Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

March 30, 2008

Do Not Hold Me

John 20:10-18

When you read the Easter stories, there are a few things that are pretty clear. One is that we tend to simply overlook how confused and unprepared the followers of Jesus were for the resurrection. When you read through and see how they respond, I think we tend to mentally gloss over and not really understand that they just were not ready for this.

The Gospel of Matthew talks about how Jesus went on to Galilee and saw the disciples there. Many did not believe.

In John 20, Mary and the others have gone to the tomb. Mary Magdalene is left there at the tomb by herself and she is distressed because the body of Jesus is not there. These are not tears of joy because the resurrection has taken place. When she has the opportunity to speak to the two angels, she asked, “Where have you taken my Lord?” It is as if her grief has been compounded. Those of us who live in Northwest Georgia remember a few years ago, the crematorium case in the northern part of the state and how distressed different family members were when they felt that their loved ones had not been handled with dignity. This is a little parallel. Mary Magdalene knows the Romans and religious leaders have already done Jesus in. He is already dead and she has already lost him, and now a grave robber or one of the other leaders has come in and made this even worse and taken his body away. You can just imagine the grief and the extra sorrow that she is feeling.

For us, we always think of the empty tomb as proof. It was empty. The stone was rolled away. He is not there. For Mary, at this point in the story, the stone is rolled away. He is not there. “Where did you put him?”

Then, whether it is a sound or a shadow that falls across from the rear, she thinks it is the gardener. She turns and asks him the question, “Where have you taken him? Let me know so I can go get the body and take care of it. Where have you put him?”

Finally, he calls her name, “Mary.” When she hears her name, I assume she recognizes the voice and she understands and responds, “Teacher.” She knows who it is. All of a sudden, she is overcome with joy, but I still don’t think she has that resurrection power. Something happens in the story. John is brief in his telling of it so we don’t know for sure. Maybe she moves to grab hold of him. Maybe she wants to hold on tight, and Jesus says, “Do not hold me.” Different translations say it different ways, but none of them sound very polite. “Don’t cling to me. Don’t grab hold. Do not hold me.”

Try to imagine the fear and love that might occur if you have ever lost a child. The child is missing in the department store, in the shopping mall, or in the woods. Because of the fear you have felt and the love for the child, when you find that child, your first instinct is just to grab hold and not let go. Surely, that is what Mary is thinking here. She was so overcome with grief because Jesus was gone and then she sees him. Love and grief are all bound together, and she wants to grab hold. Jesus is a little abrupt, “Do not hold me.”

These are all bad explanations, I think, of why Jesus was abrupt. Some say maybe he was too holy now to be touched. This doesn’t make much sense because in just a little bit he invited Thomas to put his hands in the nail marks and put his fist in his side to see where the spear was so he can really prove he is Jesus. Another commentator said that maybe he was too sore from the crucifixion. I think that person just really does not understand the resurrection very well. If we pay attention to how John tells the entire Gospel from beginning to end, there are certain things that show up here, there, at the beginning, and at the end.

In the beginning, one of the first things he says to anybody is, “Follow me.” If you read on into chapter 21, one of the first things he says to the disciples by the Sea of Galilee is, “Follow me.” Early on, when people are beginning to think, “Maybe this is someone I should pay attention to,” he says to them, “What are you looking for?” Now to Mary here he says, “Who are you looking for?” The echoes of all these things come together. In between all these things have been all these misunderstandings of who Jesus is. It seems that almost every popular story in the Gospel of John is about someone who does not understand in between “What are you looking for?” and “Who are you looking for?” We really don’t know.

Nicodemus comes and says, “Surely, you are a teacher from God. Otherwise, you could not do these things.” Jesus takes him out at the knees and doesn’t respond to him. We find out that Jesus is more than a teacher.

The woman at the well says, “Surely, you are a prophet. We know that when the prophet comes, he is going to tell us all things.” Jesus is more than a prophet.

He heals, and people want him to heal again, but he won’t be pigeon-holed into that category. He is more than a healer.

A miracle worker. They come back to him because he produced bread in the wilderness and he said, “You only come because you ate bread. I tell you I am the bread of life.” There is more here than what you are looking for. It’s not just about being a miracle worker. People are constantly misunderstanding Jesus throughout the Gospel. In between “What are you looking for?” and “Who are you looking for?” nobody has really gotten it.

Is Mary trying to praise the risen Lord or does she want him back the way it always was? I think that’s it. She wants it back the way it always was. “Oh, Jesus is still alive. Somehow Jesus escaped death. Let’s go get James and John, Peter and Andrew, and let’s go to Galilee. We will have our own little group and we won’t tell anybody so they won’t come bother us. We will just have our group.” She doesn’t really see a resurrected Jesus. Her expectations are all about the way she imagined it would be if he had avoided crucifixion. She doesn’t understand. Like so many of us, what she really wants to do now is set Jesus’ agenda. She wants to grab hold of Jesus and not let him go. Let it be the way it always was. “Come on, Jesus. Do what I am going to ask you to do.”

Isn’t that what we really want from Jesus? Don’t we really want to control him so that when we pray, it is really a way of getting from God what we want? Jesus is the inside track, and if you know Jesus, if you are a Jesus believer, then things are going to go your way. I think of the TV show where a doctor’s son was killed, and he was bemoaning his life. He said, “I was always a good boy. I always did the right thing. I always went to church. I didn’t deserve this.” He thought it was a way of guaranteeing that he would never have any problems in life. We want essentially to control Jesus.

This issue of control is a curse on our culture. We believe we can control everything and make it turn out the way we want it. We believe we can control our children and where they go to school, their majors and their grades, and what they are going to do for the rest of their lives. We believe we can control another individual and make them love us. We believe we can control any organization that we belong to and make them do what we want them to do. This is a curse because what we found out is that you can’t. In this curse, we would really like to control Jesus.

Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was no Christian but he said, “I would like to control all men, but above all, I would like to control God.” Isn’t that what we would like? We would like for our prayers to be the prayers that God answers. If we need sunny weather for a picnic and somebody else needs rain for their crops, we say, “God, you can have rain tomorrow. We really want sunny weather today.” We want to control. We want Jesus to do it the way we want it.

Here is Mary. She thinks Jesus is still alive in the way that she understood it before. She wants to take hold of him, but Jesus won’t be held. Jesus won’t be held by us either. He would say it to her, but he would say it to us. “Do not hold me. Obey me. Do not try to cling to me and make me what you want. Follow me. Do not latch on to me and think that I am your personal property. Do not think that I am your private errand boy with God to make sure that you always get what you want. Follow me. Obey.”

Leslie Weatherhead, a great British preacher in London during the World War II era, always said that if you were going to look for advice in a given field, you would always look for an expert. If you have a very difficult legal problem, you would like to get the advice of the best attorney you can find. If you want help with a medical issue, you try to find the most proficient specialist in the area of your concern that you can get. In religious matters, he said, “Why don’t we go to the person who knows best? Jesus Christ.” Why don’t we go to Jesus Christ, recently raised from the dead, recently having triumphed over sin and death, encountering Mary, and instead of trying to hold him and trying to control him say, “Oh, Jesus, what would you have us do now? Oh, Jesus, how would you have us live? Oh, Jesus, what should we do next? All we know to do is to bow, to worship, to obey, and to follow you. You are the path. Show us the way.”

Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

Do Not Hold Me

John 20:10-18

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