John 20:15
“Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him away.”
The odds are, if you were to have an audience with God, He’d ask you a question to which the answer would be all too obvious to everyone but you.
Mary is so fixated on seeking the body of dead Jesus that she doesn’t recognize the risen Christ right before her eyes. As always, we misidentify what our real problem is in life. This wouldn’t be so bad an issue if not for the fact that it leads, invariably, to ill-considered schemes to fix things. In all, mankind’s true problem, the central one, isn’t economic or social, nor is it loneliness or anything else. Our problem is sin and the answer to sin is Jesus Christ. Show me what a person thinks is the big problem in their life and I’ll show you their religion and politics.
This is the pattern of our lives. In Romans we learn that the default human condition is that of truth suppressor. Ephesians 4 tells us that sinners (that’s us!) are stuck and mired in ignorance because of the hardness of our hearts. We’d like to think that our problems are “out there”, our circumstances, our finances and things like that. But truth suppressors are incessantly busy with the denial of the obvious and that’s why we see Jesus ask so many questions. He asks questions not because He doesn’t know but because we’re not being honest with ourselves. He makes the inquiries that need to be made and the ones we avoid at all costs.
For example, America today is wracked with social/political tumult. The marxist left-wing rails against what it sees as gross and systemic inequality shot throughout our society. To prove this they often cite income figures to prove that this group or that is getting hosed by an unjust society. But we note that they never point to a specific law that needs changing. They are merely, rather, a complaint factory with one objection after another rolling down the belt. The problem with all of this is that when you see reality as God’s creation and, therefore, reflecting His moral order, you have uncomfortable questions. The leftist mob doesn’t want to do this.
God’s order for society is clear. Do you want peace and prosperity? Do you desire the good life? Well, these things proceed from a God-honoring life. A life of sin will produce strife and poverty, chaos and despair. God commands us to live humble lives. He orders us to marry and love our spouses, raise our children in the Lord, and serve our neighbor through our vocation in honor of the Lord. The church exists to train up disciples in the Word so that we may fulfill the Great Commission and honor Him in all that we do. The state, that is, the government, is established to punish crime if and when it occurs. This is God’s order for the world in the New Testament era and it provides the principles in which we can see our society. Thus, if we have troubles, if some issue vexes us, oppresses us, and causes strife, we look to these principles as our guide. If there’s something wrong, it’s because we’ve violated one of these biblical principles, which means this is the first place we should look if there’s a problem.
It’s a lie to obsess about social problems without recognizing that God’s order for society is based around the family. Broken homes, predominantly, are the result of sexual sin and this sets off a catastrophic string of consequences in the lives of everyone involved. Single-parenthood places enormous financial, educational and personal burdens on children. All income data in America shows that the single greatest indicator of financial stability is the biblical model of the family.
The accusation that poverty and social problems stem from racism doesn’t hold up against the facts. For example, Japanese-Americans were prohibited by law from owning property for the fist half of the 20th century. More still, over one hundred thousand citizens were placed in internment camps during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the per-capita income of Japanese-Americans is higher now than for white Americans. Interestingly, the vast majority of their homes follow the biblical pattern of the family – father, mother and children – showing that God’s law is written on the hearts of all. So, you see, a verifiable and demonstrably unjust law was the internment of Japanese-Americans or the prohibition of their owning property. Absent those laws, and free of political restraint, the strong emphasis on family, education and hard work has led to wealth.
One can imagine asking the average American protestor today, “Why are you screaming about injustice? Are you married? Have you provided for your family?”
Ah! It’s so easy and tempting to decry the specks in the eyes of a brother, a neighbor, or a historical figure. There’s no great moral courage required to see the sin of another. What requires a miracle is seeing ourselves as we really are – as sinners before a holy God justly deserving His wrath! And that miracle is regeneration, the breaking in of the Holy Spirit. And that process always, without fail, refocuses one’s moral guns, turns them around and instead of shooting at others, aims at itself. The conviction of personal sin is exactly that which the unsaved resists but that the child of mercy praises God for because to know God is to know His indomitable love towards the heart that’s broken over its own sin.
Mary sought the body of Jesus and reckoned, unreasonably, that she could carry the body from wherever it was. Her thoughts were a bundle of contradictions. Why would the gardener have rolled the stone from the tomb and taken the body someplace? How would he have dispatched the Roman guards? And how could she be strong enough to carry His body anyway? This was all a poor plan resulting from focusing on the wrong thing. That’s what we do in our personal lives and, indeed, our politics. We dash ourselves to pieces and waste the beautiful energies and talents of our lives trying to fix the problems caused by sin without repenting of sin. If we could perfect ourselves and our cities on our terms surely we would have done it by now.
As surely as you live and read this, you live in a sin-stricken world. The consequences of sin will touch you and, indeed, already impact your life in various ways. It’s a fool’s errand to waste one’s life opposing God, which is what we do, no matter what else we say about Him, if we dismiss the reality of sin. If you find yourself in the muck and mire of the consequences of your sin or even that of your family, or your nation, lift up your eyes to your Savior. Don’t focus on the dread problems and how unsolvable they seem. If you put all your efforts into them you may succeed in stamping out the flames of one of sin’s fires only to watch a spark start a blaze elsewhere and thus will be your life, grasping endlessly, fighting a foe you can’t defeat. It’s to you that Christ comes and asks a simple question. He knows what you need and is what you need. It’s the Devil’s greatest achievement to hide this from your sight.
What question is Jesus asking you today? Are you living half-heartedly? Are you toying listlessly with some old sin? Do you know that sin always has consequences? Have you confused God’s grace with tolerance of sin? Do you think that the sacrifice that cost God so much means that He encourages you to live a sloppy life of disrepair? Heaven forbid! Our God is a righteous God and in love He calls us to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are to respond in love and go to Him, arms open wide, running across the great green fields of grace, racing to Him, the wind in our hair, joyously forsaking all the petty moral crimes that cling so close in this world. And we are to forsake the despairing thought that there’s “nothing we can do” about life because God’s Kingdom will come and we are to be a part of it. Our life now is to lead us to the fitness to live in that world. To lose sight of that is a great tragedy for the Christian. Pursue Him and these “other things”, which the world schemes and toils for, will be added to you. You will be secure!
In this way, Jesus asks all of us, “Woman, man…why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”
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