I Have Seen the Lord

“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

–John 20:18

We’re currently in the midst of the 50 days of the Easter season, the time between Easter Sunday and Pentecost when we continue the celebration of the resurrection. As we journey through these days, I’ve been thinking about those first disciples of Jesus and what they must have been thinking and feeling. I can only imagine that those first days and weeks were  disorienting in the most confusing yet joyful way. Everything you thought you knew was turned upside down, and the whole world began to take on a different look and feel. I wonder if you’ve ever had an experience so unexpected and transformational that it changed the very way you saw reality?

I’m reminded of one of my favorite spiritual writers, and the encounter she had with Jesus that changed everything. Sara Miles is a woman from San Francisco who had worked for many years as a war correspondent in places like Central and South America, covering low-intensity conflicts and full blown wars. When she returned to her native San Francisco, she settled down, became a mother, and entered a more stable period in her life with her partner, raising a family. Early one Sunday, feeling a little restless, Sara went out for a walk, and stumbled upon St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church. She suddenly found herself incredibly curious, and was unable to resist the powerful impulse to go in and observe the service. It was a new and unfamiliar environment for her—she had been raised as an atheist and had never been part of any religious community before. She didn’t believe in God. She had never prayed. Still, she felt compelled to enter.

She sat and stood and sat again, following the service and the movements of the other people, until she suddenly found herself standing around the altar with the congregation. Someone gave her a piece of bread, and another offered a sip of wine. “I still can’t explain my first communion,” she writes in her book, Take This Bread, which chronicles her conversion and newfound Christian life. “I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind. All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations. Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. I had no idea what it meant; I didn’t know what to do with it. But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine. And the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.”

She returned the next week, and the week after, and soon was a regular. It wasn’t long after she became a member at St. Gregory’s that Sara began to make waves. She had a dream, a vision, that the people of this community could do something to help those in need. She dreamed of a food pantry, right there at the church. She dreamed of feeding people, just as she had been fed. And she started to lobby the leadership of the church to take action. But she met resistance to the idea. She hadn’t been around that long, after all, and didn’t really understand the culture or the particular mission of this congregation. But Sara was determined. She lobbied. She pleaded. She cajoled. And, eventually, the leadership of the church agreed. As she writes,

“I came to believe that God is revealed not only in bread and wine during church services, but whenever we share food with others — particularly strangers. I came to believe that the fruits of creation are for everyone, without exception — not something to be doled out to insiders or the "deserving."

So, over the objections of some of my fellow parishioners, I started a food pantry right in the church sanctuary, giving away literally tons of oranges and potatoes and Cheerios around the very same altar where I'd eaten the body of Christ. We gave food to anyone who showed up. I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, bishops — all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people.”

The risen Christ shows up in places and ways where we least expect him. But he doesn’t show up simply to show off, or even to change one individual life. When the risen Christ breaks into the world we thought we knew, it changes everything. I may not have had an encounter exactly like those first disciples, or even like Sara Miles—but I have seen how the hungry are fed, the despairing find hope, and the outcast are welcomed. So I can say with Mary Magdalene, with Sara Miles, and with all who have gone before me: I have seen the Lord.