The 40th Day

A Sermon for Resurrection Sunday

Comfort Watching

I’m not sure whether to call it “Comfort Watching” or just free therapy, but I have a habit of watching certain TV shows over and over again. But there are a few criteria to become one of these well-worn shows: they can’t be scary, mean, or disturbing; they are most often set in either the British countryside or somewhere sunny; and they are best enjoyed if I absolutely know what is coming next.

I’ve watched the episode of the Great British Bake Off where they make a Swedish Princess Cake more times than I can count.

I know that Matthew is going to propose to Mary in front of Downton Abbey in the snow…and it still gets me every time. I know how the Greyhounds score the final goal in Ted Lasso, but I still cue it up every couple months.

I would contend that these stories are better because I know the ending. And I know I’m not alone.

I asked my dad, a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, about a clip he kept on their digital recorder for years and this simple question produced the following email: “It was 1992. Game seven of the National League Championship series. The winner would go to the World Series, the loser would go home. (I might be adding the voice effects…) The Pittsburgh Pirates, with Barry Bonds and company, were leading the Braves 2-0 into the bottom of the ninth. The Braves scored one run, and then loaded the bases with two outs. And then, little known Francisco Cabrera got a base hit to left field! The tying run scores and the slow-footed (read: old) Sid Bream comes racing around third, Bonds throws from left field, and Sid barely beats the catcher’s tag and the BRAVES WIN!”

He told me he rewatched it again yesterday…with tears in his eyes.

There’s something comforting, reassuring, and yet still exciting about watching something when the end is already known.

Here we are, on Easter Sunday, and frankly, we know the ending. It’s literally all around us. The hallelujahs are out of the jar. The 40th day has come. Christ is risen! We know the ending.

It is a perspective that the disciples in our Gospel passage do not share. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb while it is still dark in utter despair. So when she sees the stone has been moved, she doesn’t think “Jesus is Alive!” She thinks “his body has been taken.” Even when she sees Jesus, she thinks he’s the gardener! What has gone so wrong has now gone even worse. Jesus is dead. And now, they’ve taken his body.

Mary was just one of the many disciples who were living in this desolate space on the other side of the cross. Their teacher, their guide, their friend, was gone. They were living the agony of the 39th day…that silent, waiting space that we’ve talked about this entire Lenten season. (For the visitors here with us, we’ve named that before the resurrection on the 40th day…there’s the 39th. And not just here in Scripture, we all have them. Perhaps there’s a resolution that has not yet come. A diagnosis that has not been healed. A relationship that is still fractured.)

The disciples were living in their worst 39th day… made even worse because not only did they not know when the 40th day was coming…they didn’t have an imagination about it coming at all. This was it. Jesus was gone.

Yesterday a group of us met to mark Holy Saturday with scholar Suzanne McDonald. She brought to life, in art and speech, just how terrified the disciples were. They were, as she put it, “humanly hopeless.” The only thing left for Mary was the grim errand of the burial spices—and now this gardener was impeding her plans.

It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognizes who he is. As Jesus said, “Mary”, right around dawn, so did the 40th day.

So she runs back to tell the disciples: “I have seen the Lord!”

This 5-word testimony is one of the most pivotal in history. Notice, she doesn’t say “I saw the Lord.” “I think I saw the Lord.” She says it this way for a reason. In the original Greek, and in our English present perfect tense, “I have seen” means something specific.

While the past tense stays in the past, the present perfect tense is an action in the past that has current relevance.

In other words, her present is made perfect because of Jesus’ presence.

Mary says this to the disciples, but here in John, we don’t know their reaction. We don’t know if they believed, if they asked for proof, or if they scoffed like they do in other gospel accounts.

What we do know is when evening comes, one verse later, John reports that the “doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews.”

So you get the feeling that resurrection hope hasn’t fully been realized. That even though they were well into the 40th day… they were still living in the 39th. That their present was far from perfect.

Perhaps we know the feeling. Like the disciples… we have to rely on Mary’s word. It was her perfect present. Not ours. And besides, there are still problems in the world. Wars. Fear. Injustice. Many of our 39th days plod on…

Friends, we are not here because all our problems are solved on Easter morning. We are here because Mary testifies that there is something greater than all our problems: a promise of resurrection. A promise of the 40th day. We are here because we know the end. And we want to watch it again and again. And frankly, we need to. We need a resurrection perspective. A lens in which to see the world. A perspective that tells us there is more to this life than the pain that is so often prevalent. A perspective that shows us hope in the midst of despair. A perspective that sees resurrection, even in death. I’m calling it a resurrective.

Now it turns out, despite my auto-spell check, resurrective is a real word, not just one I made up. It’s an adjective defined as “tending to resurrect.” But today, I’m promoting it to a noun.

Because having a resurrective is what we all so dearly need: to be about the business of tending all things towards resurrection. This is what changes everything. It’s what gets us through every 39th day…a resurrective that lives with the sure knowledge of the end, seeking to watch, create, love, care for it over and over again. Despite everything else that we are seeing…“I have seen the Lord.” Despite Mary being at a tomb and then surrounded by disbelief, she proclaims, “I have seen the Lord.”

Preacher Karoline Lewis puts it best: “These words not only communicate that Mary’s perspective of Jesus has changed, that she is able view Jesus in all of the promises of his resurrected self, but also that her perspective of her very self has changed. Her first-person sermon suggests that she has confidence in her words and now in her true identity because in calling Jesus ‘Rabbouni’ she views herself as a disciple. This is perhaps the oft-overlooked promise of the resurrection—it alters your perspective on your identity, who God wants you to be in the world, toward what God is calling you to do. All of a sudden you start to trust that who God said you were all this time might actually be true; that God might have something in mind for you that you have not allowed yourself to believe.”

A 40th day Resurrective is the viewpoint that empowers us to move through the world and call attention to the light that the darkness cannot put out. We become like Mary in these moments, resurrection translators who speak grace and love and light into a world where violence, pain, and hatred have too much airtime.

We do this by practicing resurrective listening, hearing what’s behind someone’s angry words and seeking to understand.

We do this by engaging in resurrective ministry, investing in our neighborhoods because we see both the need and the hope.

We do this by offering resurrective presence, standing in the shadow with someone until they can see the light.

There is still despair in our world. There is still loss, illness, and injustice. But the difference between us and the disciples in that upper room is this: we know the 40th day is coming. In fact, we know it’s here. Today. On this Easter Sunday.

For our own 39th days, we might wonder when. We may wonder how. But because of the empty tomb, we never have to wonder if.

We know the end.

So we can now look on every shadow and see the light that is stirring; we can look at every locked door and know that Christ is already standing on the other side. We can live with the quiet, joyful confidence that the 40th day has dawned.

And this makes for an ending better than we ever could have imagined.