Easter Vigil, John 20:1-18,
March 30, 2024
Pastor Jonathan Linman, Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
We just heard the story of the beautiful exchange between Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, and Jesus. When Jesus names her name – “Mary!” – this makes all the difference. That’s moment when she realizes her beloved teacher was alive again.
Mary’s natural impulse was to reach out and touch Jesus, maybe to embrace him. But Jesus throws cold water on this holy, intimate encounter: “Do not touch me,” he says. Jesus, why not just let Mary hug you? It would have added so much to the loveliness of this sacred exchange.
Scholars have offered many and various reasons for Jesus’ prohibition – “do not touch me” – and there’s no consensus about what it means. In another Easter story also in John, the resurrected Jesus invited doubting Thomas to touch him. So, why not Mary? What’s going on here?
Some suggest that Jesus’ wounds from the crucifixion were still sore, so touching Jesus would have been painful to him. Others have posited that because Jesus had died, he would have been ritually unclean and thus untouchable. Still others say that since Mary Magdalene was a woman and Jesus was a man, it would not have been acceptable for her to touch him according to ancient custom. There is also a view that the resurrected Christ was like a high priest and you weren’t supposed to touch such important religious leaders. Yet still others suggest that a resurrected body somehow transcended other normal bodies and so there should be no contact.
Hearkening back to my Passion Sunday sermon which I shared online, some suggest that Jesus rose in the nude, having left behind the burial linens in the tomb (which John makes the effort to point out). So, it would not have been appropriate, and maybe too much of a temptation, for Mary to have touched a nude Jesus. This view may be supported by the fact that Mary at first thought Jesus was the gardener. Laborers in ancient times would sometimes work naked so as not to soil their limited wardrobe. In one of the gospel stories, Peter, for example, was naked in the boat fishing, and when he saw Jesus, he put on clothes and jumped in the water…
So, who knows what’s really meant by Jesus saying to Mary, “Do not touch me”?
But here’s my take on it. Perhaps the most fruitful means of trying to understand why Jesus says, “Do not touch me” involves consideration of translation options for the Greek word that translates “touch.” Here are the other translation options: to fasten oneself to, to adhere to, to cling to. Each of these options goes well beyond mere touching.
Perhaps what Jesus is really saying is: “Don’t fasten yourself to me; don’t adhere to me; or perhaps most viscerally, don’t cling to me.”
Which is to say, a bottom-line message here is this (and it’s is a view held by others as well): we can’t remain in the holiest of moments and linger there when there’s God’s work to be done. In short, Jesus has marching orders for Mary.
Jesus’ command, “Do not touch me” leads precisely to what Jesus says next: “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Then Jesus continues, “But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” “But go to my brothers” – that’s why Jesus said, “don’t touch me.”
In other words, there’s urgency to Jesus’ message to Mary, as if to say, “Mary, it’s great to be with you again, but we don’t have time to linger in this beautiful moment. You’ve got work to do – you’ve got to go to the other disciples to let them know I’m alive again and that I’m on my way soon to return to God the Father.”
So it is that Mary obeyed her newly living rabbi and savior, and she went with haste to announce to the disciples: “I have seen the Lord.” And then she shared with them everything Jesus had said to her.
That’s our job, too. We cannot linger on the mountaintops of our experiences of the living Christ. We cannot just hang out in church all the time. No, like Mary Magdalene, we are called to go back home to share with others what Mary also shared: “We have seen the Lord!”
Yes, we, too, have seen the Lord in his living word, in the stories that form the foundation of our Christian life together. We have seen the Lord in the living waters of baptism when we emerge as new creations in Christ. Quite significantly and profoundly, we have seen the Lord in a simple meal which we are about to celebrate, the first Eucharist of Easter, as the resurrected Christ makes himself known to us in the breading of the bread and in the sharing of the cup. And we have seen the Lord in each other’s faces as we enjoy the gift of Christian community, as we have welcomed new members into our fold this evening.
So, enough said. I’m going to shut up now so that we can soon get to work, doing what God has called us to do, namely, to proclaim the good news in word and deed that, “alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!” Amen.
