Jesus unwraps and unveils for us – John 20:1-9

Easter Sunday; St. Stanislaus parish.

Do you how much Americans spent on gift wrap last year?  Well, neither do I.  In the busy-ness of this week, the most recent data I could find was from 2010, when this country spent 9.36 billion dollars on gift wrap.  That’s over $30 each.  And gift wrapping isn’t a purely modern or uniquely American phenomenon.  The earliest reference to it is 2200 years old, and comes from China.  Why do we do it?  Why do we wrap presents, or to take an example that might be more timely: hide eggs?  There’s something very humane about the wrapping of gifts.  Somehow, the giving and, more importantly, receiving of a gift is made even more joyful when it’s wrapped.

But, there are other, more worrying, forms of hiding and wrapping.  There are the wounds we bandage because they’re not scars yet, and we’re afraid of what the world might do to them.  There are the things we’re ashamed of, the rug bought solely to cover the stain.  There’s the hiding of a smuggler, trying to steal and deceive.  There’s the fraudster Wizard of Oz pleading with you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  There’s the stick in a jacket pocket, mimicking a gun, trying to coerce and threaten with only imagined power.

Perhaps there are parts of each of us, fears, temptations, memories of injustice suffered or inflicted, that we think we’ve drawn a curtain over, convinced that they cannot come to light, that we daren’t expose even to God’s healing touch.  The Light of the World is shielded from them, so they, and we, remain in the darkness, like Mary Magdalen at the beginning of this gospel.

Easter is about unmasking all hidings and wrappings.  Stones don’t just roll away from tombs, and Mary knows it.  She’s gone, she’s dared to leave her home at night, maybe she can’t sleep for grief, and she’s gone with courage to the place where the man she still names Lord, she still loves, lays, hidden, she thinks, in his deathliness.  But that’s not true.  The stone has been rolled away.  Could it be grave robbers, what could have happened?  She goes and she reaches out to Jesus’ trusted disciples and she laments, she dares to share her shock and sorrow and the disciples take this and act.  They run and go and return to the place that by all natural rights should be the place of death, the monument to death’s relentless power, that coerces and threatens, and sets out to conquer their beloved Lord.

But, it didn’t.  That’s what they find.  The stone has been rolled away.  The victory monument of death has been defaced, but by what?  As fast as he ran, the Beloved Disciple pauses before he enters.  Is it reverence?  Is it fear?  Is it that the cautious little-by-little tearing off of the wrapping paper on a gift?  Peter, true to his character, barges in, and sees.  There was no grave-robber… why would a grave-robber take a body and leave the grave clothes behind!?  The Beloved Disciple follows him and sees and believes… what?

He sees and believes that death has no power.  The grave clothes are empty.  The trappings of death are empty.  The face cloth has even been neatly folded, lovingly resigned, and placed in a corner.  The curtain has fallen, the stick is out of the pocket, the pretense that it’s a deadly gun is over.  The vanquished signs of death show its impotence.

But why?  What has conquered death?  There are more layers of wrapping paper to be taken off this gift.  God in Christ has conquered death, has conquered death in love.  The face cloth is laid to one side because it isn’t needed any more: God’s glory is no longer veiled.  Moses had had to put a veil on after seeing God because his face shone with a brilliance the people found blinding.  In Christ, God gives His very self, the fullness of His glory, for us, and gifts are best given wrapped.  But the wrapping exists to be removed.  And it is; the face cloth, the veil, is folded and put away, because Christ doesn’t need it any more.  Or, one might better say, we don’t need any more, because it was all for us, all of this: God sending His only Son, as a babe, in flesh, to teach, to heal, to suffer to die and to rise… it was all for us.  It was all for us to show that greatness of His love, a love so powerful that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us.

And it still can’t.  The veil is off.  God has sent us the Spirit, that Jesus handed over as he gave up his last breath for love of us, and the Spirit dwells in us.  Whatever we thought we had to hide, is transparent to God’s life-giving touch, for we have been made dwelling places for God’s own Spirit.  Our wrapping paper has been torn off and God dares to accept us as gift.

Given in baptism, in the life-giving stream of water that flowed from Christ’s pierced side, and strengthened in confirmation, the Spirit renews and reveals our redeemed beauty.  In letting his very flesh be torn open for us, Christ tore down every barrier, every shield, every wall that could keep us from living wholly and holily with each other and with Him forever.  He has gone to prepare a place for us, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony is done, done in his Flesh.

And today, we renew our baptismal promises, we renew our commitment to live openly in the light of day as disciples of so loving a Lord.  And then we’ll move to the altar and witness our God break for us, unwrap our gift of life eternal.  Christ is risen: Alleluia!