“Letting Jesus Be Jesus”
John 20:1-2, 10-18
July 22, 2007
Today is St. Mary Magdalene Sunday. But why
couldn’t it be St. Dan Kistler Sunday or fill in your name
Sunday? Each one of you who is baptized into Christ and trusting
in Him for your salvation is a saint, a holy child of God, a brother of
Christ. Is it because Mary Magdalene is more saintly than you
that she gets her own Sunday? Maybe it’s just that
she’s a more famous saint than you; after all, your name’s
not in the Bible... or is it? It’s certainly not that
Mary is any less of a sinner than you are or even that she is more holy
than you are. Saints are holy not because of their own holiness,
achieved by their good works, but because of Christ’s holiness
and His good works given to them. Often times we tend to put
certain saints on pedestals, whether they’re saints of the Bible
or contemporary Christians whom we consider to be more saintly and holy
than ourselves. Some people worship the saints, while others pray
to them. But if St. Mary Magdalene were alive today, she’d
tell you that there’s a better way to use the saints, and that is
by imitating their faith in Jesus and following their example as they
live out that faith.
It’s not just the good things about the lives
of the saints that we want to emulate, however, but also the bad things
about their lives that we want to avoid. St. Paul often uses the
people of Israel in the O.T. as an example of what not to do, while the
writer of the book of Hebrews points us to other famous saints in the
O.T. as examples of what to do. Taking a tennis class as I am
right now, I’ve discovered that one way to learn the correct way
to serve, for example, is by watching someone else serve who knows how
to do it well. And yet, since no one’s perfect, even good
players make mistakes, and after a bad serve they’ll be the first
to tell you, “Don’t do what I just did!” So,
the saints, too, teach by example both in what to do and what not to do
as God’s holy people. And Mary Magdalene is one of those
saints. She is our “coach” today.
If there’s one lesson that Mary could teach
us, if what we could learn from her could be summarized into one
statement, it might be put in these words: Let Jesus be
Jesus. Let Jesus be who He is, and let Him do what He wants to
do, because who He is and what He does He is and does for you. To
try to hinder Jesus from being who He is and doing what He does or to
try to control Him will keep you from receiving the gifts that He wants
to give you. What might a marriage look like if one spouse tried
to control the other? This was a lesson that Mary herself had to
learn. She had to learn that she could not control Jesus nor
dictate to Him what He could or could not do. She was not His
lord, but He was hers. Nor was Jesus her Lord alone, as if He
belonged to Mary and no one else. He didn’t die for
Mary’s sins alone, but for the sins of the whole world. He
is the world’s Savior, not just Mary’s. Mary’s
expectations of Jesus were also too limiting; she expected less of Him
than He wanted to be for her. Jesus wanted to be more for Mary
than she could ever have hoped or dreamed. Mary’s problem
was that she had her own ideas and expectations of Jesus, and they kept
her from letting Jesus be Jesus. We see this in the encounter
between Jesus and Mary here in today’s Gospel text which takes
place on the day of Christ’s resurrection.
Now, you might get the impression that the mistakes
Mary makes she makes because she doesn’t love Jesus. That
couldn’t be further from the truth. It isn’t a lack
of love for Jesus that’s Mary’s problem, but ignorance of
Him that is. You and I often believe, teach, and do things that
are completely false, completely contrary to the Word of God, but we do
them out of sincere love for Jesus. In the teaching about the
Lord’s Supper, for example, some Christians think they are
protecting Jesus by denying that He gives you His true body and blood
in this meal to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of your
sins. They see this as tantamount to cannablism, or as denying
the finite nature of Christ’s body, or as taking His words here
too literalistically. But no one can deny that Baptists and
others who hold this view sincerely love the Lord. The trouble
is, they are sincerely wrong! So also here... Mary’s
fault lies not in a lack of love for Jesus, but in her ignorance about
Jesus. And it’s out of His love for her that Jesus
doesn’t allow her to remain in her ignorance but corrects her.
First, as she along with several other women
travelled with Jesus, providing for His and the disciples’ needs
from their own means, Mary had heard Him say many times that He was
going to be crucified, die, be buried, and then rise again from the
dead on the third day. And yet, like the twelve themselves, Mary
didn’t understand this; it didn’t make sense to her.
So, on the day of Christ’s resurrection, instead of reminding
herself of what Jesus had said, Mary concludes from her own reasoning
that someone has come and stolen her Lord’s body. She is so
convinced of this that two angels and even the appearance of Jesus
Himself in the flesh can’t convince her otherwise. She
can’t even recognize Jesus, so sure is she that His body has been
stolen; she takes Him for the gardener. The first lesson that
Mary would teach us, then, is to pay attention to God’s
Word. Don’t do what she did and base your beliefs about
Jesus on your own thoughts, emotions, or experiences. Most of our
false expectations of Jesus and our failure to let Him be who He is
stem from our ignorance of His Word. Without His Word,
we’ll fail to recognize Jesus and we’ll take Him for
someone else.
Second, it takes Jesus to dispel Mary’s false
notions and beliefs about Him. If Jesus hadn’t come to
Mary, Mary would have remained in her unbelief. It’s when
Jesus calls to her by name that the blinders are removed from Mary and
she recognizes Him. The same goes for you. If Jesus
hadn’t come to you, you would still be lost in your
unbelief. Jesus came to you with His Word and called you by name
in your Baptism, saying, “You are my child. I wash away
your sins with my blood which cleanses you from all
unrighteousness. I know you, and I give you eternal
life.” You can only say you know Jesus, because you are
known by Him. The second lesson, then, that Mary would teach us
is that you can’t save yourself. Jesus has saved you.
He called you out of the darkness of your ignorance of Him and brought
you into the light of the knowledge of the truth.
Finally, Jesus intends to be more for Mary (and for
you and me) than any of us could ever have hoped or expected.
After hearing her Lord call her by name, Mary recognizes Jesus.
She cries out, “Rabboni!” and then we assume from what
Jesus says to her that she suddenly ran to Him and embraced Him, which
she probably did. However, this is not why Jesus says,
“Don’t cling to me...” Other versions read,
“Don’t hold onto me...” Jesus is not telling
Mary that she shouldn’t touch Him or embrace Him. After
all, He even invited the eleven to touch Him. Jesus is not
referring to what Mary is doing with her hands, but what she is doing
with her heart. She is trying to hold onto Jesus in such a way
that would hinder Him from being who He would be and doing what He
would do for her by ascending to His Father. Mary’s
reasoning might have gone something like this: “He was
taken from me once; I’m not going to let it happen again.
I’ve got Him back now; He’s not going anywhere ever
again.” Mary wanted Jesus to remain with her the way He had
always been with her in the past. But Jesus wanted to be with
Mary and do more for her in a way that Mary had never imagined.
He was not going to remain with her the way she wanted Him to, but He
was going to remain with her the way He wanted to be with her by way of
His ascension to the Father. This might have sounded to her like
Jesus was going away, that she was going to lose Him all over
again. But she was sincerely wrong. The fact that Jesus was
going to ascend to His Father meant that He would be with Mary and all
His saints always, even until the end of the age, just as He
promised. Jesus would be even closer to Mary and His saints than
He ever had been during His temporal earthly ministry. Jesus (the
whole Jesus, not just part of Him or just His spirit) would be nearer
to Mary Magdalene than He was to Mary, His mother while still in her
womb. And He is that near to you, me, and all the saints today as
He puts Himself, body and blood, into our mouths at His Table.
And so, the final lesson that Mary would teach us is that we must let
Jesus be Jesus. He who had delivered Mary from seven demons knew
how to deliver His salvation to her and keep her in that salvation unto
the end. We must trust Jesus to do the same for us and let Him be
and do for us what He wills; otherwise, we will hinder ourselves from
receiving the gifts that He would give us.
Once Mary had learned her lessons she was then given
a task, which was to announce to the rest of the Lord’s
disciples, now referred to as His brothers, His resurrection from the
dead and His soon to take place ascension to the Father. Jesus
had had His way with Mary. He had taken away her fear and
unbelief and in their place given her faith and boldness. Her
message to the disciples changed from “They’ve taken the
Lord!” to “I’ve seen the Lord!”
And so, Mary Magdalene can teach us a number of
things: 1) Don’t rely on your own reason or strength, but
do rely on God’s Word if you want to know the truth about
Jesus. 2) Don’t trust in your own efforts or abilities to
save yourself, but do trust in your crucified and risen Savior, Jesus
who has called you by name and claimed you as His own. And 3)
don’t try to control or hinder Jesus from being who He would be
or doing what He would do for you. Don’t cling to Him the
way you would have Him, but let Jesus be Jesus. Repent of
insisting on having your own way with Jesus, and let Him, His Word, and
His gifts have their way with you instead. Then you too will be
changed. Your faith in Jesus will be strengthened, you will live
as the saint that you are in Christ, and you will be emboldened and
enabled to proclaim Him crucified, risen, and ascended to the Father to
those to whom the Lord sends you.
So, if you want to use St. Mary Magdalene rightly,
imitate her faith and follow her example. As with all the saints,
she points us to Jesus and tells us to keep our eyes on Him, the Author
and Perfector of our faith. He is who He is and does what He does
for our salvation. Crucifixion would not have been the way you
and I would have chosen for our Lord to achieve our salvation, but that
was the only way to achieve it. It was the Lord’s way, not
our way, and it’s only by Jesus having His way that you are both
saved and kept in that salvation. Your way won’t do.
You’re not your own Savior, neither are the saints. Let
Jesus be Jesus. He alone is your perfect Savior, your Brother and
your Lord, sent to you by your heavenly Father. Amen.