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RISEN
What was closed has been opened.
What was full has been emptied.
What was dark has been filled with light.
What had ended has begun.
What was a grave has become labor and delivery.
What was too little too late has become more than enough all the time.
Where there were words there is silence.
Where there was grief there is now terror and amazement.
Where the story had ended the next chapter begins.
The captives have been set free.
Death has been done away with.
Hell has been torn asunder.
Life is liberated.
Those who were lost have been found.
The tomb is empty.
Are you sure?
How could that be?
Run ahead and tell everyone they will see him soon.
So of course they tell no one.
And so the Gospel goes forth with fits and starts.
Shambles and clutter, our lives are filled with shambles and clutter that is what we leave behind for others to sort through and clean up.
That is what the disciples were left with, shambles, clutter, and forgotten words that it won’t be over, that there is more. In the debris of grief they make ready to prepare the body, the details and customs of honoring our dead carry us forward when nothing else makes sense.
And in the biggest April fools ever, the grave is empty, the body has apparently gone ahead of them, back to the place where it all began, Galilee. The body that lives. Jesus waits.
If this is a joke what’s the punch line? Who is the April fool?
Needless to say this isn’t how things usually work, not then, not now. Strange things happen at funerals but not like this.
And what is left are the lives and the choices of how to live.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus does not appear. We are only given an empty tomb and the message to go so see him in Galilee.
In Mark there are no heroes among Jesus followers. There is weakness, silence, betrayal and out of this faith comes to ordinary lives.
So we see the Resurrection Faith begin and it begins with fear and silence, the first reaction to the Resurrection.
What happens from there… Mark leaves us to fill that in with our own lives. What does the resurrection change?
If forgiveness rises from the grave.
If forgiveness is the greatest power in the Universe.
If forgiveness sets us free to love deeply, to suffer for and with others.
Then what does that change?
What does that kind of freedom look like?
The stone rolled away from all the dead places in our lives and in the world.
The dead places opened up seen in this new light of life.
All the case files of our lives and of the world have to be reopened and reconsidered.
No more fear, only forgiveness.
No more anger, only forgiveness.
No more bitterness, only forgiveness.
No more grasping and hoarding only forgiveness.
Life has become the freedom to always choose to love, rather than always being enslaved to always lashing out, over and over in an endless playback loop.
Turning the other cheek: because forgiveness has risen from the grave, because we have been set free.
Our actions are no longer determined by what others do to us.
Our actions are determined by an empty grave that exposes the cross of retaliation as a shallow lie.
The sword and shield have been laid down by the river side. Down by the river side. Down by the river side.
A life defined, encompassed by an empty tomb and the message to find Jesus.
That is now where we are born.
This is our birthday.
This is the riverside.
This is our baptism.
The tomb has become labor and delivery.
That is what God does. That is what God is like. That is what the Gospel is all about.
That is who we are.
What was closed has been opened.
Rejoice. Be afraid. Be silent. Sing out!