It’s been quite a week for the United Church of Christ! Not exactly the kind of press that one prays for… For in blogs and across airwaves, in this week called “holy,” we have been called everything from a cult to evil and demonic to racist and incendiary to prophetic and faithful. Our General Minister and President, the Rev. John H. Thomas, in an effort to stem the tide of vitriol, wrote a personal note emailed throughout the UCC and posted on our church’s national website. In it, Rev. Thomas spoke intimately of the swirl of concerns vying for his (and our) attention this week: concerns that are national and international as well as concerns that are deeply personal. For him, this includes his own son’s military deployment to Afghanistan and his 93-year-old mother’s severe back pain necessitating an upgrade to the health center of her retirement home. The guilt of having to attend to pressing administrative and public matters overwhelmed Rev. Thomas in this week we call “holy…” And he wrote these words to us his church family, “…challenges that cannot be deferred demand attention, crowding out time set aside to ponder the mysteries of the Cross and the Empty Tomb…this Holy Week [we carry our] own more private worries and thoughts [and] not unlike so many other members of our churches…we look to [our] pastors for a word of grace framed by Thursday’s shadows and Easter’s promise.”
Thankfully, there are many words of grace awaiting us at the open and empty tomb this glorious morning! Some of them are spoken by ancient sisters and brothers who, through the years, have become friends on our journeys of faith. There is Mary of Magdala who looks through the tears in her eyes to see right beside her, in the guise of a common gardener, the one who is risen. Her word of grace could well be, “look…” There is Simon Peter, who hastily races to the tomb, and without hesitation, enters it. With a quick glance, Peter’s eyes take in the neatly folded grave clothes. His word of grace could be “hurry…” There is the other disciple racing with Peter, known to us in this story only as “the disciple Jesus loved.” He (or perhaps she) wins that disciple race, arriving first at the tomb, but hesitates to enter it. Only after Peter has gone in, does the “loved disciple” also enter and sees the evidence and then believes. His or her word of grace could be “check it out first…”
These two runners offer still another word of grace to us, as they see and believe and then…they go back home! What? What kind of ending to the resurrection story is this? Aren’t they supposed to go and tell the world…proclaim the good news of Jesus rising from the dead and all that? Not yet. Resurrection is a slow process. From our vantage, nearly 2,000 years later, we know that the disciples’ homecoming is not the end…it is just another chapter in the continuing story of the empty tomb. And from it, from these disciples who return home after seeing evidence of an empty tomb, comes another word of Divine grace: “It’s ok…you don’t have the whole picture yet…and I love you anyway…”
Later in the story, thanks to the newly-discovered Gospel of Mary, we hear from all the disciples who, just three days earlier had fearfully fled from the pain Jesus was suffering. Together, they now reappear to share the excitement, the wonder, the confusion, and the concern of this particular resurrection. Worrying for their own safety—after all, given that the authorities had killed Jesus, these disciples realized they were no longer protected—their word of grace is an all-too-familiar one to us. “I am scared…and I don’t know what to believe…God, help my unbelief…” This is the word of grace, often uttered in the shadows of night or through the darkness of despair; this word of grace, spoken honestly, brazenly, flings open the door for God’s love to sweep into our deepest souls.
Each of these words of grace is waiting for us, lurking in the misty early-morning shadows of an empty tomb. “Look…hurry…check it out first…you don’t have the whole picture yet, and I still love you…I am scared and unsure…help me God…” As we listen, there is a noticeably absent word of grace we have come to expect on Easter and that is “Alleluia!” There seems to be little joy expressed at or from the tomb. Twenty centuries of hindsight have inserted joy and alleluias into our Easter celebrations; we can be sure that they were not there at the beginning. Instead of joy, there was fear. Instead of alleluia, we hear concern and doubt.
This is because the people at that first resurrection were not seeing their first resurrection. Remember that these disciples had been with Jesus a few weeks before, at another tomb, the tomb of their friend Lazarus. They had seen Jesus weep, and heard him shout through the tomb’s heavy stone door, “Lazarus, come out!” And they knew firsthand how resurrection paved the way back to death, violent death, first Jesus’ death, and now, with his resurrection, their own. These early disciples were rightly concerned about their future. They were not filled with the kinds of questions that preoccupy us 2,000 years later, questions that too often seek scientific answers for a theological reality.
We, who are not under the threat of Roman guards and bloody crosses, get caught up in the question of whether or not there was a body that walked out of that tomb…whether or not the grave clothes had blood stains on them…whether or not carbon dating can answer for us a question that ultimately, is never for science to answer.
The question of Jesus’ resurrection is a question of faith…ultimately, and at its foundation, it is a question of theology. Resurrection in general, and this resurrection of Jesus in particular, pushes us to decide what kind of God we choose to experience on this resurrection day and beyond. A God who can transform death into life? A God who believes in you even when you have fled the scene? A God who never gives up, who never gives in, who is persuasive enough and loving enough to lead you back home again and to greet you there with open arms and a bigger-than-life lap? A God who, when we are cocky, still loves us and gently nudges our ego to humility and our power toward compassionate service? This is the kind of God that the tomb voices challenge us to experience today.
And along with the first disciples to arrive at that garden tomb, we also hear words of grace, of course, from Jesus himself. Spoken first to Mary, then through her to the others, and through them to millions over the centuries, and finally to us here today, this word of grace is simply, “Here I am…and I’ve been here all along…”
These words of grace, these voices from the tomb, are all the more powerful, thanks to their setting within the larger context of the “great three days…” These three days have, over the years of my life, become days to which I eagerly look forward and for which I respectfully plan each year. I think of them as Supper Thursday, Shadow Friday, Tomb Saturday, and New Life Sunday. Each has its own personality and its own gifts to share.
With the supper on Thursday night—day one begins. From the fellowship of eating together, this day drones on and on through a painful desertion of friends to a travesty trial to an excruciating death and finally ends with despair. Day two—as reckoned by the Hebrew calendar of beginning a new day at sundown—begins Friday night with all the disciples either holed up or scattered fearfully. This day proceeds through most of Tomb Saturday; only if you have never faced the death of a loved one, would you be unable to understand the depression, the loneliness, and the utter sense of isolation that these first disciples no doubt experienced on Saturday. Death is an ending, and when it hits, no amount of poetry or song or goodwill can take away the sting of the loss. It must be felt in order to move on—metaphorically or literally—on to day three.
Day three begins for these same disciples in the middle of their personal grief over Jesus and while swirling in their public fear of the Romans. The dangers of this new life without Jesus lurk, as do the disciples themselves, in the shadows. Fretting, worry, dismay, anger all merge in day three. But, then, in the middle of the day, just as it has done every other day of creation, the sun rises, and the shadows seem less despairing than they did the night before.
This journey from Thursday to Sunday, friends, is a theological journey…a journey we take with God…a journey that challenges us to believe something that is totally counterintuitive. As we have been singing throughout the past six weeks of Lent, this journey is a journey from death to life, from war to peace, from falsehood to truth, from hate to love; it is a journey from fear to trust and from despair to hope. This journey, I can assure you, is a journey that will change your life and alter your perspective.
I learned this profound truth about the “great three days” while writing my doctoral dissertation several years ago. The dissertation explores how churches and pastors can help families of adolescents who have attempted suicide. At the suggestion of my advisor, I searched for a biblical metaphor—a passage or a story—that would accurately describe the journey from death to life that is traveled by suicidal adolescents and their families. It didn’t take long for me to settle on the gospel stories marking the journey of Jesus and the disciples from the supper on Thursday night through the empty tomb of Sunday morning. Dubbed “the great three days” I poured over scriptures and commentaries to learn all I might learn about these three days from Thursday to Friday, Friday to Saturday, and Saturday to Sunday.
What I learned came neither from the commentaries nor from my study. It came from my wise thesis advisor, Dr. Sandra Brown. She noted, after reading the first few drafts of the dissertation, that my tendency was to skip over the middle day of these three days, moving quickly and directly from the meal and the cross to the conversations in and around the garden’s empty tomb. I can recall her asking me, “Sharon, where is the despair? You’ve ignored the despair…” She continued, through months of loving persistence, to convince me that, without Tomb Saturday, the rest of the story’s power is greatly diminished. I came to see that the despair and the shadows we so politely prefer to avoid, offer us a necessary entrée to a more profound experience of new life. To state it bluntly: if you have faced death, then life has more of a shimmer to it.
Earlier this week, in what is being described as a landmark speech addressing the racial divide in America, Illinois Senator Barack Obama spoke about his relationship with his UCC pastor, The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. I include this story, not to condone Rev. Wright’s racial sentiments, nor to promote the candidacy of Senator Obama, but rather to offer yet another example of a word of grace currently emanating from that same empty tomb. That word is “transformation.” Obama stated that, in his opinion, Rev. Wright’s “profound mistake…is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country…is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”
As I listened, during this week we call “holy,” it occurred to me that we face the same danger of becoming stuck somewhere in these “great three days.” If we remain at the foot of Friday’s cross, weeping that we are not worthy or railing that injustice has won yet again, then we will have missed the point of the great three days. Similarly, if we choose to remain tightly wrapped in the despair or fear of Tomb Saturday, feeling ourselves alone and isolated from our fellow citizens of God’s kingdom, then we will miss hearing the words of grace surrounding the tomb’s entrance. And, likewise, if we blithely jump over to Sunday morning, with joy and happiness not born of tears and mourning, then we will also miss the point. The point these tomb voices seem to want us to believe, and to experience for ourselves, is that God meets us both in death, despair, fear, and hate, even as God also meets us in life, in hope, in trust, and in love. God meets us and lovingly transforms the first set into the second. We may not even see this transformation happening. Just so, it is true that, when the Easter movie plays, we do not get to see the spine-tingling moment when a grave opens and God only knows what happens! Resurrection will always escape detectors. We see only the aftermath, the effects. We hear only the voices of those who surround the resurrection site.
You and I both know the impact of resurrection continues still. That is the miracle and that is the mystery. Having once begun, the God who raises up just will not stop. Look! Check it out! You don’t have the whole picture yet! You are loved! Help! Here I am, always…! Now, what next, you may ask. Authors Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan give a hint in their book, The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem. They write, “Easter is about God even as it is about Jesus. Easter discloses the character of God. Easter means God’s ‘Great Cleanup’ of the world has begun – but it will not happen without us.” Pastor and professor, Barbara Brown Taylor concurs. In a sermon on the resurrection written years ago, she says that Jesus doesn’t remain in the garden because “…He was on his way to God, and he was taking the whole world with him…” Meantime, he pauses just long enough to illuminate for Mary, within the early-morning shadows, the truth that new life is within, planted by God; new life that cannot be killed, and if we can remember that, then we can do anything: move mountains, banish fear, love our enemies, or change the world. The only thing we cannot do, while standing at the empty tomb, is hold on to him… All in all we would probably rather keep the risen Christ with us where we are than let him take us where he is going…into the white hot loving living transforming presence of God, who with a word, whispers resurrection grace in each of our ears. |
