I preached this sermon on Easter Day, April 20, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 20:1-18, Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus in a garden.
This is how it ends. THIS is how it ends.
Take a look around you—at the morning light, at the flowers, and the flame that burns, refusing to be overtaken by darkness. Bathe in these rolling waves of alleluias, all of us here, together, finally, on the edge of a new day, standing in the risen light. If you take nothing else away from this moment, from this season, from this life, just hold on to the revelation all around you now: this is how it ends.
Whatever else has ended, or is ending for you, or in this world, this is how it ultimately ends. Whatever you are afraid of, or angered by, or regretful of, take heart, because this is how it ends. Whatever grief you carry, whatever wrongs you can’t take back, whatever words you never got to say, this is how it ends. Whoever you have lost, whatever parts of yourself you have betrayed, whatever you are still trying to find, this is how it ends. Whatever seems to be falling down around us or fraying apart at the seams: remember, and believe, and taste and see, that this is how it actually ends.
In this line of work, every day I hear and I feel, underneath all the words spoken and headlines blaring and the anxieties that pervade our church and our country and our time on this fragile earth, every day I hear the fear of endings. I hear that we are “in decline”, that we are losing ground, that we are coming apart, that everything we’ve loved and worked for is leaving us.
I hear this across all spectrums of identity and ideology and outlook and circumstance. We have all been seized by this sense of an ending, a bad ending, and like Mary Magdalene we are, many days, stooped over by the weight of our tears. Like her, we are wailing at the angels to give us back the things we love most, the things we cannot bear the ending of.
But why are you weeping? Look around you, and see, and know again, or for the first time, the truth of Easter: this is how it ends.
Whatever breaks, whatever dies, whatever unravels in us and around us—that is not the actual ending that God has in store for us. This is. Because our God is the God of Love and Life, our God is an Easter God, and we are Easter people, and on this clear and fragrant morning our Living, Loving Risen God emerges from the darkness, up among the flowers like a gardener, asking us to look, to look, and to see how the first green shoots of this new and deathless creation are rising right up all around us, right out of the wreckage of all those dreaded endings we fear.
So look! Stop your weeping and look!
Now, I love this moment of reunion between Mary Magdalene and Jesus; I find it one of the most poignant in all of Scripture. But I have also wondered sometimes if Mary felt like she got the brush off from Jesus. He’s in an awful hurry.
Here she is, the only one who stuck around after the men left and went back home, here she is crying her heart out, suddenly reunited with her Lord and teacher and friend, and then through her blur of tears and joy and relief, Jesus is just like, “Girl, bye! I’ve got places to be. It’s Easter; I’ve got brunch plans. I love you, Mary, but kindly extricate yourself from my person.”
Well, maybe he was a little more pastoral than that. But he doesn’t stick around long enough to explain or even to instruct. Because how can you really explain all of this. He simply needs her to look, to see, for that briefest, most crucial moment in human history: to see that, whatever has us bowed down in grief, this is how it ends. With you and I, and him, and everything alive, redeemed, renewed—and united with the One who made us. And on that day, oh what an Easter brunch it will be.
And this is important, especially now: that this glimpse, this Easter day that shows us how it all will end: this is meant for something far more than consolation. It is meant to EMBOLDEN us. It is meant to make us a little brave, a little feisty, because this ending means that we are free. We are free from despair. We are free from shame. We are free from death. We are free!
And Mary, well, she gets it. She understood the assignment. Because out of that garden she goes—she goes and she announces—she PROCLAIMS what she has seen. Oh yes, if you hadn’t noticed, the first APOSTOLIC PROCLAMATION of the risen Lord…the first human heralding of the new creation…is borne on a woman’s lips to the men hanging out at home.
Because what has been cast down is being raised up and blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted; and blessed are the pure in heart for they, THEY shall see God; and blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!
And as Mary goes along proclaiming, mind you, the world still looks the way it always did. Caesar is still on his throne, and Pilate is in his judgment seat wondering what truth is, and the crowds who called for crucifixion still know not what they have done. And all around are all of those usual endings, endings, endings, and falling temples and crumbling nations. Oh yes, we’ve been here before.
But Mary? Mary is emboldened now, because she stands at the center of a new world, she has seen, before anyone else, that this is how it ends. And when you know that this is how it ends, you can do anything that love requires, because there is nothing left to fear.
Friends, Easter is the feast of fearlessness. It is the feast that invites us to not just cling to the hope of some good news someday, somehow, but to see it here, now, alive, in front of us and around us. It is the feast that asks us to stop wailing at angels, and to dry our tears and hike up our garments and chase after that good news. Proclaiming as we go this thing, this Person, this Risen One, this new world that we have glimpsed.
And as we go, if we run into those petty tyrants of every age and the structures that prop them up, we will laugh, and we will stand in the streets and tell them: NO. You have no ultimate power. Because this is how it ends!
And if we see our beloved church changing through the years, we will cry out joyfully: it will be ok, because we are not limited by institutional realities, we are proclaimers of the Gospel of the Risen Lord, and this is how it ends!
And if we must say goodbye to each other along the way, as we certainly will in time, then we will say goodbye with tears and with tenderness but also with hope, because we know that this is how it ends.
And frankly, even if society were to fracture all around us and we had to stand on the rubble of what has been built, even then, even then, like the generations before us, even then we will look for that green shoot rising up at the mouth of the empty tomb and we will point and say, LOOK. This is how it ends! I have seen the Lord and this is how it ends!
Just like this. With love and truth and possibility, and resurrection, and a day that is not actually an ending at all, but a beginning. Look around you. This is the first glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, with flowers, and a flame that will not be overtaken by darkness, and a torrent of unstoppable alleluias, and all of us together, finally, fully, always.
So why are you weeping? This is how it ends.
By Another Road 