Easter Day
Year A
RCL
He is Calling You by Your Name
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Today we arrive at the absolute hinge point of human history. We gather to celebrate a reality that changes everything about how we live, how we love, and how we face the grave. But if we pay close attention to the Gospel of John, we notice that this great revolution did not begin with a loud blast of trumpets or a massive public spectacle. It began in the dark, in the quiet, and in a state of profound confusion.
John tells us that early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Mary is not expecting a miracle. She is not arriving with a joyful spring in her step. She is coming to perform the heartbreaking, heavy ritual of grieving a dead friend. She is walking through the dark of early morning because the dark inside her own heart is even thicker. The man who had given her a completely new lease on life, the one who had looked at her with unconditional love, had been brutally executed. Her world had completely collapsed.
And when she arrives, she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the tomb. Her immediate reaction is not faith; it is panic. She assumes that grave robbers have struck. She runs to tell Peter and the other disciple, crying out, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Even after the disciples race to the tomb, look at the linen wrappings, and go back home, Mary stays behind. She stands outside the tomb weeping.
Every single one of us knows what it feels like to stand outside a closed door or a deep loss and weep. We know the feeling that death, disappointment, and finality have won the day. And when Mary finally bends down to look into the tomb, she sees two angels who ask her why she is crying. She repeats her deep anxiety: they have taken away her Lord.
Then she turns around and sees Jesus standing there, but she does not recognize Him. She thinks He is the gardener. This is a beautiful, accidental truth, because Jesus is indeed the new gardener, starting a whole new creation in the middle of a cemetery. He asks her the same question He asked the disciples at the very beginning of the Gospel: “Whom are you looking for?” Mary, still trapped in her grief, asks where the body has been taken.
And then, the entire universe pivots on a single word. Jesus looks at her and simply says her name: “Mary.”
The moment she hears her name spoken with that familiar, fierce tenderness, the fog vanishes. The darkness breaks. Her baseline reality shifts in an instant from despair to overwhelming joy. She turns and cries out in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” She realizes that death does not have the final word. The grave could not hold Him. The worst that the world could do was not enough to extinguish the life and love of God.
This is the explosive message that Peter stands up to proclaim in our reading from the book of Acts. Peter, who had denied Jesus three times out of fear around a charcoal fire, is completely transformed by the resurrection. He stands in the house of a Roman centurion, an outsider, and declares that God shows no partiality. He testifies that Jesus went about doing good, was put to death on a tree, but God raised Him on the third day. The resurrection turned a group of hiding, terrified disciples into bold witnesses who changed the world, because you cannot frighten people with a cemetery once they know the cemetery is temporary.
This resurrection power is not just a historical event we look back on with fondness. It is a present reality that defines who you are today. Paul writes to the Colossians with a radical challenge. He says, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
Paul is not telling us to escape from the world or ignore our daily responsibilities. He is telling us to stop living as if death is the ultimate boss. Setting your mind on things above means refusing to let the bitterness, the tribalism, the anxiety, and the self-preservation of the world dictate how you treat other people. It means living with the confidence that your true life is hidden with Christ in God, entirely secure and deeply loved.
The Psalmist captured this triumphant shift in perspective in Psalm 118 when he sang that the Lord is my strength and my song, and has become my salvation. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
So, where are you standing and weeping today? What is the dark, heavy situation in your life where you assume that hope has died and been buried? It might be a broken relationship, a secret struggle with addiction, a heavy blanket of depression, or a deep fear about the future.
Listen closely in the silence of your heart today. Jesus is not standing far away on a pedestal of gold. He is standing right beside you in the middle of your ordinary, messy life, and He is calling you by your name. He is inviting you to drop your grave clothes, to step out of the tomb of your past mistakes, and to look up into the dawn of His grace.
Let the joy of the resurrection wash over your wounds this week. Walk out of those doors today as a people who have encountered the living God, and share that light with a world that is deeply tired of the dark. Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.