Easter Sunday

I watched the first episode of yet another of these reality tv competitions last week; Race across the world. It describes 5 teams of people competing to travel through a beautiful area in Canada with a limited budget, to see who gets to the destination first – and of course, who gets eliminated.

The filming has dramatic and beautiful landscapes, and there is all the kind of drama you get on a journey with the places they go to and the people they meet and the added tension given by the race.

But of course as all good tv and film makers know, the external drama is nothing without the internal drama. We are just as engaged by the stories of the relationships in the teams – father and daughter, two brothers, husband and wife as we are in the landscapes and the journey itself.  And at the end of the story, the focus is on the feelings of both the team that win and the team that lose, and on everything that has been learnt along the way. The internal journey is just as important as the external journey.

We’ve just seen a dramatized version of a story that is central to our faith as Christians; and for us too, it is not just the external story of Jesus’ resurrection that is so central to our faith, dramatic and powerful though that story is; it is the internal journey that we are invited to go on as a result that makes all the difference.

Recently I read an account by a woman who described how her life had changed when her first son was born, and it was discovered that he had Down’s syndrome. Everyone around her thought it a disaster and commiserated, but she was not prepared to see it like that. She went on to have two other children and they are all teenagers now and she describes a happy if sometimes chaotic family life. But I was struck by the effect she said the birth of her first son had on her life; she said she felt that there was more of everything: more love; more pain. Life had become fuller, and richer. Ordinary life intensified.

That seems to me also a good description of the difference between ordinary life and resurrection life. When you start on the spiritual journey that is prompted by the resurrection of Jesus, there is more to life.

The 16th century poet John Donne describes in his famous poems what life felt like to him when he was madly in love; in a similar way, he describes life intensified.

The Good Morrow: “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved?”……….. the idea that life didn’t even start properly until their relationship began and that one room is enough if that is where your loved one is.

“love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.”

And in another, “the sun rising”, he says that if the sun’s job is to warm the world, it is enough that it just warms the room where he and his lover are:

“since thy duties be

         To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich was an anchoress which meant that she lived in one room for much of her adult life, a cell which you can still see if you visit the city of Norwich. She spent much of her time ministering to people who came to visit this holy woman. It can’t in one sense, have been much of a life, to survive in just one room, never to go anywhere. But for Julian it was the place where she was called to serve God, and the visions and experiences that she wrote down still inspire many people today. Her life too was rich and full even though it was completely limited geographically.

We don’t know much about Mary Magdalene, the woman who was the first to witness Jesus’ resurrection. We don’t know her age. We know that she was probably not married and without children, which is why she is identified by the place she came from, Magdala, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, rather than as wife or mother of someone else. We know she was wealthy enough to provide, along with some other women, the finance for Jesus’ travelling ministry, something we’re told about in Luke’s Gospel. There is no evidence she is connected with the unnamed sinful woman described in a previous chapter by Luke, although that idea has taken hold of people’s imagination over the centuries; but we are told she was released from 7 demons. In today’s language, we might understand her to have suffered from a mental illness from which Jesus healed her.

Life changed for Mary when she first met Jesus. I think it must have been for her like an opening up of a life that had been full of misery and distress before, and now had love for Jesus at its centre, with the sense of purpose that love gives. It was a life that had become fuller, richer. As well as her external life changing when she met Jesus, as she (we presume) followed him around the Galilean countryside, her internal world had also changed. Life for her intensified. There was more love, and more pain. Especially when her teacher died on the cross on that Friday afternoon.

We can see that she was loyal to Jesus, that she cared about him deeply, and wanted, after he died, to do one last thing for him by anointing the body with spices and oils. That’s why she is there at the tomb, early on Sunday morning as soon as the sabbath is over. Likely she wasn’t a young woman, but someone who had experience of laying out bodies, still a holy ritual undertaken by local women in many Jewish communities.

We can see in the story that she knew Jesus well and as soon as she heard his voice speaking her name she recognised who it was.  She must have been a woman of courage, to witness Jesus’ death with the other women and head up to the burial field early that morning, accompanied by others though John doesn’t mention this. And she was bold enough to face the ridicule of the disciples when she went back to tell them that she had seen Jesus, and he was alive.

No doubt that Mary from Magdala had grown in her internal life over the two or three years since she met Jesus, and developed those qualities of courage, love and the desire to serve. And no doubt that the resurrection, and the coming of the Holy Spirit which followed, changed her still more, giving her opportunities to grow in courage and love and to serve in new ways.

I wonder where you are on your journey in relation to Jesus? I wonder how rich your internal world is; how much you have grown and will continue to grow over the next few years? I wonder what the external story of your life is; the places you have lived, the things you have done: and I wonder what your internal story is.

For everyone who follows Jesus there is the promise of an ever growing and sometimes challenging internal and spiritual life. Jesus doesn’t just leave us in peace, undisturbed; if we’re open to him he will bring new experiences, new people, new life, whatever your physical age. He will bring more love, and quite likely as a result, more pain.

In the words of the hymn:  we “give him back the life we owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be”.

Because if we follow Jesus, we are promised a richer and fuller life, like the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, beginning here on this earth and continuing into the life to come.