[SB] Easter Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Turn, Turn, Turn
(with thanks to Richard Ascough, who pointed out the problem)

"But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to 
look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body 
of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They 
said to her, 'Woman, why are you weeping?' She said to them, 'They have 
taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.' When she 
had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did 
not know that it was Jesus.  Jesus said to her, ' Woman, why are you 
weeping? Whom are you looking for?' Supposing him to be the gardener, she 
said to him, 'Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have 
laid him, and I will take him away.' Jesus said to her, 'Mary!' She turned 
and said to him in Hebrew 'Rabbouni!' (which means Teacher)." -- John 20:11-16

Try this. Stand up from your desk and look under it, as though you are Mary 
looking down into the tomb, trying to see what's going on. Now, turn and 
face away from the desk; pretend there's someone in your doorway, someone 
you don't recognize. You talk to this person for a minute, and then he says 
your name. And you turn --

-- you turn. Which way? You're already facing the man, remember. What 
direction do you turn in? Toward your desk, turning your back on him? A 
quarter-way around, so you're looking at the wall or out the window instead 
of at him? This doesn't make any sense.  Mary has already turned to look at 
the man who is Jesus. Why should she turn again?

We always get into trouble when we try to take the Bible too literally; it 
breaks down very quickly if we see it as mere empirical observation.  It 
only yields its meaning up when we back away from simple black-and-white 
and begin to see a pattern that has very little to do with factual accuracy 
and everything to do with truth.  The word "turn" is a good example.

Turns don't necessarily have to be physical rotations. "To turn, turn, 
turn, will be our delight" might be a Shaker's spinning dance, or it might 
be a process of exploring, turning back, exploring again, turning back, or 
it might be a heart turning from one god to Another. The seasons turn, but 
not literally.  "To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, 
turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven," Peter Seeger sings. 
My extremely large Webster's gives the word "turn" more than two full, 
large, three-column pages in tiny, tiny type. It's a small word exploding 
with meaning.

It's a small moment exploding with meaning too. Consider: the angels call 
Mary "woman", as so often women in the New Testament are called by their 
gender, not their true names. The "gardener" calls her "woman" too. It's 
when Jesus gives her her true name -- when he calls out not to all of 
womankind, but to this one particular absolutely-unlike-any-other 
God-created individual woman, that something in her turns and sees who he 
really is.

Giving her her name makes a tiny seismic shift, as though something in the 
universe had popped into a new place. Jesus isn't just dead-and-risen for 
the whole of humankind, to bring us into alignment with God's ultimate 
purposes; it's not only a matter of grandeur and millennia and salvation 
and all those things -- although they too are true. It's also a matter of 
intimacy. There is no either-or here, only a both-and.

These two are friends, after all; this is a woman who dearly loved this man 
as her friend and teacher. This is someone utterly desolated by her loss, 
with no understanding as she weeps, helpless and bewildered, that maybe it 
wasn't a loss at all but a transformation. And suddenly, when she hears her 
name, her whole world swings around in its tracks and heads in an 
incredible new direction.  She has been turned by his calling out to her.

The moment happens so quietly, without any fuss or to-do, in a place of 
grey, dewy quietness, with no apparent glory: plain rock and perhaps a few 
plants and the first uncertain light of morning. There's been all sorts of 
glory in churches last night and this morning, paschal fires blazing up, 
splendid chants and anthems and processions and wonderful rich vestments, 
organs and trumpets bellowing seemly joy -- and more power be to these 
things; they express something real and rich.

But for me, the turning of my heart seems to happen mostly in quiet dusty 
places where nothing much is going on. It's in silent dawn-light places 
where I weep in desolation that someone I'd just about given up on calls me 
out by name, and something in me turns and wants to answer.

******************

I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.