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Homilies by Rev. Andrew Collis unless indicated otherwise.

Easter Day, Year A
South Sydney Uniting Church
April 16, 2017

John 20:1-18

‘Talking to a Stranger’

The young people have been busy making sculptures at their table. The guiding theme to their creativity today is “strangeness” … That certainly seems appropriate on a day we celebrate the strangeness of Easter bunnies and bilbies laying/gathering/delivering eggs … chocolate eggs! God be with you …

There are strange pictures to look at and to colour. Some people think it’s strange to light candles and sing songs together. The angels in the tomb are pretty strange – messengers from God. How do you imagine them? …

Things get strange when we are standing at the edge of what we have known or have experienced. At the edge of being human – in encounter with beings other than human (bunnies, bilbies, dogs, cats, ducks, chickens …) Things get strange when we are standing at the edge of one culture – seeing or hearing, meeting or eating with someone from a different culture. Listening to or reading about people from another time or place, people who speak another language. Sitting in a pew alongside someone we have not met before. Have you experienced anything like that? …

The site of a tomb can be a strange place. And resurrection brings us to a very strange place – the edge or boundary of life and death as we know it.

The word resurrection (Gk: anastasis) means “to rise or stand up again”. Jesus was killed and laid in a tomb. But two days later he rose up, he stood up, removed and rolled up the cloth that was covering his face and walked out of the tomb. Does that sound strange? And not just that he stood up again, but that he stood up for everybody – “I am the resurrection,” Jesus said – alive, loved, and alongside God forever.

The meaning is something like this: in Jesus God’s love for the world is stronger than any power of fear or hate. Love is the word. Love is the first, the embodied and the last word.

Alleluia! we say/sing. Praise God!

But there’s something else in the story that is strange. Sometimes it’s helpful just to notice one thing in a Bible story and to think about that one thing, to pray about that one thing. What I notice is that Mary doesn’t recognise Jesus. At first she thinks he is the gardener. Perhaps she is crying so much she doesn’t see clearly. Or perhaps the risen Jesus – the Jesus who stands up for Love, who stands up for everybody forever – is the same Jesus, but also different. He looks different. He appears in this story, and in some others too, as a stranger.

We are being shown something important.

Because we believe that God is love, and that Jesus is divine love for the world, then we, too, want to be more loving. When we meet a stranger and show kindness to a stranger, we might be making a new friend. We might be in the presence of angels. We might be in the presence of God. When we are in a strange place and feeling like we don’t belong, and someone shows kindness to us, we might find ourselves invited to join in, then learning something new, sharing food or skills or stories or questions … exposed to wonder, as the philosophers say.

Mary Magdalene became a teacher in the early church. She was very wise and caring. She was known as the “apostle to the apostles”. I think she learned that showing kindness to a stranger – just giving a stranger or visitor a drink or a smile or a chance to talk or share – is a way of keeping close to Jesus the Teacher.

She might even have thought this: we’re all a bit strange, we’re stranger than we often think we are – and our lives are strangely connected.

Have you ever thought of yourself as strange? … That can be a funny realisation – and the beginning to really loving strangers/others for who they really are.

Because we believe that God is love, and that Jesus is divine love for the world, then we, too, want to be more loving. May it be so. Amen.

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