God shakes our world – Matt 28:1-10

To complete my series on the Seven Sorrows of Mary, I closed with the resurrection.

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.  And, behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord had come down from heaven.  The angel came and rolled away the stone, and then he sat upon it.  His countenance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow.  The guards quaked with fear and became like corpses.

The angel spoke to the women:  “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are seeking Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here, for he was raised just as he said.  Come, see the place where he laid.  And now, go, tell his disciples that he has been raised from the dead, and he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him.  See, I have told you.”

Immediately, they went away from the tomb with fear and great joy.  They ran to tell his disciples.  Jesus appeared right to them, met them and said:  “Rejoice!”  They went up to him and grasped him by the feet and bowed down in homage to him.  Then, Jesus said to them: “Do not be afraid.  “Go, tell my brothers to go away to Galilee, and there they will see me.”

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Back when I still lived in California, there was a Bible study I’d go to in the rectory of nearby church.  One day, we were discussing some passage and as I was explaining how some aspect of it struck me, suddenly everything jolted.  My first, unthinking instinctive reaction was: “someone’s done an emergency stop.”  Then, I remembered we weren’t in a car… we were in the rectory, and rectories don’t do emergency stops.  It was an earthquake.  Not one that caused any real damage, but enough to jolt us, to spill people’s drinks, to make me joke that God maybe didn’t like that interpretation I’d just offered.  Enough to remind me that the earth we instinctively think of as solid and ultimately dependable is neither of those things.

Neither is death solid.  The solid impenetrable looking stone that blocked the entrance to the tomb was a victory monument for death.  Death was making a claim on the world, a claim of terrible reliability, of normativity, a claim that you can organize your life around the assumption that death will claim you and have the final say, just as surely as the earth will stay still when you stand on it.  The earth jolts.  The victory monument topples.  The movement is not to let Jesus out, but to show that he’s already gone.  He has triumphed over death.

The earth quakes, the guards tremble with fear, the faithful women share the fear but meld that with joy.  They don’t fall, they run, because they have a gospel to proclaim.

As we’ve worked through the Sorrows of Mary this semester, we were promised fall and rise, that the dying and the rising were equally assured.  Now, I couldn’t end this preaching cycle with Jesus still in the tomb.  We need to see what rises from the rubble when the earth shakes.  We live in hope of the day when the only falling will be being moved by love to prostrate ourselves at Our Lord’s feet.  As so often in the Gospel, Jesus will say to us “Arise!” and rising turns to running, for we have a gospel to proclaim!