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John 20:1-18
Today's Bible reading part one is John chapter 20 verse 1 to 18.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.
So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in.
Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.
Finally, the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.
Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."
At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?"
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means "Teacher").
Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!"
John 20:19-29
Our second reading continues from where we left off from the first reading, so I'm continuing from verse 19 of John chapter 20.
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!"
After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
Again Jesus said, "Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." And with that, he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven."
Now Thomas, also known as Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord!"
But he said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!"
Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."
Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"
Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
The Garden and the Human Story
Good morning everyone. My name is Megan. I'm one of the ministry team here at Deep Creek. It's a bit special to be preaching in a garden this morning.
If you are a student of English literature, well at least literature written for younger folks, you may know that a lot of very famous stories were stories about gardens and worlds that were maybe gardens once and then that lost the life that they had.
The Secret Garden, written 1911, there was a garden that was locked away for years. The door was hidden. The walls were overgrown. Everything inside was dead. The garden sort of exemplifies the grief and loss of this young girl and her relatives.
No one goes in. No one expects anything to grow. But when the door is finally opened, they discovered that the life had never completely gone. Something had been waiting, green returns, flowers. The garden becomes a place of healing and joy and new life.
About 20 years earlier, Oscar Wilde wrote a story called The Selfish Giant. The giant owned a garden, owned a property, drove children out, built a wall around his garden. But once the garden was closed in, winter settled and never left. Snow and frost. The trees stopped blossoming. Spring refused to come.
When it was locked away, it was frozen. But when the children returned, when the garden was shed, life finally broke in again.
And then in the middle of last century, maybe one of the more famous stories for you, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, the whole land is a garden under a spell. Always winter and never Christmas, the thaw never coming, rivers frozen, trees bare, lifeless.
But when Aslan returns, the thaw begins, the gardens begin to grow, shoots push up from the ground, the early crocuses. And when the children fly over the land on Aslan's back, leaping, the land starts to bloom even as he passes it through the air. Life returns to a world that had been locked in winter.
Well, I wonder if we tell stories like this because we recognise that in some way deep down this is our human story. The Bible, of course, begins in a garden. Humanity is created for life, life with God, life in the world, life with each other, walking with God, walking with each other, walking in harmony with creation, knowing God, receiving his breath.
The garden is a place of peace and trust and communion and provision, but that life is lost when humanity decide to go their own way. Humanity is driven from the garden like the selfish giant's garden. It becomes shut to them, although not surrounded by winter. Since then the world has never been quite the same.
Life is still there but fractured, joy is still there but fragile. Peace appears but it doesn't last. The world feels like a land that is stuck between winter and spring. We see a little moment and then it goes. Maybe in our own lives we see it too. We glimpse the life we were made for.
We eat the chocolate eggs and we feel great and then we don't feel great. These moments of joy never last. Relationship strain, anxiety returns, bodies fail, communities fracture. The world is conflicted and unstable and how much we feel that even today. We sense that life is good but not as it should be. It feels like something has been lost.
Easter Morning: The Garden Restored
The garden is shut, but John tells us that Easter morning begins in a garden. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified and in the garden a new tomb, the previous chapter says. And Mary comes to the garden while it is still dark and she stands weeping. The grief of Friday is in the air, this is winter, the world feels broken.
But then she turns and sees Jesus and John tells us that she thinks he's the gardener. And it's kind of funny but in a sense she's right. Because Easter is the moment where Jesus is opening and flourishing the garden once again. Easter is when spring begins even when it's autumn. Easter is when life returns.
Not just new shoots appearing but the life that we were created for being restored. The risen Jesus is the gardener, he stands in the garden as the beginning of new creation. And from that moment on life begins again.
Well John is very deliberate when he tells us that Mary came to the tomb while it was still dark. It's lovely that today was the end of daylight savings, really helped. I feel like our numbers might reflect that. God bless you. We all enjoyed it except for our friends and relatives who are nurses and who were doing that shift overnight and had an extra hour.
But we don't have to get up as much in the dark from now. But in the gospel darkness is when Mary comes to the tomb while it was still dark. And it's not just a time of day.
The Gift of Life in Darkness
It's the setting into which life is going to break, darkness. From the beginning of John's gospel, and we saw the video at the start, John has framed salvation in this way. In him was life, in Jesus was life, and that life was the light of all humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The gift of life begins in the darkness. It doesn't wait for the darkness to clear, it shines within it. We don't have to get ourselves into the light to meet Jesus. We don't even have to get our world into the light for it to meet Jesus. He comes into the darkness by his own initiative, into the darkest of all darkness.
It's what Friday is, an unjust, violent death, the darkest of all darkness. But interestingly, John doesn't describe darkness falling on the land. We painted it on Friday, Phil, the royal we. John doesn't do the, and then darkness fell, because for him, the whole passion, the whole suffering of Jesus, the whole cross is in darkness.
Judas goes out into the night to betray him. The arrest happens in the darkness. The disciples scatter in fear in the darkness, and the resurrection begins while it is still dark. Creation itself, of course, began in darkness. In Genesis 1, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and God said, let there be light.
John is mirroring this pattern. If creation led to a garden where we lived and received life, this new creation starts in darkness. Creation starts in the dark, and the resurrection takes place on the first day of the week, the time of new creation. Redemption doesn't begin after everything is fixed. It steps into the dark.
If we go right to the end of scripture, redemption is described as the removal of night itself. Revelation 22 says, when Jesus returns and God makes all things right and everything is created anew, not just that first moment of it breaking in at Easter day, there will be no more night.
The story of scripture runs from darkness at creation to light breaking into darkness in Christ's resurrection to a future where darkness is finally gone. But here in the garden, John 20 stands in the middle of that movement. The resurrection comes in. The gift of life begins in the darkness. Easter is the dawn of the new world, but the full shining sun is still to come.
When Jesus speaks Mary's name, everything changes. She recognizes him not because she's reasoned it out as the sun has begun to rise, not because someone's convinced her, but because he calls her by name. And this is our second point, that the gift of life starts in the darkness, but we're called into that life by our name.
The risen Jesus addresses her personally, and it is then that she realizes that it is him. Embracing Easter is not simply about belonging to a tradition. You can't rely on ethnic heritage or church background or school assemblies or family habits. None of these can replace the moment where Jesus calls you by name.
Resurrection life must be in a personal encounter. Jesus actually always worked like this. There were crowds around him, but he saw the individual. He taught as he walked along, and he drew people in. When he's calling his disciples, he calls them by name, and they follow him.
Mary knew Jesus. She had followed him. She had heard his teaching. She had witnessed his ministry. But even she must encounter him personally as the risen Lord. She can't rely on yesterday's knowledge, on an understanding of Jesus as a good teacher. She must hear him now as the risen one.
The life that returns in the garden is received when we realize that the living Jesus is not just kind of part of our background, part of the crowd, but addressing us personally. In John chapter 10, Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who calls his sheep by name, and the sheep listen to his voice. Mary hears her name. She recognizes the shepherd's voice, and she turns toward him. Rabboni, teacher, Lord, this is the blessing of life that comes into darkness, because it is Jesus calling our name.
Breaking into Locked Rooms
Now, maybe you feel that that is out of reach. You're like, well, OK, I'm waiting. He's not called my name, and that's why I'm sitting where I'm sitting, kind of on the fence about Jesus, or really quite ambivalent, or even a little bit hostile, if I was honest. And this is why I think we move into the next part of the story out of the garden into Jesus coming into the locked room.
Because we say to ourselves, if only Jesus would encounter me like he encountered Mary in the garden, then I would believe. If only I had your faith, your experience, you heard him say something to you, Megan, then I would have that faith. But I haven't, so I don't. But the next scene shows us that life must break into our locked rooms.
The disciples are gathered together with the doors locked for fear. The resurrection has happened. Mary has encountered Jesus, but they are still shut away, paralysed by fear. They're not expecting an encounter. They're trying to avoid danger, as it's not good for the Roman leader's narrative, nor the Jewish leader's narrative, that the tomb is empty.
But John says, Jesus came and stood among them. The locked doors didn't stop him. He takes the initiative and comes into their place of fear and hiding, and he speaks peace, and he shows them his hands and his side. And only then does John tell us the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
And the same pattern continues with Thomas. He wasn't there. And don't you know that feeling of when the group has, you couldn't make it to the event and the party or the holiday, and they've got these great photos and stories, and you weren't there, and you're like, I just feel on the outside now. Is it ever? Am I ever going to be part of it again?
Well, Jesus comes again to Thomas, and his faith follows an encounter. Life doesn't wait outside and say, OK, well, you missed it. Jesus entered the locked room. Now, I think about us. We have these locked rooms. Maybe it's intellectual. We feel unable to believe because we've kind of got these questions or doubts.
Maybe it's emotional, like past hurt, disappointment with the church, disappointment with something that happened in life. Grief has closed us off, and we've locked it. Maybe it's cultural. We feel like faith belongs to other people. I remember we were ministering down in South Melbourne, and it was a very, very multicultural situation.
And the young people said to us, well, we just weren't brought up in it. It's not our family's tradition to be Christian, so it's not for us. Lock the door. Sometimes it's a moral thing. Guilt or failure, pride makes us assume that life with God is not possible. Sometimes it's fear, fear of change, fear of surrender, fear of what faith might mean.
And I've been thinking about this, and I think the key to seeing the life of Jesus break into these rooms, if you want it to, is first and foremost, honesty. You need to name what the room is. Name it to yourself. You just have to be brutally honest. Name it to a friend, or a family member, or a parent, or a pastor.
If God is grace and truth, then I think the most authentic thing we can do if we want him to break into our lives is to be truthful, radically, brutally truthful. If you really have questions about God and suffering, or how the church treats people, or why Jesus teaches certain moral things, then be brutally honest about them.
And don't imagine that people haven't had those questions before you. If you really own those questions, there are ways. But if they're really just excuses because there's something else, just be honest about it. Just be truthful to yourself. Just say, actually, I don't want to lose this thing. I don't want to risk what God might call me to.
Just be honest about that. Because Jesus can't break into a locked room that you haven't actually been honest about its existence. Many Christians across history have described their faith beginning like this, not by opening the doors or climbing toward God.
Life Restored Through the Spirit
but by naming the room and God breaking in. Martin Luther famously struggled with fear and guilt and anxiety about God's judgment. And he knew Christian teaching. I mean, he lived in a monastery. He prayed constantly. He was on the track, the trajectory, like, you know, getting there. But he felt trapped in a locked room of conscience.
And he named it. He told his Christian mentor that he couldn't escape the sense that he could never be right before God. And they were talking about how he might celebrate the Lord's Supper. And his mentor said, look to the cross, look to the wounds of Christ, and see the life of God coming from Christ alone. And he heard it.
But then God broke through. In Romans 1, 17, as he was reading, Luther saw that righteousness was a gift received by faith. And he wrote that he felt altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. The doors he could not open were opened for him. Jesus entered his locked room, and life broke in.
And this brings me to my final point, and really the peak of the passage. True life returns with the breath of the risen Jesus. He's in the locked room. He speaks peace to the disciples. He shows them his hands and feet. And Jesus says, as the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And then John says, and with that he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit.
If life began in creation when it was dark and light broke through, then it was the breath of God that made humankind when God had fashioned them. John is deliberately telling us that Jesus, the gardener in the garden of the resurrection, bringing it into the locked room, Jesus is breathing his life, breathing his life into that garden so that each person might have that new life in them.
The gardener of the new creation breathes again life into his people. This is also the fulfillment of what Jesus had promised in the upper room. We've just finished a series on it. You can go back and listen to it if you want to. It's on the website. In John 14 to 17, Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples after his departure that he will send his spirit.
I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate, someone to walk with you, someone to make sure that your future is bright, to help you and be with you forever, the spirit of truth. You know him. He lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
This is shared life, life that flows from the Father to the Son and now to the disciples through the spirit. And so when Jesus breathes on them his spirit, the breath of the risen Jesus is the gift of this life in them, his very spirit. So this life is three things for us.
- Firstly, it is life that does not end in death. The resurrection is not merely Jesus' personal victory. It is the beginning of life that will not end in death for any and all who believe. Jesus' resurrection is now the guarantee of your life, my life, when we follow this Lord. The garden that had been locked by sin and death is now open. Death no longer has the final word, and that garden will never, ever stop growing.
- Second, this life is a life now of communion with the Father through the spirit. Jesus says in John 15, abide in me and I in you. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. This is life now, participating in the life of God that brings forth garden fruits in your life. Beautiful things, flowers, all kinds. It's incredible, guys. I love it. Fruit, whatever is needed for the people around you and for yourself, this is what grows as you share in the life of God. It is not simply existing until life breaks through death at the end. It is relationship now of new fruitful garden life.
- And finally, this restored life is life on mission. Immediately after breathing on them, Jesus says, as the Father has sent me, I am sending you. Not just existence, not just fruitful, but sent. Moving, not static, life that starts to bring the garden wherever you go. Moving outward, the doors open, calling people in and seeing the garden expand. Jesus, in John 17, prays, as you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. And that's what it means when he says, if you forgive people's sins, they're forgiven. And if you don't, they're not. Because now you have my mission. We're used to thinking that in a really very churchy way. But what did he come to do? To forgive and give life. And so if you go and take his mission, if you go with the spirit of God in you moving, not staying, but moving, then you bring actually that same mission with you. And it's about forgiveness. You're declaring Jesus, and you're seeing that people come to know him. And you can say, you are forgiven, friend. You've walked into the garden. Life is yours because you have recognized Jesus. You have heard his voice. And into the darkness, his light has shone.
Well, we're going to spend some time singing and then sharing in the Lord's Supper. And I encourage you, what is it? Is it that you need to be true, truthful, about your locked rooms? Is it that you need to trust that he will walk into the darkness? Is it that you just need to stop and hear him calling your name and turn? Is it that you need to know that the garden is now in you and through you for the world? Let's stand and sing.
