Readings: John
20: 1-18 Acts
10: 36-43
We pray: May our hearts be open to your word for us O
God as we join this day with Christians throughout the world who celebrate the
Good News alive in our world. Amen.
Today I want to
talk about the women. The women who
walked the way with Jesus – from Galilee and places along the way, who were
there in Jerusalem, at the gates, at the cross, at the tomb.
And, one suspects,
at the Last Supper. At our Maundy
Thursday service Tui read a poem of the experience of gathering around the
table at Opoho and I was particularly struck by the last few lines:
No-one left quietly. Instead
they ate more bread,
drank more ‘wine’ and chatted
about how the last supper
was incomplete
without women, without children.
Was that meal a
men only affair? Would the Jesus who
encouraged Mary and chided Martha have excluded all but the men? At the very least they would have served and
listened even though they did not get a mention. Whatever, we know the role of women in Jesus
time of ministry is incredibly understated and often ignored. But when it came to the tomb – there was no
hiding the fact that it was all about women.
Women who found the empty tomb, women who encountered the good news of
the risen Christ, women who told the men and were disbelieved.
‘While
men were in hiding, women delivered the greatest news the world has ever known.’ That was the somewhat controversial title of
a reflection written by Jim Wallis this Easter.
And right enough
the story of Easter Day belongs to the women; to Mary Magdalene, Mary the
mother of Jesus, Joanna, Salome, Mary mother of James and all the other women
who were with them. Each Gospel names
them differently but all agree that it was the women followers who came to the
tomb that morning, come to mourn awhile, to anoint his body, to sit with
him.
There was danger –
after all this was a convicted political criminal and there was every change
that the guards could see them as conspirators and arrested arrest them
too.
There was
helplessness – the politicians and priest had made sure the tomb was securely
sealed – how would they get in to anoint the body.
There was fear too
– all the followers of Jesus would have been afraid and bereft. But it seems that the men and women responded
differently. Most of the men seem to
have accepted the unthinkable, that it was all over, and were staying well out
of the way – even hiding for fear of being identified. But there was something in those women that
couldn’t let them do that. Their love
for Jesus was born out in their actions, their determination to minister to him
even in death overcame their fear. It
was like they couldn’t abandon him, even when all was dark and hopeless. They
came with a strength of purpose that would not be ignored.
Jim Wallis calls
the women of the tomb as history’s midwives of hope for they birthed the good
news of the risen Christ.
And the hope they
brought to the world was not hope we
think of as that fleeting sense of possibility or that the tide must turn
sometime but rather hope as a choice, a decision, an action based on faith,
where we plough ahead despite all evidence to the contrary.
I wonder if we can
put ourselves into the minds and emotions of those disciples, men and women,
that Sabbath day. If we can pause in the
moment, accepting that we didn’t know what came next, be those disciples reeling
from the death of their beloved leader.
There could be no possible way in which they could go on. What would it have been like?
For they could do
nothing until the sacred day had ended, so it wasn’t until the third day that
they could make a move of any sort: and for most of them it was to go to the
tomb or to stay in hiding. And while it was the women’s role to anoint the
body, the men could have gone too. They didn’t.
Not one.
That response of
the women on Easter morning to the death of Jesus is a pivotal moment in the
Gospel story. Imagine if they too had
stayed away, unwilling to act, to go and be with their saviour, dead though he
might be.
They, none of
them, men or women, knew what was ahead.
But the hope was stronger in the women – embedded in their faith was a
trust that in Jesus all things were possible and so they got on with loving
him, even in the blackest circumstances.
And it seems that
we can find times throughout history when the sheer dogged hope of women has
transformed the course of human history:
the women in
Ireland who were determined to end the deep abyss that was sectarian violence,
the Mothers of the
Disappeared in Latin America who stood alone before the military and the world,
testifying for their loved ones and for the truth,
the Mothers of the
Movement in the States, standing for justice and reform in the face of gun
violence against young people of colour, calling for justice and hope in the
face of unspeakable personal tragedy.
The Black lives Matter movement, the women marching throughout the world
in response to the policies and rhetoric of Donald Trump.
Midwives of hope –
all of them. And this is who we are
called to be – men and women both – to be as those women were at the tomb,
continuing to live in hope even when the most optimistic amongst us can see no
way forward. That is what faith in Jesus
Christ is – a hope believed in and lived out.
How are we to live
out that hope today? When we see no way
forward we are to believe in and act on the love that was unable to be
destroyed on the cross, the love that overpowers death and darkness and
aloneness and is with us always. For no
matter how unlikely or far-fetched our hope for justice, for peace, for
equality, for food, for shelter for all people might be, we are to surge
forward believing all things are possible in the name of God. The hope that
realises the breaking down of barriers, the challenging of the powerful, the
showing of compassion to the unloved and mercy to the undeserving is with us
–it was for the healing of the world that Jesus died, that we might believe the
power of love over death, that we might trust that the risen Christ works in
and through us, even when we can see no way out of the mire this world is in.
So this Easter
Sunday, can I ask you, for a while, to sit with the women who stayed with Jesus
through the darkness into the light and to ask what it means to be a midwife of
hope, seeing the impossible and the unachievable and entering into it anyway,
confident in the hope and promise that is the resurrected Jesus. Amen
Margaret Garland
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