I want to bring spices to the tomb. I know about tombs. I have seen death.
I have watched people take their last breaths. I have suffered the death of relationships. I have spent months, I have spent years, feeling distressing sorrow about loss. Heartbreak is no joke. It comes at you at all hours, including the hours you used to relish. I love mornings, especially early mornings, when all is quiet except a spring bird outside, and the dog is snoozing nearby, and it’s just me and my coffee and all the blessings of my life. And that’s the kind of time when heartbreak just walks in the door and announces itself. So yes, I know about tombs. I know about death. I know about sin. (Sometimes the heartbreak is about something I did, or something I left undone.) The coronavirus has changed a lot of things, but as a death-dealer, COVID-19 is nothing new.
I know. And so I want to bring spices to the tomb.
I know about the problem of evil, too. When I was in the Jerusalem Holocaust Museum five years ago, I saw an old photograph of a line of people. They were standing in line to be executed, to be shot in the head, and at the front of the line was a large hole that received one body after another. Can you imagine being in that line? Who could imagine that?! And who could dream up such a horror and perpetrate it on other human beings?
That line of death was formed many long centuries after Miriam takes up her tambourine and sings her great song of victory at the Red Sea. “The LORD has triumphed gloriously!” she sings, leading others in the song, celebrating liberation and life, a happy ending. But maybe even then, while she celebrates on the seashore, maybe even then she knows what you and I know about death and sin and evil and suffering and tombs. She must know. She had been a slave, a female slave at that. “Slavery is terrible for men,” wrote the freed slave Harriet Jacobs, in the 1860s, “but it is far more terrible for women.” And freedom from slavery was sometimes far more dangerous than the brutality of the plantations.
But Miriam sings.
Do the women sing when they get up at my favorite time of day to go to the tomb? Sure. Maybe they sing hymns. Sunday, for them, is the first day of the week, just like our Monday. It is a dull workday, a dreary weekday. Sabbath is over. Their friend and teacher is dead. If they are still going to the tomb in our own time (and I do believe they are), then maybe one of them is wearing a t-shirt that says, “Mondays. Am I right?” So yes, yes, they must be singing. A blues song, a sad hymn, a lament, but yes, they must be singing.
And then, yes, and then…
In my own vision of what happens when they get to the tomb, after they step over the unconscious guards to peer into the tomb, after they see the messenger in dazzling white, after they hear that their friend and teacher is alive, and that they will see him in Galilee (Galilee: a place that can be, for us, any place we call home) — after all of that happens and they meet their Lord, he says, “Greetings!” just the way Matthew tells us.
(Sidebar: In my hearing, this “Greetings!” is a little maddening. For me, it’s like he’s saying, “Oh, hi!” Like, seriously, Jesus?! “Greetings”?!)
But anyway, as I was saying, then — in my vision of what happens — then the Risen One hands the women Miriam’s tambourine. He has it with him. I do not know how he got it, but then, I don’t know how he couldn’t have gotten it. In three long and terrible days he goes everywhere: he endures massive suffering, he goes through death itself, he travels to hell, preaching to anyone in hell who will listen, and he pulls those that do listen from their spiritual tombs, and he returns to his friends, very different, much scarier, startling, unpredictable — but he returns. So somewhere on that long journey, he finds Miriam and asks to borrow her tambourine, and she says, “Oh of course. That’s what it’s for.”
And then the women, stunned and still wearing their sardonic Monday t-shirts, the women — my sweet sister companions in grief! — they fumble with the tambourine for a few moments. They aren’t sure right away what to do with it, or whether they dare sing a more hopeful song. In a confusing whirl of light and energy, Jesus is gone again, gone to go to Galilee, that is, to any place where humanity is sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death.
But they have this tambourine now. So it can’t have been just a dream.
Slowly, haltingly, then with more verve and power, they play that tambourine, and they sing. They sing about impossible hope, about life trampling death, about joy and freedom and renewal and restoration and reconciliation and justice and peace. They still know all about tombs, because like Miriam, like you, like me, they have seen death, and they will see it again. So the song of joy is not about the sudden arrival of a magic paradise, a heavenly playground where every single child and woman and man is safe, and whole, and nourished, and secure. But that is what makes this tambourine so powerful! It helps us sing about life in the midst of death, about justice in the midst of injustice, about freedom in the midst of bondage.
The Risen One has been everywhere, the Risen One is everywhere, and so “Galilee,” then — is the place where the Risen One has gone ahead of us — “Galilee” is our deathbeds and our sickbeds. Galilee is our quarantine rooms and our bedrooms and our dining rooms. Galilee is our morgues and our intensive-care units and our field hospitals. Galilee is our closed polling stations and shuttered workplaces. Galilee is anywhere and everywhere that we are and we go, weighed down with our coffin spices, grimly steeling ourselves for another grey Monday, tracing the scars on our hearts, and then discovering — to our shock and confusion, and then, slowly, to our glad joy — that even and especially in our hardest times and most awful days, even and especially here, God is rising up in power, God in Jesus is rising up in resurrected life. Though we do suffer, and though we do die, we also are resurrected in Christ, and we will not be going to tombs forever.
We will — no, even on this very night, we do — stand at the seashore with Miriam herself. We stand there together, arm in arm, and we sound her tambourine, and we sing our song: Alleluia, alleluia, Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed, alleluia, alleluia.
Preached for the online Great Vigil of Easter, Year A, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, April 11, 2020.
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Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21
Matthew 28: 1-10
Artwork published by UMC pastor Greg Smith on Twitter.