For some, the idea of an Easter morning footrace is the farthest thing from your mind. Lace up the running shoes and hit the pavement.

And some no doubt felt themselves racing to arrive here or some other church this morning. Particularly if the kids are a bit slow-footed.

But this morning’s story isn’t about a footrace. It’s about inspiration and urgency.

Easter  |  John 20:1-18

The first time I realized I was looking forward to Easter, I was an adult. Before then, it was all anticipation. It was waiting for what was coming. I’ve always felt that for Easter. Mostly it was about finding those hidden treats and waiting for church to feel normal again.

So I’ve always known that sense of anticipation and excitement for a day just like this one.

But I’m speaking of a different sense. That sense, not of waiting for something to arrive, but being inspired to move myself.

I used to tease all those people who kept forgetting that we don’t say “Alleluia!” in Lent. I grew up in a church which said it every Sunday at the dismissal, so it was always there except in Lent. And so people would stumble over it. Not just the first week, but the second and the third and even the fourth. And if they had been gone for a few weeks, even the fifth. I would snicker at their mistake.

But just a few years ago, my sense of the timing has changed. And I feel the urgency to proclaim Alleluia!, even in Lent. Not because it’s a habit. But because I want it.

The Footrace

The footrace between Peter and the Beloved Disciple is a silly element in the story. It has the jocularity of two guys who still, after all this, don’t get it. One needs to get there first, and the other needs to let him get there first (even though we all know he beat him fair and square–he let Peter win {wink, wink} because he’s so humble). It’s the sort of naive exuberance of wanting to see and still not knowing what it is they are looking for.

They are the epitome of urgency. They just lack the inspiration.

The ridiculousness of these two men has the danger of overshadowing the far more profound character of Mary. The one whose devotion takes her to the tomb in the first place. Whose concern for Jesus’s remains guides her to seek help. Help which makes a race of getting there, checking it out, and going home again.

She sees the empty tomb and tells them. They see the empty tomb and go home. But it’s there, then, that God gives Mary the opportunity to see and understand. Not because of these men. In spite of them.

She sees two angels who speak to her and yet she is weeping in their sight. Weeping over Jesus. She’s not staring at them in fear or having a rational argument with them. She’s distracted and preoccupied with the whereabouts of Jesus. Someone has taken him! she thinks.

That’s when she sees him. She is the first to see the risen Christ! Jesus gives her that honor.

The Sermon

Many scholars point out that Mary Magdalene preached the first Easter sermon, nearly 2,000 years ago.

She gets this incredible honor because she has an even more incredible honor of being the first to see Jesus. To have the resurrected Jesus come to her.

He’ll come to others soon enough. We’ll read about those encounters in the Easter season. Encounters with the disciples named and unnamed. And these encounters will challenge us about belief and witness and what it means to see and not see Jesus in the resurrection. All of that comes next.

What we have now is Mary. She is the first to see him, the first of many. And she gets the honor of proclaiming the risen Christ to the other disciples. Telling them that she saw him. That he is coming to them as he promised. And that he will be going away.

This is the message he instructs her to preach that first Easter morning. To find the other disciples and get them together and deal with a new reality:

• That Christ isn’t dead; he’s alive!
• He will be present.
• And he will go away again.

He’s “ascending to my Father.”

How strange it is that we mistake inspiration and urgency for anticipation and necessity. That we might run to the empty tomb, racing our partners in ministry, needing to defeat them, best them in a race to show off. Because we’re always trying to be the perfect Christians, measured against each other.

I don’t know why we do this. These races are exhausting. And we miss our chance to see him when we’re running around anyway.

Embracing Urgent

There’s a reason one of my favorite parables of Jesus’s is the Lost Coin. The one in which Jesus tells us of a woman who loses a coin of some value in her house and she sweeps and cleans and overturns and dusts as she goes, tearing her home apart and making it new all at the same time. And she’s doing this at night! It’s a crazy, silly thing to do. The responsible thing to do would be to wait until morning, but she doesn’t. She does it then.

And even more startling for the reader is that when she finds that coin, she gathers her friends (who’ve probably gone to bed for the night) and gets them together for a party. Because she wants to celebrate!

It’s a parable which cuts against our expectations and how we handle life as Christians and how we govern our churches. But Jesus starts the story by saying the kin-dom of God is like this. It’s like urgent joy. And sharing good news. And embracing the ridiculous because God has done amazing things.

This countercultural vision of God’s kin-dom come is still radical around these parts.

Even the exuberant proclamation that Christ is risen! fails to embody how profound that truth remains.

It isn’t about the science, the belief, or the traditional character of one’s theology. It’s a Jesus appearing first to Mary. Appearing to unnamed disciples on a road. And then even to Saul, the persecutor. Coming to remind us how different the kin-dom is from our power-obsessed culture and its devotion to certainty.

So today we proclaim a different gospel. An inspired and urgent gospel of radical hospitality and deep love given in the most inconceivable way possible. Not just in the form of a man who was supposed to be dead, but also in a woman the church has refused to recognize as a disciple, in the weakness of words over the might of our arms, and the deceptive power honesty, intimacy, and personal connection have to transform lives.

And the cherry on that sundae is that every one of us is ordained to proclaim the gospel in its hearing. So do we run home? Or perhaps we might embrace the urgency and joy in sharing at the party we’re going to have around this table. And the parties which come after.