So where’s the gardener in the story? You remember, the gardener who comes upon Mary Magdalene after she’s discovered the empty tomb. Only it’s not a gardener, it’s Jesus, and she recognizes him when he calls her name. What happened to the gardener in our Easter story this morning? The gardener’s in the Gospel of John. It’s the one we probably read most often, but it’s only one of four. All the Gospels have an Easter story, though the details vary. We might think the Bible is careless with details, but more likely it’s that facts get twisted or lost over time. Oral history becomes embellished. Facts are facts. They’re important, but only relatively so.

If we want to quibble with facts, we have much to dissemble. Who was there that morning to discover the empty tomb? Was it just Mary, as John reports? Or did Mary bring along the other Mary, the mother of James, and Salome, as Mark tells us in the story we’ve just heard? Luke says that “all the women” who had followed Jesus from Galilee saw where he had been buried and returned on the first day of the week to anoint his body. As if there had been a veritable entourage of women around him to the end. Maybe so. All the Gospels do agree that for whatever reason it was women who came to the tomb and discovered the body gone. Perhaps it’s just because the women had come to anoint the body. Perhaps it’s because of other reasons. Those apparently are ours to discern.

And there’s the matter of who greeted the women at the tomb. Two angels or one? The Gospels disagree. Matthew reports an earthquake that seems related to the appearance of a single man in dazzling white who is able to roll away the stone unearthed by cosmic assistance. Regardless of number, it’s men in dazzling white – angels, we presume – who tell the women that Jesus is not there. He has been raised from the dead. The women are to go and tell the disciples what has happened.

How would we respond to such news and such a command? Emotions in the Gospels run the gamut from fear and astonishment, as Mark reports, to great joy in Matthew as Mary Magdalene runs to tell the others. Very quickly Jesus appears to them as well, confirming the report of his resurrection. The women in Luke run to tell the eleven remaining disciples, but the disciples don’t believe them. They won’t be convinced until later when he appears among them, as he does also in John, bringing a word of peace and breathing the Holy Spirit upon them behind closed doors where they have secluded themselves in fear. After all, the man they had been following had just been crucified as a political criminal. Despite their denials of being among his followers, there were those who surely knew they had been his friends. What reprisal might they face? What would become of them now?

So our Easter story – or stories – is rich in nuance and implication. Rather than confusing us with conflicting facts, it enlists similarities to direct us to the truth. Facts are facts. They are important, but only relatively so. What is important is what the facts point to. And what the facts point to is truth. The truth of the Easter story lies in the consistent fact that when whoever it is who goes to the tomb to attend to the dead body gets there, no body can be found. The body is gone. The body has been raised, the angels tell us. I think the truth is held no more succinctly than in the rhetorical question the angels ask only in the Gospel of Luke: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” At that moment we realize that the story has not ended. It is only beginning.

There is no end to this story. We often want books and movies to give us a happy ending, especially when life outside assaults us. We need to be distracted from reality and to be diverted from all pain. I don’t think we can say that when the women find the body of Jesus missing they feel they have reached a happy ending. I like Mark’s description of their emotions and actions the best. Commanded to go out to tell the disciples, especially Peter, that Jesus has been raised from the dead, they are “seized,” Mark tells us, with terror and amazement. They tell no one, at least for now. They are too amazed to take it in and too afraid to report what they may have seen or, more accurately, what they have not seen. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” They have not had a happy ending to this tumultuous story. But what they don’t yet know is that they have had a joyous new beginning.

It’s often that way with us, as well, I think when death comes upon us. Right after the death of someone we have loved dearly, shock protects us and busyness engages us. But it’s when we face the immutable reality of the body’s disappearance from our lives that fear and dread attack us. What now? For some people, visiting the place of burial can bring comfort. Quiet visitation to the place where the body has been laid provides a focal point for grief, even if we believe that the Spirit has been raised to God’s promised place of eternal rest. The sadness of separation can grip us as we realize that life as we have known it will never be the same again. Life for us will never be the same again, yet God provides a new way in and through time.

I remember such an experience in the death of my mother. In truth, I think she died before she died. The quality of her life had diminished beyond the life she had known and lived with vitality a couple of years or so before the day she breathed her last. I was almost relieved for her when death came, though for me the sadness in her loss remained palpable. The grieving I had begun some time before continued in the face of loss. Occasionally I would have moments of remembering, glimpses of her presence, but then one Thanksgiving, gathered among family in the kitchen, making favorite recipes written in her own handwriting, I recall saying out loud for others to affirm, “Marie is here today.” Marie was the name my mother had. A name I always loved. And in the cooking of the dishes she used to make for us – probably the quintessential way she had expressed her love for us – we knew she was among us still.

Not unlike those disciples of Jesus who, sharing a meal like the one he had set for them just days before his death, knew his presence later on. As Luke tells us: “When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” Vanished from their sight. Things have changed. The body is no longer theirs to hold or touch. He is with them but in a very different way. The loss brings sadness. How can it not? But the abiding presence causes us to wonder and to be amazed. And, in time, to be comforted in remembering what has been and glimpsing what is yet to be.

For there is no end to the story. No end to a story that begins in loving embrace. The fear and terror come from the absence of a body to touch, to anoint with precious oils as was the custom long ago. But the angels’ message is consistent in all four Gospel stories: Go! Go from this place of death to the place that still holds some of the life you’ve known and await something to come of life you’ve not known before. Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Paul tells us that Jesus was the first fruit of the resurrection that would come to all whom God holds in love. That’s why Christian funerals and memorial services are called services “of witness to the resurrection.” We give thanks to God for the life of the one we have loved, and in faith look to God for the promise of new life beyond the life we have known. There is no end to the story. We may not get a happy ending as we might write the script, but there is certainly a joyous new beginning as God continues to fill the pages of the human story, our own included, with its particular joyful memories and hopes.

You know, it’s only been since the triumph of reason in what we now call the Enlightenment that we have been consumed and perplexed by the “how” of the Resurrection. That is, how did God do that? We know how life works. Dead stays dead. How could God possibly raise someone from the dead? But the ancients didn’t look at reality quite that way. They gave God more power perhaps than we are likely to give today. For them the question was not a how question but a why question. Why would God raise Jesus from the dead? And that question would be answered by recognizing that God is just and loving and will not let evil triumph in the end. The end of the story is not death, but life, which means there is no end, for in God’s inestimable love and mercy God raises the souls of those who have died into eternity. In the Resurrection God defeats death, raising to new life the souls of all those whom God holds in love.

Our challenge then is the same the women at the empty tomb received from the angels of God. Go from this place of death into the mystery and wonder of life that yet awaits you. Why do you seek the living among the dead? The story goes on. Take heart. Be of good courage. Live in thanksgiving to God for all the blessings that have been, and enter into the joy of our living, loving Lord in whom we find an abiding presence beyond place and time, beyond fear and terror, beyond astonishment and amazement, within the peace only God can give.

This is the promise of our risen Lord, my friends. This is our Easter joy!