The Voice of Love

A sermon for Easter Day
April 17, 2022

“Woman, why are you weeping?” Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb of her friend and teacher. She has come to anoint his body after the unimaginable, after a tortuous death, a brutal death, a public death. After resting on the Sabbath, she has come to do her part, to give this man executed as a criminal the last religious rites: the anointing of his body. She no doubt spent the Sabbath preparing. Preparing the spices. Preparing herself. Preparing herself to see him again. To see his mangled corpse. There had been much weeping. 

She comes to the garden. The other gospels tell us other women joined her. John just focuses on Mary. She arrives. The stone is rolled away. The place abandoned. She runs to tell the others. They come and see, and then they leave again. She stays. She weeps some more, her eyes nearly spent from crying. She looks in the tomb and sees the angels, perched at the head and the foot, just like the angels on the Ark of the Covenant. It doesn’t register. “Why are you weeping?” “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” 

Another man approaches. “Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She doesn’t recognize him, either. She pleads with the gardener. 

Grief does strange things to a person. It sends us headlong into a fog. We put ourselves to work at a task–preparing spices and ointments, calling the funeral home, writing the obituary. But there is a fog that doesn’t lift for some time. Through this fog we cannot see clearly. Mary Magdalene cannot either. She has the tunnelvision of grief. Where is the body? I must anoint the body. 

Jesus speaks. “Mary!” “Teacher!” she cries. His voice of love expels the fog. His voice of love expels all of those other voices screaming in Mary’s ears–the voice of worry, the voice of anxiety, the voice of fear, the voice of grief and death. He speaks. She recognizes her Lord. 

In chapter 10 of John, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” That’s Mary. She hears the voice of Jesus. She is snapped from her all-consuming, tunnelvision, grief-stricken reality. Her Lord is standing there. Alive. And in that moment, the fullness of the Church, the fullness of this Body that confesses the Resurrection, is held completely and entirely and only in Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles. She has seen the Lord. She has heard his voice of love. It is not a mirage. It is not some cheap metaphor. It is a real Resurrection. Christ is as alive as you and I are right here, right now. 

Of course, this isn’t the only time God has spoken in a garden. God is a gardener from way back. In Genesis we have a similar story. You remember it. Adam and Eve have eaten from the fruit. They have sinned. They discover their nakedness. They have listened to those other voices–the voice of the serpent, the voice of going their own way, the voice of pride, the voice of greed, the voice telling them they can be greater than God. And then the voice of God, the voice of love, speaks. “Where are you?” Adam, son of earth, where are you? Adam and Eve stay hidden in the bushes. Mary lunges for the risen Christ, her teacher and Lord, clinging to that voice that banishes all others. She’s a sheep who will follow. Adam and Eve hide out, ashamed. They know the voice of God, but unlike Mary, they are not keen on running toward it. They have bought into the other voices. 

Today, as Christians, we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. Not a metaphor. Not a neat story. But a real story, with a literal Resurrection, a real body that was really dead but now is really alive. And that Resurrected One is calling our individual names, just as he called Mary’s name. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Will we follow? After all, there are plenty of other voices competing. The voice of pride calls to us, telling us to lift ourselves up and our wants up over God. The voice of hatred calls to us, telling us it is okay to hate others who aren’t like us. The voice of conceit calls to us, telling us we’re better than others for whatever reason. The voice of war calls, telling us love and peace are fools’ errands. At their root, it’s the voice of fear. The voice that says we’re not good enough. That God doesn’t care for us. That we have to look out for ourselves because no one else will. That we have been abandoned, left to our own devices. Take that fruit from the tree. Resign yourself to your fear. 

In the middle of all of that, the voice of Love calls you by your name. The voice of love speaks through the fog, through pride, hatred, conceit, violence, all of our fears. And that voice of Love, of Love that is resurrected and alive, that perfect love casts out all of those fears. If we will allow him. 

Our duty and delight is to run toward his voice. To cling to that voice. That’s what we do in worship and prayer. Like Mary, running toward her Lord, allowing that voice of Love to thunder over the competing and cacophonous voices of the world. Like Mary, we will hear the Resurrected Christ, that Voice of Love, calling us, by name, to new and transformed resurrected life. Right now and forever.