Easter Morning, by He Qi, used with permission.
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“Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” the spice-bearing women ask, up at dawn, worrying their way to the grave of their friend.
Great question. Who will roll away the stone for us? The stone is immensely heavy. Sure, it’s shaped roughly like a wheel, so it can roll. But you can imagine the difficulty in getting a purchase, getting it to first start rolling. Once it has a little momentum it will move with increasing ease. But that first shove is heavy. Maybe impossible.
But we want the stone to move, because like those women, we want to visit our friend’s grave. And we want to do what one does when visiting a friend’s grave. But maybe the grave is impossibly shut. Maybe the cemetery is closed.
Who will roll away the stone for us?
And — we also know that the stone belongs to us. It is ours. We lent the stone every inch of its immense size, every pound of its crushing weight. We rolled it into place, you and I, all of us, down the ages, together. We made the stone. We like the stone. We need (or at least we needed) the stone.
The stone hides death. That’s one good reason for its existence in our lives. We don’t want to look at death. We don’t want to smell death. Our own death is hard to contemplate of course, and we have plenty of deaths of loved ones to grieve. These sad deaths are a hard reality that the gravestone can sometimes shield from our eyes, push out of our awareness, the tomb sealed shut.
But then there are the deaths we cause, the deaths we participate in, the culture of death inside which we live and work. The bad news around the world, the news of the countless deaths of innocent people — this news doesn’t just come at us, with us as impassive, innocent consumers and bystanders. No, we are caught up in it. We are a part of it. We contribute to suffering and death in the world.
We know that, and we can admit that, when we’re honest, when we choose not to hide the truth behind a heavy stone. The women who come to the tomb, wondering about that stone: they know well the many forms of death in the world. They know well how complicated human life is, how complicated human death is.
They’re the ones who remained with Jesus, watching him die, watching the removal of his body from the cross, watching the burial. Mark the evangelist names them three times: all three of this morning’s spice-bearing women are named as witnesses of the death, and the two Marys saw where the body was buried. They saw the stone roll heavily into place. They have seen difficult things. Just like us.
And when they witnessed all of that, what did they think about? What did they feel, as they watched from a distance? I don’t know, and we are not supposed to beam ourselves back to an ancient time and pretend we know what it was like. If the resurrection matters, it matters because it is happening today, here, with us. Now.
But I can tell you what I think and feel as I hear the story of the witness of these spice-bearing women, the record of their vigilant watch, and their fretful wondering about the tombstone. I can see, through their eyes, the death and burial of Jesus, and I can think about my own involvement in death, in the here and now. My unconscious – and, often enough, conscious – support of an economy that privileges my life above others’. My unconscious – and, often enough, conscious – enjoyment of many privileges that my neighbors do not have. On the other side of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, we confessed many things, including this terrible thing: we prayed, “Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty…” If I am standing with the spice-bearing women, I am reflecting on all of that – on all of that death. And how that death sometimes has my name on it.
So yes, I can imagine wanting a heavy stone to block all that out – to block it out from myself.
But the stone doesn’t just block out death, mask death, hide death. The stone also secures and safeguards a grim, sad future. That sounds like a bad thing, but at least it’s the devil we know. The stone is an object of hopelessness: our friend is dead, and once you’re dead you stay dead. Everyone knows that. The women approach the tomb worrying about the stone, not because he might be alive but only because they want to anoint his dead body. In fact, when they are confronted with the news of his resurrection, they are far more upset and disturbed – and even terrified – than they had been during his arrest, trial, torture, execution, and burial. All of those things are horrible, but they are reassuringly familiar. But resurrection? A good, redemptive future? Authentic hope? The spice-bearing women – and all of us alongside them – we can’t easily wrap our minds around such a thing.
The resurrection reveals a new future, which maybe sounds exciting but is also, when you really contemplate it, deeply unnerving. In a new future, a future with authentic hope, I will have to set aside comfortable things, like my privileges. I will have to let go of the grim comforts of cynicism and nihilism. I will have to grow and change. I will have to trust. I may not have to believe something hard and fast. (Please note — particularly if you resist going to churches that demand hard beliefs — please note that belief isn’t about signing your name to a list of firm conclusions. It’s just the courageous practice of trusting someone outside of yourself.)
But even with all of these conflicting feelings — our resistance to the reality of death alongside our desire to be honest and courageous about it; and our resistance to the reality of a bright future alongside our desire to be filled with hope and amazement and even joy — even with all of these conflicting feelings, we now, like the spice-bearing women, want someone to move that stone for us. We want to get in there. We want to see.
And here is what we see.
A young person dressed in bright clothing tells us that there is no dead body: death has been reversed, creation is young again, the future is bright again. We will all die, but that is not the end of all things. We are driven by the Risen One into the world to cultivate life where there is death, hope where there is despair. We do that here at church, helping people find shelter, building friendships with those who are lonely, feeding hungry people, embracing grieving people, walking with our oldest elders and our youngest children, assisting those unable to walk, tending and revitalizing this neighborhood — revitalizing, a word that means “restoring life.”
And though the spice-bearing women run away, amazed and afraid, we now are invited to heed the instructions of that brightly-dressed young person — and maybe it was him who had the strength to roll away our stone. We can follow his instructions. We can go to Galilee. Galilee: not just rural hills around a lake in northern Israel, but our own world, our own city, our own neighborhood, occupied by our friends, and also those we all too easily call our enemies. Galilee is our own context, our own households, our own workplaces. That’s where the Risen One first appeared to us, teaching us how to care for the sick, how to clothe the naked, how to feed the hungry, and how to change the world.
Alleluia, Christ is risen, and Christ has trampled death, kicked aside the pebble of our gravestone, and gone ahead of us into this world, this dangerous world, this sad and anxious world, this beautiful and lovely world.
So let’s go. Let’s go from here, filled with hope — and also more than a little scared by what we have seen and heard. Let’s go from here into God’s good world.
There we will see the Risen One, just as he told us.
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Preached on the Resurrection of our Lord (Year B, Mark), March 31, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Mark 16:1-8