Mary Magdalene met the challenge to change. She had been driven mad by a demon world that subjected her to madness; the madness of oppression, the madness of suffering. Her mad way of coping with that madness needed to end. She needed to die to that old madness if she was to have a new life. It was a new life of no longer insanely coping with demons of deadliness but of transforming the world that produced them and of doing so in the company of others. But now that madness was oppressing Jesus, crucified under a madness of suffering. The sane healer who drove the demons from her and showed her how to change, how to transform herself and the world was murdered by the world’s insane oppressors. What is to become of her new emerging life? Will she change back and revert to madness once again? She has come to the end result of madness, the tombs. Will she linger here and let its madness for death overtake her? She has come “to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark.” But death is not there. Life is there instead.
Life presents us with the challenge to change. Can we meet the challenge? Can we do so in little personal ways and in great social ways? It is so very difficult to change in great social ways. Great social ways are often presented as traditions needing to endure and not to be changed. But they are often, in truth, simply old oppressions and deadly sufferings; old and deadly gods, religions, values, and politics. They oppress us and they make suffer and they must no longer endure and we are challenged to change them. We live in a mad world, a world that would make us mad to cope with it. But like Mary Magdalene we are called not merely to cope. We are called to transform. We have not been given a mandate for death. We have been given an experience of life. We face an ultimate challenge to change from the cross to the Resurrection – from every cross to every Resurrection. It is the challenge to die to what is old and deadly because what is new and life-giving within us and within the world is waiting to be born.
“I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow but dwell on. It is to this grave I most frequently return and return to ask what is wrong, what was wrong, to see it all by the light of a different necessity but the grave will not heal and the child, stirring, must share my grave with me, … the child in me that could not become was not ready for others to go, to go on into change, blessings … standing in the flash high-burn momentary structure of ash… it is a picture-book, letter-perfect Easter morning: I have been for a walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook works without flashing in an abundant tranquility: the birds are lively with voice … it is a sight of bountiful majesty and integrity… fresh as this particular flood of burn breaking across us now from the sun.” Easter Morning! (Easter Morning – A. R. Ammons)
Prayer: Spirit of Life, burn bright from us.
Question: What sane change for society will I not let linger at the grave with me and instead bring to resurrection?
April 1, 2018 Gospel John 20:1-9 Easter