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.”
~~
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!
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