Letting go. Easter 2021. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

John 20:1-18

My daughter Emma is finishing up her first year in college, and my son Aidan is about to graduate from college. I will spare you the usual bromides about how quickly time passes, etc., etc., and instead just note that my wife Lori Ann and I were married for several years before we had children. So we were very accustomed to a childless existence before Aidan was born. Having children turned out to be the best thing ever, but even as we began a whole new and wonderful chapter in life, there was still a sense of letting go, a bittersweet surrender of the life we had known and loved. And here we are, letting go again. It’s awesome watching our children become adults, and I’m excited to see what the next chapter holds. But there is still a loss: the old days of daily parenting our children while they live with us are giving way to something new, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to viewing the past with some nostalgia and longing. And all that is on my mind as we celebrate the resurrection.

The Gospel on this Easter Day proclaims with great joy that Jesus is risen, but it also contains one of the most poignant and painful verses in the entire Bible, when Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, Do not hold on to me. Mary was the most faithful of Jesus’ followers. She loved him dearly, and stayed at his side when everyone else deserted him. If the Gospels had been written in a less patriarchal time, she would no doubt have been acclaimed as the chief disciple and the greatest of the apostles.  She was there at the foot of the cross, and she was there at the tomb on that first Easter morning. So of course she is amazed to see Jesus alive and of course she wants to embrace him with love and fervor. But he won’t let her. Jesus is never needlessly cruel, so clearly there is a reason for this. The old way of knowing him and loving him has ended; a new chapter has begun. It will involve knowing the presence of Jesus through his indwelling Spirit. It will lead to a deeper experience of God’s love. But in order to move forward into that future, Mary has to let go of the past.

Someone once said that the big problem with the Good News of Jesus Christ isn’t that it’s good but that it’s new. The promise of resurrection is not the same old same old, repeated forever. The promise is new life, and new life means . . . new life. Paul tells the Corinthians, If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Cor. 5:17) No wonder people don’t recognize the risen Christ immediately: it is Jesus,  but he is manifesting new life. And in the same way, we will manifest something that is new and no doubt wonderful. The only requirement is to let go of the old: Do not hold on to me, Mary. Let go and reach out for new life.

And of course this is not just a message about life after physical death. To live as Easter people, children of the resurrection, is to embrace a life of ongoing growth and change. We let go of relating to our children as kids so that we can relate to them as adults; we let go of one job when we change to another; we let go of finding our identity in our work when we retire; we let go of our parents when they pass away; we go through the excruciating pain of letting go of our spouses when they die; we experience the ultimate letting go when we die ourselves. But it’s not just in the big life changes that we see this. We let go of prejudice and bigoted ideas so that we can know greater justice. We let go of anger and resentment so that we can offer forgiveness and experience peace. The Spirit will inevitably lead us to let go of false or inadequate notions of God so that we can embrace a fuller, richer understanding of the Divine Reality. In countless ways we are called to follow Jesus, not clinging to the status quo but always open to new life and open to God, and when need be, dying to the way things were. But only then can we comprehend what Paul means when he says, simply, We die, and see — we are alive. (2 Cor. 6:9)

We may resist seeing the life of faith as a continual process of dying and rising, but that is the way Jesus leads us forward: For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. And we lose our life by letting go when it’s time to let go. For all the joy of Easter, there is a gentle but urgent invitation to follow in the dying and rising of Christ with faith and without fear, trusting that it will lead us ultimately into the very heart of God. I actually like the way the Sufi mystic poet Rumi puts it:

            I died as a mineral and became a plant;

I died as a plant and rose to animal;

I died as an animal and I was a man.

Why should I fear? When was I ever less by dying?

In Christ, we are never less by dying. That’s true for us as individuals, and that’s true for us as a church. We will come out of this pandemic; hopefully we will be celebrating the resurrection together in this building next year — but we will not just return to the way things were. We will begin a new chapter, we will rise to new life. I don’t know exactly what that will look like: none of us does. But we don’t need to be afraid. We follow the crucified and risen Lord, who says, “Do not hold on to the old: I have something new to show you. Reach out and take it.”