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April 11, 2004
Do You See the Place Where They Laid Him?
Do You See the Place Where They Laid Him?
Psalm 13 / Mark 16: 1-8
April 11th, 2004 (Easter)
Places where events special to us took place are precious. You live in a city far from where you were born, then come back and drive by that hospital and feel it is unique to you among all hospitals. You return to the restaurant on your anniversary where you gave your wife her engagement ring. You can think of many places that are dear to you, but something more attaches to this place. I like the line in the love song, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” where the fellow sings, “I love the grass on where she stands.”
The place where Jesus’ friends laid Him after He was crucified is more than special to Christians. Some of us here this morning were in the garden within sight of Golgotha, where holy tradition tells us Jesus’ friends buried his body in a cave-tomb. The hill beyond looks like a skull. It looks down over the garden tomb, a sepulcher carved out of a rock. It looks like what we imagine the place was like where Jesus’ broken body was laid to rest after the agony of the cross. A hush came over us all in that place.
When each of us stooped to move inside that doorway, we saw the place where tradition tells us Jesus was laid. The guide didn’t need to point it out to us. It was unlike the first Easter morning when a young man sitting on the right side of the place said to three panic-stricken women, “See the place where they laid Him." It would have had to be on the right side because on the left side was rock wall.
But there is something different about our fascination with this place and other tombs in Jerusalem. It’s not just the difference in the One who was buried there.
We went to another location in Jerusalem where we were shown the tomb of King David. We looked at this monument at it felt like touching history personally. In still another graveyard I saw the tomb of one of the great Spanish rabbis, I think it was Rabbi Moses Maimonides, whose opinions shaped much of medieval Jewish tradition. Both these places left me feeling hushed. I felt personally connected to significant men in history.
But what we felt inside the tomb where they laid Jesus was different because this was a grave where something very strange happened. Before dawn on the third day after Jesus' battered and torn body was laid to rest, an earthquake shook the hillside, and an angel pushed the stone rolled away from the door. Mark doesn’t tell us this, but Matthew’s Gospel does. And Jesus walked out that door, and as John’s Gospel tells us, remained near by.
Because Jesus was there when Mary Magdalene stood outside weeping. He asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” I remember Jesus had called His mother, “Woman” when He was on the cross. It seems to us a harsh, impersonal term, but it must have been a term of endearment.
Dan Brown has told a lot of people who read his novel, The Da Vinci Code, that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife, but that is a fiction. He admits it. But the Gospels are not entertaining us when they tell us that Mary Magdalene, and two other women came and found the tomb empty.
What makes the Garden tomb particularly eerie to any of us who have stepped inside it, is that it is not a grave vacated by grave robbers, or by the practice in those days of gathering up the bones of the deceased when the flesh dropped away, to put them in an ossuary—the kind of box that was recently found holding the bones of Jesus’ brother, James. This tomb was vacated when the body that lay there came to life again and walked out of it.
In the days that followed Jesus showed Himself strangely unattached to any one place. He would appear now here, and now there. Just when two of His disciples realized that Jesus was walking and talking with them as they walked on the Emmaus Road, He was gone. He appeared in a room with His disciples, ate fish and honey to prove He was a physical being, and then disappeared. Jesus showed that He was not attached to any one spot at a time, as He had been limited as any other person is, when He walked the Palestine roads with the twelve disciples.
I wonder, in fact, if in those days after Jesus resurrection He may have appeared to people personally at different places at the same time. Paul tells us Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, and then to more than five hundred at one time. We assume that he means that Jesus appeared to each of these five hundred at the same time in the same place. But I have wondered if during these forty days Jesus began to demonstrate what he said to His disciples in His last moments with them.
Jesus said to them, “I am with you always.” Around that circle of eleven men, each one heard Him say, “I am with you always.” Each heard Jesus say to him, “I am with you.” And they did not all stay in the same place afterwards.
They would go their separate ways. Tradition tells us Andrew went to Russia. Thomas went to Parthia, and then to India. Each of them went away, and each one trusted the promise, “I am with you always.” So Andrew went to Russia trusting that Jesus was with him there. And Thomas went to India to found the Mar Thoma Church, and Jesus was with Him there.
For forty days I wonder if Jesus primed the pump of trust in His presence everywhere by actually appearing to many different people in many different places wherever they were. People who loved Jesus told each other, “Jesus appeared to me yesterday.” And each one who heard this said, “How can that be? He was with me then?” And slowly the truth crystallized in peoples’ minds, Jesus meant precisely that when He said, “I am with you always,” and that’s why each one saw Jesus with her at the same time, in many different places.
Space could no longer limit Jesus as it does you and me. I cannot be in two places at one time. Neither can you. Neither can David Copperfield. But Jesus was not limited to being in only one place at a time. This seems a strange and fantastic idea, and to be sure neither the Gospels nor the Apostle Paul says this explicitly. I intend no irreverence in proposing this.
But the disciples were so convinced in Jesus’ presence with them after this that they went to the farthest places to bring the presence of Jesus to the world He died to save. And we need not think as some incredulous folk think, that all of these were filled with “Easter faith,” a strong, spiritual delusion that energized them.
And the message that each of the disciples told multiplied this very promise to as many people as heard them tell it. Generation followed generation. One generation told the next, “Jesus promised, ‘I am with you always’.” And it was always as new and true in each generation, no matter where, no matter in what language the promise was repeated, “I am with you always.”
How can this be? We adapt our inability to understand by changing the sense of what Jesus said. We say, “Jesus’ ideas are with us.” Or we say, “The faith of Jesus passes on from one to another.” Or, "we remember Jesus always." But Jesus said, “I am with you always.”
How can it be that Jesus is here in this place today, and Jesus is down the road in Weaver Chapel too? Not only that, but Jesus is in the living rooms where shut-ins cannot get out on Easter morning. He is with them. Jesus is in the prisons, and in hospital rooms, and I could go on and on the rest of the day to mention places far and near. And in each place, what Jesus said to His disciples holds true. “I am with you always.”
I can’t explain how this is true. It’s not His memory that is with me. It is not the ideas He spoke that are with us. Somehow, perhaps as the air we breathe is the same here as it is in Medellin, Colombia, Jesus pervades places.
Paul tells us, “In Him all things hold together.” But I don’t want to try to dabble in the physics of Jesus’ presence. That’s way beyond me.
Instead I think of something else. First, negatively, I think of how inappropriate it was for the Crusaders in the 11th century to fight violently to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims because this was where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose again. That was not an appropriate way to honor Jesus' for His Passion.
I think of how inappropriate it is for Christians to so cherish the memory of any place connected with His life that it goads them to hostile acts toward others. It is wrong to fight and kill because Christians cherish a place.
How bizarre it felt to descend into the basement like place in Bethlehem where there was a cold, marble slab with a Bethlehem star fixed in silver on the place where Jesus’ lay as a newborn baby. The manger in which He lay, wrapped in swaddling bands was soft and warm, however humble. That expensive marble slab offered no warmth or welcome.
How unnecessary, though understandable, it was to see the Serbian Orthodox monk passionately kissing the spot where tradition says Jesus’ body was lowered from the cross. This place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is surrounded by controversy as five Christian denominations divide the place among them, and each guards his fraction of space fervently.
Let’s return to what Paul tells us of Jesus appearing to five hundred people at one time after He rose again. What each of these said to someone else was an eyewitness report. Those who heard these five hundred tell them that Jesus was alive and present with them, told others. And thus the word got out and multiplied.
After Jesus appeared to each of these first five hundred, He did not do so again to them. They had to trust that the One who was dead, and lived again, and who appeared to them, remained with them even when they could not see Him.
And so the word got out, not just that Jesus escaped the tomb alive again, but that Jesus was from now on present with us.
This is the genius of this faith we celebrate this morning. We have sung the most exuberant hymns. We have heard our wonderful choir sing. We have felt that special mood of Easter morning when we know that around the world Christians everywhere are doing the same thing.
But it’s not just Jesus’ memory that we celebrate, but also His presence, His very presence. Jesus is in this room this morning, and I hope that you have opened your heart to Him so that He is in your heart. Because strangely, though Jesus is present, not limited by time and distance, or by the inability to be in only one place at one time as we are, Jesus is limited by the welcome we give Him.
I remember years ago when I was in graduate school the Christmas Eves when I would walk the streets of the city where I studied and look at all the beautifully decorated homes. I saw Christmas tree lights sparkling from living room windows. People put up their decorations to create a festive atmosphere in the neighborhoods. They were festive, but not welcoming. I was not welcome in those homes. Nobody knew me. It pleased folk to have their pretty homes noticed, but they didn’t proceed to say, “Come in and share our Christmas turkey.”
In the Book of Revelation we read this strange verse. Jesus says to people in a church, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice, and will open the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.” What does this strange verse mean? I thought that Jesus is and was present wherever two or three were gathered in His name. How could Jesus, who said, “I am with you always” be shut out of any place.
Christianity is a “by invitation only party.” The invitation is two-way. On the one side, Jesus says, and I repeat after Him each time we take the Lord’s Supper, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” His welcome is continuous and personal. But on the other side there must be the invitation you and I give to Him, “Come, the door of my heart is open. Come in and eat with me.”
It is strange to say, but this morning when we take Communion, even though I pass on to you Jesus’ invitation, “Come, eat with me,” you and I may either welcome Jesus into us or keep Him outside,” as much outside as I was outside in the cold on Christmas Eve looking in at the merriment taking place in those homes many years ago when I was a graduate student.
How do you open your heart’s door to welcome Jesus?
We have all seen that a very small key can open a large door. You put that little carved piece of metal into the opening near the handle, and if it fits perfectly, you turn it and you can open the door.
Strange to say, when you and I say to Jesus, “Jesus, come into my heart and eat with me this morning,” He honors the invitation. It feels strange to say this to someone we cannot see. You’ll feel gullible, perhaps. But the strangeness is all in you.
A small word from your mouth can open your heart. Very often people who take sorry turns of life began their tragic move by saying, "I will take those drugs," or, "I will break into that home." Having said it, a resolve begins in their minds. They do what they determined to do by deliberately saying something.
Something similar happens when we say to Jesus whom we cannot see, “Come, Jesus, be my guest. Come into my heart.” At Communion we can say, "Come into my heart and eat with me," because we are eating with Him. When you put that small piece of bread into your mouth, and when you drink from that small glass, say, “You are as welcome in my heart as this bread and wine are in my mouth.”
What happens from there is up to how you maintain your welcome to Jesus. For me it was a life-changing event when I deliberately opened my heart to Jesus forty-three years ago. Others here would say so too. Some would say their hearts have never been shut to Him, always open, because your parents taught you well to open your heart to Jesus, and you did so as a child.
But it doesn’t matter when, it only matters that you welcome Jesus. Because the only limit Jesus has, in His presence everywhere, is the welcome each of us offers Him. He can be in both Ethiopia and America at the same time. He can be in our sanctuary and in St. Andrews United Methodist Church at the same time.
But until you and I welcome Him into our hearts, He will not come in. He cannot come there without your welcome.
I hope you will make Jesus welcome inside your heart, at the center of your life. And if you are doing this for the first time this morning, and are confused where to go from there, will you please speak with me. I will gladly share with you how it has been for me, and this may help you
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank You that Jesus was not left in that cold, stone tomb, but that He became alive, and that He burst the boundaries of all that limits us, so that He is always and everywhere with those whose hearts have welcomed Him. Help us now to welcome Him. Lord, We believe. Help our unbelief. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at April 11, 2004 09:30 AM