Sermon for Easter Day - John 20:1-18

If you want to know where the really weird stuff in the Bible is, just ask a Baptist middle schooler. They can tell you where to find the giants, witches, behemoths, unicorns, and dragons. The King James Version has the best names for strange creatures, of course, like the fearsome cockatrice, a half-rooster and half-snake with the ability to turn people to stone, and the pit-locusts, which are like regular locusts but bigger, with human-like faces, armor and stinging tails.

In addition to mythical creatures, perhaps one of the strangest things in the Bible is the book the Song of Songs, which the Baptist kids for sure know about. It’s remarkable that it made it into the Bible at all. There is no mention of God in it, and it tells the story of two young lovers who are utterly enthralled with one another. The love poetry between them is suggestive enough to make anyone blush. Since this is a family-friendly Easter sermon, I won’t go into detail. But I will tell you that the young woman leaves her mother’s house in the middle of the night at great risk to herself in order to find her young man. Throughout the book, he is often elusive. He hides behind lattices, and bounds away with some regularity. But they continue to find one another outside in beautiful gardens, and say things to each other like, “My love is an apricot tree,” and “the ceiling of our room is the cedars.”

Given the nature of the book, it’s not surprising that you often hear that the Song of Songs should be read allegorically or symbolically, as a love story between God and Israel or Christ and the Church. Early Church fathers claimed that only the most spiritually advanced should read it, those able to rise above the - shall we say - human details in order to see a higher meaning. The great Jewish rabbi Akiva said that all of Scripture is holy, “but the Song of Songs is the holiest of the holy” (Williamson, The Forgotten Books of the Bible). However you read it, the message is absolutely clear: a love story belongs in the Bible.

As John wrote his account of the Easter story, I am convinced that he had the Song of Songs in mind. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb alone while it is still dark, much like that young woman searching for her love. From there the connections deepen. She encounters an empty tomb, speaks with angels, and doesn’t recognize Jesus when she first turns to see him. And then John tells us that she supposes him to be the gardener. In such a brilliantly told story, this is much more than a matter of mistaken identity. We hearers of the Gospel are now with Mary in a garden, where all great biblical love stories happen, and especially the one between God and humanity. We are meant to hear echoes of Eden, where God once walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening and they delighted in one another’s company. It matters that Easter unfolds in a garden.

You’ll remember that it was in Eden that God declared creation good, including humans to whom God gave the garden. The story got complicated with a tree, a piece of fruit, and a snake. Despite our fundamental goodness, we turned out to be a rebellious lot, full of shortcomings and misdirections. Things went off the rails rather quickly, and we and God have been looking for one another ever since, hoping to reconcile and delight in one another’s company once again.

The details of John’s telling of Easter are breathtaking in how they echo the whole of Scripture. It is no accident that Jesus’ tomb is in the middle of a garden. It is also no accident that Mary does not recognize Jesus right away. The gardener, the resurrected Christ, is a new creation, who will tend to this world and make the whole creation new (Brown, Sacred Sense). This is God’s grandest gesture of grace yet. In raising Jesus to new life, what had gone off the rails has finally been restored. Sin has been forgiven. And death has lost is power. There is now nothing in our world that God has left untouched and unredeemed.

There is a chance that all of this talk of gardens and grace might feel like it doesn’t apply to you. For many people on Easter morning, one of the weirdest things in the whole Bible is the story of a living Jesus who was very clearly dead in a tomb the day before. And Mary’s mistaken identity of him is not the only misidentification we have to contend with in order to trust the Easter story. We mistake our own identities all time time, failing to see ourselves as good or lovable enough to be worthy of the risen Christ. Fortunately for us, God thought this through ahead of time and added something compelling. It is when the gardener speaks Mary’s name that she recognizes Jesus. Resurrection is no longer some abstract idea for Mary, but deeply personal. The risen Christ speaks each of our names, too. He has risen, and he has risen for us.

People often want to make rebuttals to that statement. In a world where so much has gone off the rails, we assume that God would naturally prefer to go bounding off once and for all. We are very good at cataloging our sins and even better at counting the sins of others. And we are stubborn about sitting in the tombs of our own making, because at least they are familiar. But even those tombs are in the garden. And the gardener, the risen Christ, is clearly not deterred by tombs. He can roll away any stone and find us even in the coldest, darkest of places.

If we trust the ancient rabbi who said that the Song of Songs is the holiest of the holy, its love story has wisdom for us on this Easter morning. When the two young loves find one another in the garden, we overhear one say the most extraordinary words to the other: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave” (Song of Songs 8:6). God’s love for us is that strong, more powerful than anything that tries to separate us, even death itself. We are in the garden this morning, my friends, where all the best love stories happen, because Easter is a love story. Christ is risen, and he is calling your name.