Easter 3 The Resurrection, Recovering Every Self-Conscious Moment

[HKHaugan]

Easter 3 The Resurrection---Recovering Every Self-Conscious Moment.

John 20:1-2 “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 where they have put Him.’”

As you read this you are in the self-conscious moment. You are in the present in your mind, heart and body. It is the ‘right now’, the ‘every conscious moment’ of your life. This is your eternity, right now. What is taking place in your mind, in your heart and in your spirit---in your eternity right now?!

This is the moment, and every moment you exist, that Jesus came to recover to make every present moment God’s moment, where time is not the issue. The real issue is who and what you are spiritually in the self-conscious moment.

Here in John’s Gospel we have Mary’s self-conscious moment, a moment that precedes not only all her next moments but all the next recorded moments that makes this particular Scriptural account so important.

The setting is darkness, the early morning of the day after the Sabbath (for the Jews, our Saturday), the beginning of all the waking, walking, working moments of every ordinary weekday. The moments always ‘darkest before the dawn.’ All of our moments in this world are lived in the darkness of our past conditioning in a world darkened by sin and evil, in the darkness of not knowing what is next until the light of morning arrives. The light of our spiritual morning when Jesus becomes the moment.

What Scripture reveals in Mary’s experience of the empty tomb is her self-conscious moment and how she processed it. Her process is exactly like ours. She is on her way to do the chore of caring for the body’s burial, the usual work of the women of her day. She sees the stone has been moved and makes an immediate assumption, runs back and tells Peter what she assumes has happened. Look at the first word she says, ‘They’.

First, it is a horizontal judgment. Even with her personal experience of Jesus, her first reaction is to think horizontally, that is, emotionally, mentally, worldly, based on past conditioning. She is not thinking vertically, that is spiritually, she is making an immediate assumption based on her horizontal everyday experience.

Second, it is ‘they’ who have done it. Who is ‘they’; soldiers, grave robbers, authorities?

Third, she is afraid, it’s dark and she’s alone so she runs. Sound familiar? In one way or the other, lonely, afraid, in the dark, we all run, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically.

Fourth, when she finds Peter she gives him her processed horizontal conclusion. Even though the Lord had already revealed Himself as Lord she still thinks of Him as a human superior but, even at that, one who dies and is therefore dead. She is still not thinking spiritually and can’t until He appears to her in His risen body. The importance of this scene is what the Resurrection does and that is to reconcile every waking moment as God’s moment. Every self-conscious moment is the moment Jesus came to recover for each of us.

Every moment of Jesus’ life was a self-conscious moment of choice and decision that Jesus lived conscious of three things, His Father, His Word and His Spirit. This is the level to which Jesus raised the dignity and significance for us and for all humanity. He raised the vertical flag over the territory of horizontal darkness. When Jesus was raised we all were raised.

The most recent exposure of the world’s darkness and how first impressions and conclusions can be destructively misleading was in the amazing performance of a world-defined frumpy 47 year old Scots lady who completely converted a cynical, ready-to-shoot-down audience by her incredible rendition of the Les Miserables song, I Have a Dream. Everyone’s sin-conditioned experience was geared to her exterior appearance and age, another laughing stock for the masses to jeer and use to escape their own inglorious anonymity. Something happened when she began to sing. There was the realization of individual uniqueness, of a gift underneath waiting to emerge in spite of the stone covered hearts dressed in the world’s cynicism. Even the judges (Pharisees and high priests of this world) were amazed and one of them in tears. Just imagine when we come before the Lord what that moment will be like. That is the moment for which He is preparing us with His Spirit in all our self-conscious moments in this world.

How many of our first impressions are moments of self-consciousness based on the conditioning of a darkened world in our own darkened hearts and thinking processes? What Jesus did in His Resurrection was to show a perfect human heart’s spiritual response in every single moment even the moment of death. His plan of transforming our hearts begins when we believe in Him not only as a human superior but as the spiritual Lord of lords, King of kings and God above all, who walks with us moment by moment. His self-conscious moments become our moments as we let Him be the Lord over every unknown next moment. That is why Scripture affirms that He is the same, yesterday, today and forever. Stay tuned.