Easter Day
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”
On Good Friday I quoted from a poem by the late American poet John Updike called Seven Stanzas at Easter. It’s a poem that warns us against that great temptation that we sometimes face when it comes to Easter or really any miracle of Jesus: to reduce it. To make all of this less than it is.
The temptation to reduce the horrors and the gruesomeness of the crucifixion in order to sanitize it and make it more palatable, the temptation to reduce the miracles of Jesus to coincidence or trickery or misunderstanding; the reduction of Jesus to a great teacher and guide. Updike began his poem by saying
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Updike is saying here that the only thing that keeps your time here today, your time praying or reading the bible, my time in seminary, my time as a priest, the hours I’ve spent at the altar, a complete and utter waste of time, is the fact that on a certain Sunday some 2000 years ago a woman went to visit a tomb into which, three days prior, a flayed, broken, pierced, cut open, bled-out, battered corpse of man had been sealed, and found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.
“It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent,” Updike says, “not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles” that he rose from the dead – that is, he didn’t rise as a nice thought or a pretty flower, “it was as His flesh: ours” that he rose, “the same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that piereced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.”
And the rock that Mary Magdalene finds rolled away? “Not paper-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.” Updike’s imagery is lovely here – think of the tomb from the perspective of the disciples – Mary arrives while it is still dark – the darkness of not yet fully understanding – but she sees the stone is gone and runs to tell the others who run with her and one goes in and sees the linen wrappings that had embraced Jesus’ body. You can’t see into a cave from the outside, you have to go in and you have to adjust, but once you’re in you can see out, the light would be flooding in from without illuminating everything that it touches in the cave. That is, for us to truly know that he is risen, to truly know what it means for us that he is risen we must enter the tomb with him – our everlasting life with him is bound up with the degree to which we are willing to bear our own crosses to our own Calvary to endure suffering, to die with him, so we can be raised with him.
And Updike’s line about the stone is that when we are with Christ in our lives it’s like we’re in the tomb, we can rejoice anew every day that he has died and risen for us, and we can even look outward and be blinded by the light that illumines our minds and hearts, but that stone represents our unbelief, our temptation to say, “ahh, but maybe he didn’t really rise from the dead…” or “ah yeah, but I saw this meme on TikTok about how resurrection isn’t possible…” These doubts like the stone slowly grind away at us, it rolls back over the entrance, and eclipses – cover over, reduce – the broad, beautiful light of the day that is the light of Christ.
“Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded creduility [gullibleness] of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.” The door of the cave. Let us walk through. Let us with the disciples see the empty slab, the folded linen, the shroud from his head, and knowthat this is no parable or metaphor, but that Jesus lives, and he lives for us.
But then again there’s something so tragic and relatable in the disciples even in this beautiful Gospel that we hear, and at so many moments that we will hear about over the next number of weeks. Relatable because even when the disciples are given what was promised, even when they happen upon the best thing that could have happened, the thing that Jesus promised, they have trouble recognizing it. How often do we fail to recognize good news when it comes our way or when we practically trip over it? Maybe the good news doesn’t come to us in the way we imagined, or it doesn’t look like we thought it would. Not one of them that comes to the tomb today is able to make the connection between what Jesus promised and what they see inside the cave. In fact in every account of this the disciples are gripped either by fear or by disbelief, even with the good news smacking them in face they perhaps gave into exactly the kind of temptation that John Updike knows we humans are given to fall into, even good news can seem like false hope - how often have we thought, “I don’t believe it - these kinds of things never happen to someone like me.”
But we will see their minds gradually become enlightened over the coming weeks as they come to recognize Jesus’ resurrection, and to recognize Jesus himself, often through the resurrected Jesus doing the things he did for them in the past. Take Peter, for example, whom we heard on Good Friday denying that he even knew Jesus while he sat beside a charcoal fire, for fear that he would be arrested as well. Peter doesn’t recognize the resurrected Jesus again until this stranger sits down with him around a charcoal fire on a beach and eats with him – and suddenly, in the recollection of something familiar, Peter knows him. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a Gardener until he calls her by name as he had so many times.
This is to say that we come to know Jesus more and more by recollecting and remembering what He has already done for us – not in general terms like “he died for humanity” – but recollecting what he has done for Colin, for [Ruth, Barry, Morris]. When you recollect a friend, you don’t remember friendship in some abstract way, you remember the times you laughed together, helped one another, cried together. We can read all we want about what friendship is from the perspective of our brain chemistry, but if you want to know what friendship is – go get a friend. Theology can teach us all kinds of wonderful things about God, it can give us a framework in which we can think about God, but if you want to truly know God you must have a relationship with God.
Because – remember – it is for friendship with you that he came into this world, and because of his friendship with that he gave up his life in this world; in the words of CS Lewis in Mere Christianity, “When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.” That is, even if you were Peter and you were alone on earth with Him, and managed still to deny knowing him, he would still wash your feet, tell you he forgives you, die for you, and then come back to look for you.
What we proclaim today on this most sacred day is the central proclamation of the Christian faith, without which this is all just smoke and mirrors and a waste of time; what we proclaim is no metaphor, no parable, no myth-of-an-earlier-ignorant age, no fanciful story about new spiritual life taught by a 1st century Palestinian-Guru, but it is this: Jesus Christ has risen from the dead; Jesus lives…not in memory, not in story, not in teaching…but he rose in flesh and bone and body and even now lives. And what’s more, he died and lives for you. Not us, not we, in our generality, but you in your particularity, who’s been in his mind since God moved over the face of the deep, you whom he has always sought.
Our hope, our comfort, and our salvation stands only on this truth and this reality: the empty tomb and risen body, both of which are all that we need to know the kind of friend we have in him.
