Dawn. First light; gray but
coloring through the murky abyss of night. Dawn, the moment in the day when everything
is yet possible. Though drawing the night to a close, it is more about
beginning than ending. It is
anticipation rather than reflection; advancing rather than retreating;
stretching forward rather than reaching back.
It is light emerging –
each day’s reminder of God’s
creative voice that in Genesis spoke into the void of deep darkness and called
forth life, and that even in this day – this fresh darkness – can call forth
light and life again.
It is,
according to the story, at the dawn – the birth not simply of the day but of
the new week and, perhaps even a new beyond as yet unimaginable – that Mary and
Mary Magdalene approach the tomb – their visit, itself, that first Easter
morning, largely about moving on. There
hadn’t been time before for a funeral.
As the crucifixion on Friday had quieted to its predictable conclusion,
the Sabbath was coming on; there were more pressing arrangements to put in
place. There hadn’t been time for the
rituals, the prayers, the remembering, the saying
goodbye.
But there
was still that work to do. And so at
dawn – those vaporous moments of new beginning – these two Mary’s get about the
work of any good funeral – naming and beginning the transition between the
goodness that has been and the ambiguity of what might be. According to other gospel writers, the first
visitors had it in mind to prepare the body more properly with spices. But not so Matthew. According to this story teller, they just
wanted to see the tomb. They had no
concern about how they might get inside; their mission was simply to be there,
to stand and, with their eyes and the eyes of their soul, to take in the full
reality of what had happened. They are
trying to move on, don’t you see? Doing
what they can to complete the death and progress through the grief. Whatever has gone before, this is “day 1” –
the first day of life on the other side of this one who had so thoroughly
rearranged the pieces of their actions, their affections, and their
aspirations. This is morning, the first
day of the new creation.
But as so often happens, life is richer, more complicated than
that. There are more tombs in
this story than the one these women were on their way to visit – burial places
of hopes and imaginations flattened and shrouded and sealed behind stones of
intimidating, suffocating fear. It would
take exactly what the women experienced to break open tombs of this
description: an earthquake, the shaking
of the very foundations of belief, comprehension, expectation, and
orientation. Everything these women
thought they knew about death and life, hope and divine purpose and presence
began to shake and crumble and disassemble.
Little
wonder that four times in the brief span of this account mention is made of
fear – of being afraid, or the enjoinder to NOT be afraid. When all that we comprehend, believe, and
have come to expect are rocking and rearranging, it is pretty natural to find
ourselves disorientingly afraid. My guess is that you have been in those kinds
of earthquakes before, ones that shook apart the world as you had known it to
be. More often than not, they appear, in
their rumbling, as unmitigated destruction.
Perhaps it is the death of a loved one, or the death of a love; perhaps
it is the dismantling of an order or routine, or the crumbling of an ideal. But in the dusty stillness that follows, we
have discovered stones rolled away. Can
you name a stone that preserved some darkness; that blocked your way to
more? And can you name the earthquake
that finally rolled it clear – or could?
A
fascinating subtlety occurs in the story, easily overlooked in the rumble and
the glare of angel, earthquake and surprise.
According to the narrator, the guards are shocked and become like dead men at the appearance
of the angel, but not so the two Mary’s.
For them, the events of that Easter morning did not merely occur at
dawn; they were, themselves, a dawning of new possibility. Not just a tomb, but a whole new world opened
up before them, and they were entrusted with the message. “Go and tell the others. Tell them he has been raised from the dead, and is going ahead of you to
I don’t
know why it was that the angel didn’t tell the others directly – popping in on
them wherever he may have found them, in bed or tavern or wandering sleeplessly
through the streets. I don’t know why he
chose these women to deliver the message second hand. But there, in the cemetery, these two Mary’s
became not simply disciples but the first two apostles: those who are sent to proclaim the good
news.
They were
the first, but they were not the last.
Disciples of Christ have been encountering the risen Lord in unexpected
dawnings ever since; disciples who have become apostles, sent to share the good
news with still others. We are gathered
here, this Easter morning some 2000 years hence as living proof. As we reaffirmed within the candleglow of
Christmas Eve, we here proclaim anew on this bright morning of Easter: “the
light shines on in the dark, and the darkness cannot overcome it.”
The
leaders so affronted by Jesus’ witness – the fearful and the settled and the
comfortably powerful but limited – tried to shut him away. But as Walter Wink once wrote it, “Killing
Jesus was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed-head by blowing on it. It was like shattering a sun into a million
fragments of light.” [1]
“Fragments of light” that have, indeed, pierced our darkness. And what that light confirms in the fresh
rays of new day is not simply the power but also the character of the God
behind the Jesus we’ve come to love.
William Sloan Coffin once put it this way: “What is finally important is not that Christ
is Godlike, but that God is Christ-like.
God is like Christ.” [2]
Isn’t
that, finally, the kind of news we might describe as “good”? Not simply that Jesus’ resurrection confirms
our hope of some disembodied existence on the other side of the grave, but
rather that Jesus is, after all, the Christ – the reflection of the very face
and heart of God; that the God we’ve come to seek is exactly like the Jesus
we’ve come to know.
Perhaps
the glory of Easter is allowing the immensity, the beauty, and the extravagant
grace of that reality to finally and completely dawn on us.
Hallelujah. Christ is risen. Christ is risen,
indeed.