Dawn: SALT's Commentary for Easter Sunday
Easter Sunday (Year B): John 20:1-18 and Mark 16:1-8
Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on these passages, “Understanding Easter - Part Seven: Rethinking Easter.”
Big Picture:
1) Easter Sunday! Today begins the season of Eastertide, fifty days of celebrating Jesus’ resurrection, all the way to Pentecost — outpacing the forty days of Lent, and at the same time making up roughly one seventh of the entire year, in effect a “sabbath” writ large for the year as a whole. The resurrection is so great a mystery, and calls for so grand a celebration, that merely one day won’t do.
2) Easter Sunday! At the outset of Luke’s Gospel, the priest Zechariah (Elizabeth’s hubby and John the Baptizer’s dad) sings a song known today as the “Benedictus,” including the line: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). Now — at last — that dawn has come!
3) But dawn is not the day. Easter Sunday is only the beginning: Jesus’ resurrection is the “first fruits” of the harvest, an encouraging glimpse of what’s ahead (compare 1 Cor 15:20-23). But “what’s ahead,” by definition, isn’t yet here. We call it “dawn” because its rays of light break through the shadows — but it’s also true that for the time being, the shadows remain. Accordingly, Easter comes not as the solution to creation’s problems but rather as profound assurance that a new, irrevocable era has begun — and in the end, love and justice, shalom and joy, will have the final word. The sun will rise!
4) And sure enough, shadows are everywhere today. Violence, despair, rancor, war and rumors of war… But this fifty-day season of Eastertide presents an opportunity: redoubling our commitment to create a graceful, peaceful, beautiful world in which all may live and thrive.
Scripture:
1) Ask ten Christians why the women come to the tomb that Easter morning, and nine will tell you that they bring spices to anoint Jesus’ corpse — but that’s not the story John tells. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus have already wrapped the body in linen, myrrh, and aloes, and when Mary Magdelene arrives alone before dawn, she has no spices in tow (John 19:38-42).
2) Why does she come? Is it sheer grief, a longing to be close to Jesus, even in death? Or is she concerned that Jesus’ body, already disgraced in mockery, torture, and crucifixion, will be degraded even further — even stolen? Or is she holding out hope-against-hope that what he said in his last public teaching (“when I am lifted up from the earth“ (John 12:32)) somehow means that death is not this story’s final chapter? Or some combination of these motives?
3) We can’t know for sure, of course, but in any case, the story resonates with a longstanding theme in the Bible’s library: women as bold, resourceful, tenacious defenders of life and of the dignity and honor of the human body. Shiphrah and Puah, for example, the midwives who shrewdly subvert Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew children (Exodus 1:15-21). Or Rizpah, Saul’s widow, who camps out on a hillside beside her dead sons’ corpses for something like six months, day after day, night after night, defending their bodies against scavenging birds and animals (2 Samuel 21:10-14). Or indeed the women who stay near Jesus even after most of the male disciples have scattered in fear: in John’s telling, “his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene”; and in Mark’s telling, “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome” (John 19:25; Mark 15:40).
4) Mary Magdalene initially draws the conclusion that Jesus’ body has been moved — but the presence of the linen wrappings and face covering suggest otherwise, since anyone who moved the body would have no reason to remove the linens, much less neatly “roll up” the face covering. Peter sees the scene and apparently doesn’t know what to think; “the other disciple” sees “and believed”; and the two men return to their homes (John 20:8-9).
5) Only Mary stays behind. She’s weeping, so she seems to have drawn the conclusion that, as she puts it to the two angels, “They have taken away my Lord” — perhaps revealing the fear that brought her to the tomb in the first place (John 20:13). She then mistakes Jesus for the gardener, only recognizing him when he calls her by name — a clear echo of Jesus’ teaching that the Good Shepherd “calls his own sheep by name… they know his voice” (John 10:3-4).
6) The garden setting itself evokes the Garden of Eden, as if the story of salvation has come full circle, redeeming the original gardeners, Adam and Eve, divinely called to “till and keep” the garden (Gen 2:15).
7) Jesus’ words to Mary frame what is happening not as resurrection alone, but rather as resurrection-for-the-sake-of-ascension: “I am ascending… to my God and your God” (John 20:17). Just as he had promised in his last public teaching, he is ascending, and drawing his followers — and indeed “all people” — with him: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). In other words, the resurrection, astounding as it is, isn’t an end. It’s a new beginning.
Takeaways:
1) It’s Easter Sunday, but the readings from John and Mark are hardly simple stories of triumph. Today is only the beginning — and rightly so, since a mystery as fathomless as Easter can only begin on a single day, beckoning us to enter into its depths and riches for the fifty-day season to follow, and beyond.
2) Accordingly, Mary Magdalene arrives on “early the first day of the week,” a poetic turn suggesting a new start (John 20:1). Thus Easter Sunday is not the end of Lent — it’s the beginning of Eastertide, and in a deeper sense, the beginning of Christian life, a life lived in the light of God’s resurrection. The trumpets and lilies signal not a final victory, then, but a commencement, a launch, a kickoff — a dawn of a new day.
3) And this morning twilight still has plenty of shadows, and wounds (Jesus rises, please note, as a still-wounded savior), and struggles, and fears (Mark 16:8). Indeed, if our first reaction to a report of resurrection is cynicism or skepticism, we’re in good company. Some among Jesus’ own disciples, the ones who arguably knew him best, initially refuse to believe. And as we’ll see in the weeks ahead, Easter faith is often a mix of trust and doubt, belief and disbelief. For after all, there are at least two ways to miss a miracle: first, to dismiss it, to reject it too readily, as if astonishing things never happen; and second, to domesticate it, to accept it too readily, as if it isn’t astonishing at all.
4) Key women in the story, however — Mary Magdelene in John, and the two Marys and Salome in Mark — refuse to withdraw, whatever doubts or despair they may feel. They stay close. They bear witness. Like their ancestors, Rizpah, Shiphrah, and Puah, they insist on honoring and protecting Jesus’ body. And eventually, as John tells it, Mary Magdalene proclaims the mystery: “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). She is the original apostle, staying with Jesus on the cross, coming to the tomb before dawn, and in the end, declaring the good news. To anyone who argues that women should not be leaders in the Christian church at the highest levels, the Easter stories in all four Gospels together stand as a luminous, devastating reply.
5) Easter Sunday! What’s the good news of the Gospel today? For those who despair that death-dealing powers have the upper hand — fear not. Easter means God ultimately is and will be victorious over the powers of death. For those who feel isolated and lonely — fear not. Easter means we are all together in the risen Body of Christ, even if we’re separated in time or space. For those who despair that our guilt is too great for God to forgive — fear not. Easter means God has cleared all accounts, liberating humanity from shame, reconciling us to God and each other as God’s children. For those who despair in the midst of pain or anguish — take heart. You are not alone: Jesus suffers with you in solidarity and companionship, and Easter means you will rise with him. For those who despair over a world filled with hate, violence, and scapegoating — be encouraged. In Christ’s passion, God has taken the place of the scapegoat in order to expose humanity’s violent ways — and Easter means God one day will overcome violence once and for all. Indeed, Easter means that God has taken one of the worst things in the world (the Roman cross) and remade it into one of the best (the Tree of Life), a sword into a ploughshare — and if the worst, then also the whole creation in the end! Like the cross, the empty tomb is a great divine mystery, a rising sun dispelling shadows in multiple directions. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on these passages, “Understanding Easter - Part Seven: Rethinking Easter.”