With death certificate in hand, John went to the American Consulate to make arrangements to send the body back to the States for proper burial. The Consul, after hearing of the death of the mother-in-law, told John that sending a body back to the States for burial could cost as much as $5,000, and in most cases the persons responsible for the remains of their loved ones decide to bury the body in Israel, which would only cost $150.

John thought for some time and answered, I don’t care how much it will cost to send the body back; that’s what I want to do. The Consul was taken by John's reply and said, You must have loved your mother-in-law very much to spare no cost.

No, it’s not that, John said cagily. You see, I know of a case many years ago of a person buried here in Jerusalem. On the third day he arose from the dead. I just can’t take that chance.

That reminds me what happened in the old Soviet Union years ago after the death of Nikita Khrushchev, the former Premier who had fallen out of favor with the Communist Party. Party leaders had cast Mr. Khrushchev aside and were uncomfortable with the idea of burying his body on Soviet soil. They first called the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, and asked if the U.S. would take Khrushchev’s corpse. Nixon had his own problems at the time and declined. Then the Soviet leaders tried Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel. Mrs. Meir was agreeable but she added, I must warn you that this country has the world’s highest resurrection rate.

Joking at Eastertide fits the season. In fact, Easter sermons have begun with a joke for hundreds of years. And that makes sense, if you think of it: humor lives at the cross between what is and what we thought should have been. And nothing fits that like the cross itself and the resurrection that follows. We think fear and death have won, and then instead of tears of mourning we find tears of joy, instead of grief, laughter.

But we don’t laugh about resurrection because we think the whole idea is a bit ridiculous; we laugh because it should be ridiculous and turns out not to be. We laugh, because the whole idea of laughing is possible only if the resurrection actually took place to begin with. And if it did take place after all, then it took place, literally, to begin with. That is, we have a new point of departure for thinking about the world and our lives. We are permitted to think things are possible we never thought possible at all. Maybe resurrection is not the exception to the rule of the world we know, but the rule of the new world we are invited by Jesus to know.

A friend of mine visited Budapest recently and brought me back the oddest addition to my poetry shelf: a red-leather bound, beautiful, 1845-edition by Janos Arany. I don’t read Hungarian, but the only English in the book quotes Lord Byron on the flyleaf: … Oh, thou world! Thou art indeed a melancholy jest. See how Byron turns things round? The world as we have known it has become a sad joke. In light of the resurrection of Jesus, everything is different.

Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, says the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He thinks Jesus shouldn’t have done it. Of course, Jesus didn’t do it, exactly; God did it to him, the criminal’s theology is a little off but his point remains. He thrown everything off balance, the Misfit says.

And so he did. I mean, you know what Will Rogers said about how you can only trust two things in life, death and taxes? Well, now you can only trust taxes. Isn’t that a cheery thought? Well, yes, it should be, really. Because it means death has lost its reign over us. Something new has come into view, a new way of looking at life altogether, a way that starts with Jesus’ resurrection and leads to the hope of our own resurrections, a way of dealing with death this side of resurrection that allows us to let go of this life without fear. And all of that means we can live now with freedom and joy and love, since the worst thing that can happen to anyone need not happen to anyone; that is, to die and be done for forever.

Mary Magdalene is thrown off balance by the One raised from the dead. She goes to the garden that morning to mourn the loss of life and love; she comes away with a new experience of life and the certainty that love is stronger than death. She is in the dark when she goes, before daybreak in the heavens, with heartbreak in her breast. She does not expect that Jesus has made a break from the tomb. The confounding tragedy of his death is compounded now by the tragedy of his stolen body. That’s what she thinks. And what would you expect her to think? If she didn’t think that, I would find the story harder to believe than it is already.

She takes Jesus for the gardener. She can’t even recognize him at first. How strange is that? I don’t know. I haven’t ever seen a resurrected person, have you? Maybe she wasn’t looking closely enough. Maybe it was Near Eastern custom that she avert her eyes from looking upon a strange man in conversation. Maybe the tears got in the way of clear sight. But then, her ears weren’t affected by the tears, were they? Jesus spoke to her and she still didn’t recognize him by his voice. And no matter what you believe about Mary Magdalene’s relationship to Jesus—whether you buy Dan Brown’s outlandish conjectures in The Da Vinci Code, or just read between the lines of the Bible itself—you can imagine some special intimacy, if only a soulish one, between the two. She had to have known his voice. And yet, she cannot identify him. Until, that is, until he calls her by name: Mary. And that does it.

She rushes to hug him in a way that brings the imagination all the more into play. Jesus enigmatically tells her Do not hold on to me, which in the King James is translated Do not touch me. The reason he puts her off, though, is because he has not yet ascended to his Father. It’s not that he puts off her love; it’s that he has yet to go to a land that is fairer than day … where the Father waits over the way … in the sweet bye and bye.

Jesus points Mary toward a new land,  a new life, a new place. This everlasting life in—what shall we call it, Everland?—is where resurrection is the door to get in, it is the means of birth to that new world.

We don’t know much about Everland, but we know it isn’t Neverland, don’t you know?! Last week we looked at how the cross kills all dreams of Neverland. You don’t get to the new reality God brings to pass in Jesus’ resurrection by denying death with a flight of fancy into the imagination. You get to Everland by the death-defying imaginative leap of faith made possible by Jesus’ resurrection. We don’t know if you get to stay young forever in Everland ala Peter Pan, or if you have to grow up. Truth is, we don’t know much about Everland at all. We know that we call it Heaven, and we know that we probably think of it wrongly most of the time.

For instance, if Jesus’ resurrection tells us anything, we don’t fly about like disembodied spirits. We have bodies of a sort. Jesus had a body enough to be taken for an unresurrected man. He later even showed his scars to his disciples. So, there must be some continuity between this life and the next. We know he ate with his disciples, which makes me very happy, since eating is one of my happiest, sinful pleasures. My idea of heaven is perfect metabolism; but that’s probably more wishful thinking than resurrection hope. We really don’t know much about the world Jesus is raised into and tells us he will raise us into. But we know we can begin to experience its power over all of this life even now, before we die, through faith.

Notice this, Mary would not have experienced the new power of resurrection life that Jesus’ resurrection makes possible if she had not gone to the garden tomb that morning while the dew was still on the roses, as they say. Her love and devotion for Jesus opened up a new possibility for her in a way it did not for those who were committed to the reign of death over love and stayed behind closed doors, living in fear.

The only translated line I have from Arany’s Hungarian pen is this: In dreams and in love nothing is impossible. And that’s a nice sentiment, but it kind of sounds like a poet with his head in the clouds rather than a realist with his feet on the ground. Unless, of course, you really get this whole resurrection thing: in which case everything’s been thrown off balance, don’t you know?! Then the true realist would be the one with his feet on the ground in Everland!

But you can only get to that point by going yourself to meet Jesus in the garden, so to speak. Jesus says as much when he tells Mary to go tell his disciples: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Not our Father or our God, that would be too generic. My Father and your Father, my God and your God.

It would be like a brother talking to his sister and saying, I was talking to my daddy the other day…. She would object, What do you mean YOUR daddy; he’s MY daddy, too. And while that is true, though we grow up in the same house, it’s never the same home, is it? The same man may be father to both but each knows him as daddy differently. So also, we must each have our own experience with God as our Father, as the one who raises the dead and births us into Everland.

If you cannot yet see beyond this land of the ever dying to the land of the ever living, you have to move into the family house and make it home. You must become a sister or brother to Christ, so that you may know God as your Father, too. To do that, you must open yourself in faith and love to the Risen One who can be known only in a committed relationship. The way we come to know him in his resurrected self today is by being committed to the way of life he lived.

Kim and I were visiting colleges in California with our daughter Jillian a few weeks ago. We were walking though the corridors of Chapman University in Orange and stumbled upon a wonderful collection of papers and photographs and artifacts from the remarkable Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer was a renaissance man: a musician, New Testament scholar, doctor, and missionary to Africa. Chapman has set Schweitzer as an icon of the kind of well-rounded young people they hope to turn out.

One of Schweitzer best-known statements well describes how, in similar fashion to Mary in the garden, anyone can truly come to know the resurrected Christ. He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside. He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which he has us to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings, which they pass through in His fellowship, and—as an ineffable mystery—they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

If you want to learn who Jesus is, if you want to experience the risen Lord today, if you want to join the laughter because you get the great joke of Easter, you have to become an insider, because it’s an inside joke! Open your heart to him today as he calls your name. Trust him and obey him, and you will meet him in the land of the ever living—in Everland.