What Is Loved, Is Resurrected

I preached this sermon on Easter Day, March 31, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. A version was also featured this day as part of The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work.

“While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.”

—

What is loved, is resurrected. 

This is the proclamation of this singular, eternally true day. This is what we discover on this morning, as the dawn caresses the darkness and wipes away its tears. Just as sunlight reveals itself in the morning sky, so has the Son of God revealed his fullness, so that in the light of this impossible, wondrous moment, we, like Mary Magdalene, might finally behold God’s answer to our broken hearts:

That what is loved, is resurrected.

Because Jesus, who was so deeply loved, who is Love, has been resurrected. Or, more accurately, he IS the resurrection, just as he once told Martha as she grieved over Lazarus. He is Love and he is Resurrection, and now, at last, we see what had previously been hidden: that these two, love and resurrection, are the same thing. We see that love is not a temporary condition, not something that we must live in fear of losing; it is the fundamental premise of existence, it is the Alpha and the Omega. When we love, when we are loved, we are given a taste of eternity. 

And so Jesus, this Love enfleshed, stands before us, bathed in the dew of the garden, his voice as soft as flower petals, his heart as radiant as fire, and he has arrived, not at the end of his journey, but at the new beginning of our journey. At the new beginning of the world—again, as before, in a garden. A beginning that is again, as before, signified by the tenderness of a God who walks among the trees and seeks his children and calls out to them by name. 

But on this day, on the other side of night and on the other side of death, God has a new message to add: not simply that we are loved, for that has always been true…but that what is loved is resurrected. That love is resurrection, and that death is no longer a closed door. It is an empty tomb. 

It was not always evident that this would be so. 

Humanity has traveled a long way to get to this morning. Outward from the original, creative tension between chaos and genesis; outward from the garden of Eden; outward across a thousand wildernesses of yearning and temptation; traveling through the turbulent seas and across the river to the precarious, uncertain peace of our earthly promised lands.

And as we have traveled, humanity, in good times and hard, has always sought the one thing it could never have: a solution to the conflict between our affections and our mortality. In other words, that what we love, dies.

This has been the curse, this has been the bitten, bitter fruit of an inescapable insight: that even if our deep love—for God, for family, for spouse, for neighbor, for earth—somehow manages to endure over time, our bodies and the work of our hands do not. We are burdened with the degeneration of even our noblest efforts, the severing of our most precious bonds. The inescapable presence of death has driven the world mad with grief, desperate with the longing for something other than goodbye.

But today, in the strange dim light of Easter morning, a wondrous thing takes place. And not just the one you are thinking of. 

No, in fact, the first thing is this: that a disciple, Mary Magdalene, who has watched Jesus suffer and die, and who now carries the vast pain and loneliness of all creation in her heart, on a morning in which God is dead and Love is dead…she comes to the tomb. She comes to the grave of all human hope, knowing what has been lost, and she looks into the void where Love used to be…and yet she refuses to yield her love to that void.

Mary refuses, there, despite the literal death of Love itself, to give up the love she carries in her. She keeps that love alive in her broken heart. And so, on behalf of all of us, she comes to bear witness and to tend to God’s body when no one else is able or willing to do so, because she knows that bearing witness and tending to what is broken is what love looks like, both in life and in death. 

And in this moment of miraculous tenderness and strength, she, the stubborn bearer of a Love that was supposed to have been killed, is given to behold a new miracle:

That what is loved, is resurrected. 

Mary Magdalene did not resurrect Jesus, of course—the upwelling, earth-sustaining, heaven-rending power of the living God did that—but it is also true that, even as Jesus lay dead, this very same divine, undying love coursed through her veins and animated her soul and carried her to the tomb that day. 

It was God’s love, it was God’s own heart, in and with and through the heart of Mary Magdalene, who also wept beside the empty tomb, God weeping in her and with her and with us for the senselessness of separation, weeping for that long journey out of Eden, across the wilderness, through the seas, searching for something other than goodbye—a journey that God made, too, right beside us, step by weary step.

And so while Mary did not resurrect Jesus, we can say that she carried that same resurrecting love within herself, that she was an agent of and a participant in its surprising, vivifying force, and that she partook, in that moment, of the very same powerful, stubborn love that will ultimately restore all life back to life. 

And if she does, then so can we. 

What you need to know is this: the Resurrection of Jesus is not just a remote story of a bygone moment when something amazing happened; it is a statement about what is still true for you and for me and for everyone who is still navigating that long and often wearisome journey in search of something other than goodbye. For everyone who struggles to love; for everyone who has loved and lost; for everyone who feels confused about what love even is: Easter Day is the answer. 

What is loved, however imperfectly, for however long, is resurrected. 

This is what the risen body of Christ signifies and enacts: that what is loved is not lost to you, and it will live forever, not only as a memory, but in its fullness, in the flesh, on that day when God becomes all in all, and the whole earth is loved back to life. 

And, as Mary discovered, what you choose to love in this world is imbued with the promise of resurrection simply by the act of loving it. Every time you have gently kissed a soft cheek or held a calloused hand. Every time you have refused to break a bruised reed or trample a fragile spirit. Every time you have preserved the hope of the poor, or sought beauty, or made peace. Every time you have stopped to love something, you have taken part in the ultimate resurrection of the world, for what is loved—by you, by God, and by God working through you—is resurrected. 

Why and how is this so? How can Easter be what it is? 

We cannot explain it. We need not explain it. Because neither can we really explain our compulsion to love, even in the face of loss and uncertainty, and yet we simply do. Love is its own answer to the questions we ask. And resurrection is the same. 

Jesus emerges from the fading night, calling Mary by name, calling you by name, to confirm what you already knew in your bones but dared not trust: that love is worth the cost, it is worth having to say goodbye, because there is indeed, something other than goodbye at the end of the story, there is a place where beginnings and endings meet, where, forever, the dawn will caress the darkness and wipe away its tears and all that has been loved will be alive, and we will call each other by name. 

And in this strange new Easter light, perhaps we will realize that there was, in fact, always something deeper than mere human longing that propelled us across the wilderness and through the sea—that our long history of choosing to seek, to hope, to endure, to dream of something other than goodbye, was never a futile endeavor—it was a fertile one. It was the resurrecting love of God already at work in our mortal bodies, now completed in God’s body.

And like Mary in the garden, beholding the Risen Lord of flesh and flower and flame, perhaps we will discover that we, too, are bearers of that force which is stronger than death; that our choice to love is to take part in the very same mysterious, power that compels life to rise up from the earth.

For what is loved, is resurrected. 

Just like Jesus. 

And, one day, just like us.