"A Curious Detail" (Easter Sunrise)

"A Curious Detail"
Easter Sunrise
John 20:1-18

Scripture Reading:  John 20:1-18
Message:  "One Curious Detail of the Easter Story"

What was going on inside the tomb, right before the stone was rolled back out of the way?  What happened right before Jesus stumbled out of the tomb?  Although, something tells me Jesus didn't stumble out of the tomb, shielding his eyes from the morning light after being closed off in the darkness.  But we'll get to that in a minute.  Right now I'm wondering what was going on just prior to moving the stone.

Jesus probably would have been naked when crucified.  It was part of the humiliation the Romans heaped upon those who received this kind of capital punishment.  Were the angels shopping for cloaks for Jesus to wear for his grand reentrance back into the world?  "Should we get the white one or the one with pinstripes?  Cotton, or cotton blend?"  Jesus pacing back and forth inside the tomb, wondering if he could trust the angel's shopping skills.  "I hope they didn't go to the Gap and get something too trendy," Jesus may have been thinking.

But I don't think that's what was going on either.  Somehow they solved the no clothes issue.  Something else was going on, and John gives us a glimpse of it in his version of that Resurrection morning.

Right in the middle of John's story of Easter morning John gives a small detail that is extremely intriguing.  Let's go back and put his story time line together.

First, we see Mary coming to the tomb—watching the dust rise up from the way she is dragging her feet.  She is more than a little despondent, her heart broken from the dying of Jesus.  We hear the twilight sounds of the morning starting to rise with the sun.  We sense the stillness—even the emptiness—of the air. We see her tears and feel the crushing weight of her even greater grief as she discovers in the dimness of the morning the stone rolled away. We hear her shrill cries as she sobs out her testimony to Simon Peter and John, after running back to them, telling them that robbers must have come and stolen Jesus' body.

Then comes the running of two men. We hear the panting. We feel the hot breath. We see the younger of the two outrun the older. Then, by the first rays of light, first, by John, and then by Peter, that the tomb is indeed empty. That's when we get the detail.  It's through their eyes that we get to see inside the tomb.  We get to hear about this one, obscure detail:
"…and the face-cloth, which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself" (John 20:7).

It's a curious little detail to include, don't you think? John was there—the first inside the tomb.  He saw the whole burial cave scene. The memory of that place was so ingrained into him that he wanted to record every last detail.  The face cloth was one of those details.  The way the other burial cloths are described, in the Greek, it's like Jesus' body just went up through them, as if he were a ghost.  The cloths lay just as they would have if they fell through his body.

But not the face-cloth.  It was rolled up and set in an entirely different place in the tomb.  Why?  I don't know.  Neither does anyone else.  So we get to imagine.  Imagine Jesus, having just arisen.  He stands up.  The face-cloth is still stuck to his face.  He gently takes if off.  Holding it loosely between his fingers, he takes his time to view the place where he had lain dead.  Because he had never seen it before.  He was, of course, dead when they brought him there.  The binding strips laying there in a helter skelter fashion.

While he stares, he consciously takes the face cloth, folds it in half, and rolls it up.  What is he thinking?  What is going through his mind?  Was he thinking, There is where I lay.  There is where I was dead.  He gingerly touches the nail scars in his wrists.  No pain.  Totally healed.  This is where I was wounded.  But I feel nothing.  I was dead.  But now I am alive—in a different and new way.

In an unhurried way, Jesus takes it all in.  As he stands there, the stone begins to move, effortlessly.  It rolls up its little ramp and settles on it's positioning plateau.

Jesus looks out into the world from inside his tomb.  He begins to walk out, but stops.  He remembers he has the rolled up face-cloth in his hand.  He smiles.  He looks back at the heap of grave cloths.  He places the rolled up face-cloth on a tiny shelf of rock, where a candle would have been placed, above the place where Jesus would have lain.

Again, he stands for a moment looking at that scene, that in a moment, he will turn his back on and never look at again.  Why did he place the face-cloth there?  Maybe it was a visual parable.  Like when the Father God, at creation, changed all the chaos into order, Jesus put a little symbol of order over the chaos of his death bed.  The world was at one time a spiral of disorder where up was down and left was right and life was death. Everything was flipped on its head, but when He stepped out of the tomb, with the placement of the rolled up face-cloth, He announced to our broken creation that He was setting everything back the way it was always supposed to be.  Order above the chaos.

Out of disorder and into order. Out of death and into life. Out of brokenness and into wholeness. And maybe that reordering started with that simple act of taking what might have otherwise been a wrinkled, tattered mess, folding and rolling it up neatly, placing it in an intentional and specific spot.

Then, with a wry smile, He walked out into the light …