Jesus is Calling Your Name

We like to be greeted by name. Being addressed by name shows that the person talking to us knows, at least in part, the story of our lives. It shows that the person speaking is interested in us and engaged in our life. I think that is why we are so turned off by telemarketers who call us by our first name. Have you ever had that experience? Such intimate speech is reserved for those who really know us. It is presumptuous and disingenuous when a person we do not know makes a pretense of intimacy. Such feigned familiarity violates the subconscious rules of human discourse.

The closeness between Mary Magdalene and the resurrected Jesus is what makes John’s account of the resurrection so compelling. John tells us that Mary had a brief exchange with two angels at the tomb. Verse 12 tells us that Mary saw “two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.”

Interestingly, in John’s account of the resurrection, the angels make no proclamation to Mary. Instead, they ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” (vs. 13). Mary is so grief-stricken she does not seem to recognize she is speaking to angelic beings. Normally in the Bible, when people encounter angels, they fall to the ground in fear. The angel’s question gives Mary the opportunity to pour out her grief and fear. Mary responds to their question by saying, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (vs. 13).

Mary had not come with spices and cloth to embalm Jesus’ body according to Jewish custom. That had already been done by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Mary came with only her grief to mourn at the tomb.

John tells us that following the brief exchange with the angels, Mary “turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus” (vs. 14). Mary was looking for a body, not for the risen Christ. In fact, Mary mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener. She even has a brief conversation with the resurrected Lord. Jesus repeats the angel’s question, “Woman, why are you weeping?” (vs. 15). Then Jesus adds a profound and poignant question. "Whom are you looking for?” (vs. 15). That is a question to ask ourselves this Easter Sunday. Whom are we looking for?

Mary fails to recognize Jesus. She says to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away” (vs. 15). As one commentator observes, “Mary is preoccupied with the body of Jesus. The empty tomb does not prod her to faith, but rather makes her worry about the corpse. Dead bodies do not simply disappear. Someone has to move them. Mary’s logic is right on target in a cause-and-effect world. Find the body, wherever it is, and get on with grieving.”

It is not until Jesus calls Mary by her first name that her preoccupation with Jesus’ corpse gives way to Easter wonder and resurrection joy. The same is true today in the twenty-first century. Until Jesus calls a man, woman, or child by name, all this business of an empty tomb, angels, and resurrection is illogical nonsense, but when the risen Christ calls you by name everything is changed.

This was my experience. I was raised in the church. My mother’s father was a Presbyterian minister. My Dad’s father was a Baptist missionary. We were forced to go to church, but I was a very nominal Christian. After my first year of college, I dropped out and took a job at a factory that made halogen headlights for Ford Motors. The year was 1978. I was at loose ends. By the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I went to a Christian bookstore near my apartment to buy a Bible. The clerk helped me to pick out a translation, and after I finished checking out, he asked me, “Do you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” In that moment the Spirit fell upon me, and I began to cry, something I am not prone to do. The clerk asked me to pray with him. I prayed, perhaps for the first time in public. All of the training I had received in the church as a child came flooding back in, and I poured out my heart to God asking for forgiveness and help. That encounter radically reoriented my life, and, after a long journey, I stand before you as an ordained PCUSA minister of thirty years. In that moment Jesus called my name.

When Jesus called Mary by name, her heart responded, “Rabbouni!” Rabbouni is an honorific title for a Jewish teacher of the scriptures but is more than that. The word implies a personal relationship. It is not simply “teacher,” but “my teacher.” When the risen Jesus addressed Mary on a first name basis, her darkened, grief-stricken soul was flooded with light and life and hope. “Rabbouni! My teacher is alive.”

One of the prominent themes of John’s gospel is the hour of the Son of Man’s glorification. The glorification of the Son of Man begins with the crucifixion whereby Jesus was lifted up from the earth in order to draw all people to himself. Jesus’ earthly glorification reaches its climax in the resurrection, but it achieves its fullness when he returns to the Father and resumes his former glory. What I find so astonishing is that the resurrected Son of God is found hanging around a graveyard, hanging around concealing his glory, hanging around waiting to talk to Mary, waiting to call her by name!

And consider the sort of person Mary had been. Luke tells us that “Mary, called Magdalen, from whom seven demons had gone out” was numbered among those Jesus chose to follow him. Mary’s life before Jesus was anything but stable. She was definitely not numbered among the cream of society's crop. Herbert Lockyer, in his book All the Women of the Bible, shares this insight. “As Mary is referred to as having ‘seven demons,’ her condition must have been worse than the rest.” In an imaginative description of her exorcism, he writes, “The moment Jesus’ compassionate eyes saw the wild-eyed and cringing woman of Magdala, he commanded the tormenting demons to come out – and stay out – of her. Her deranged and nerve- racked mind became tranquil. Sanity returned, and she was made whole.”

And yet, it is Mary Magdalen, exorcised of seven devils, that Jesus waits for. It is to Mary Magdalen, exorcised of seven demons, that Jesus appears first, before any of the apostles. It is Mary Magdalen, exorcised of seven evil spirits, that Jesus calls by name. Mary becomes the apostle to the apostles. Jesus says to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (vs. 17).

The resurrected Jesus is not preoccupied with his own glory. Risen from the grave itself, ready to ascend to the Father, Jesus still has time for Mary, time to engage her in conversation, time to call her by name, time to assuage her grief-stricken soul. The same is still true today. The risen Jesus is still “hanging around,” if you will, ready to call you by name.

This has been the power of Christianity for over two thousand years. Through the Holy Spirit, through the body of Christ, through the scriptures, through the preaching of the Word of God written, through the sacraments, through our witness, Jesus still calls children, women, and men by their given names.

There is always a temptation at Easter for preachers to engage in apologetics. Apologetics is the branch of Christian theology charged with rationally defending the faith. It helps us to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us. There is an important place for apologetics in the church, but friends, reason and logic cannot produce resurrection faith. The old hymn got it right when it said, “He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today! He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way. He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart. You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.” He lives within my heart. There is no substitute for personal experience.

I wonder what your lives are like. What they are really like. I don’t mean your public persona. I mean the true you, the person you are when you are alone with your own thoughts. What are your hopes and fears? Your secrets and compulsions? Your struggles? We are all like Mary Magdalen to some degree. The dark depth and expanse of the human struggle is almost unbearable at times, but brothers and sisters, friends, it is needy people like you and like me that the risen Jesus calls by name.

He calls us by name because he knows the full story of our lives. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and still, he loves us. Hallelujah! He calls us by name because he is interested and engaged in the particular details of our lives. Thanks be to God! He is interested in us, not like the pretending telemarketer. He loves us so much he is willing to hang around our darkened and diminished lives, waiting for the opportunity to call us by name. Praise the Lord!

Whom are you looking for this Easter Sunday? When you hear your name called, Jesus becomes the giver of immortal gladness, filling our beings with the light of day. When you hear your name called, then Jesus’ words drive the dark of doubt away. Jesus Christ is risen today, and he calls you by your name. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God! Alleluia! Amen.