"HAVING EYES TO SEE"

“HAVING EYES TO SEE”

            In the 1982 movie “ET”,  I remember the young boy Eliot shouting to the government agent Keys:  “He came to me – he came to me!”  Here Eliot was proclaiming that the extra-terrestrial person named “ET” had chosen to appear to him, and that because of that, Eliot had both special knowledge and a special responsibility for taking care of ET and of the message that ET brought.  The proclamation came as the government was taking over ET, and ET was dying.

            I’ve often thought of that conversation whenever I read the 20^th chapter of John where the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalena.  Mary comes to the tomb alone, and she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the tomb.  She doesn’t think: “Hallelujah!  Jesus lives again!”  Rather she thinks that the body may have been stolen.  She runs to get the male disciples to help her find the body.  Being the males that they are, Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” have a competitive interlude at the tomb, then they leave.  They don’t find the body of Jesus because he has risen, he is alive.  The men are at the tomb, but the risen Jesus chooses not to appear to them.  I’ve also kept that in mind over these years – Jesus chooses to appear to Mary, not to the men.  She is the primary witness to the Resurrection;  indeed she is the only witness mentioned in all four Gospel accounts:  she is the primary witness.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the church has done all it could to discredit her importance, but the truth remains:  Mary Magdalena is the primary witness.

            And, she almost fails.  She does not have eyes to see.  The risen Jesus appears to her and speaks to her and stands right in front of her, but she does not recognize him.  She thinks that he is the caretaker of the cemetery, so it is not that he is a ghost or is not human.  Her perceptual apparatus has been taken over by the power of death, and she is not able to recognize him.  She does come to recognize him, however.  How?  He calls her name: “Mary.”  From that moment, she has eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to receive.  This many-layered text in John tells us that she wants to hold on to Jesus, but he tells her that her task now is not to hold on to him to seek to keep him in the old life that she has known.  Her task now is to become a witness to the new life, to go and tell the other disciples that he is risen and that life is changing.

            As we know, the male disciples do not believe her.  The risen Jesus obviously chose to appear to her and to the other women, and the men cannot abide this.  They wanted to be in the room, or at least in the tomb!  And, in the passage in John that follows Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus, the men are in a room, later named the upper room.  They are afraid and anxious and worried.  My daughter Susan told me of a fine sermon preached by McKenna Lewellen recently at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church on this passage.  It was entitled “Stairwell Gospel,” and she emphasized that Mary was on the stairwell, pounding on the door, telling the male disciples to come on out and celebrate, because Jesus had risen and had appeared to her.  The men, of course, refused to believe her, because God obviously would not entrust such an important message to such an insignificant witness as a woman.

            They do finally come to believe, and then they act like it is their story, not Mary’s.  It is a reminder that those of us in power often miss the risen Jesus because we are so tied and anchored to our way of understanding the world.  God would not possibly choose to bring the truth to those at the margins, to those whom the world says are not worthy or even capable of receiving or handling the truth.  Our political life in the USA now turns on this idea:  white people, and especially white men, are trying to return us to the upper room, where fear and anxiety seem dominant and even central.  The exciting idea of new life, of diverse peoples, of women, of LGBTQ, of all people being welcomed to the center – these seek to be drowned out, even though many people are pounding at the door.  We have been here before in American history, and the votes in the primaries this spring and then in the fall will determine whether we stay locked up in the room in fear and in anger, or whether we will come out of the room and move into the new vision that seeks to be born.  Let us have eyes to see.