Easter Sunday
The first Easter started in an isolated corner, in a graveyard, in the quiet of an early morning just as darkness was slowly transforming into light. But then note how the cast of characters and action quickly builds. It is almost cinematic.
First it is two women walking through the dawn, a gentle beginning. Then…an earthquake, and an angel resembling lightning, or maybe snow. The guards, hired to ensure the dead man in the tomb remained dead, now become “like dead men” themselves. Tomb, women, brilliant angel, men lying like dead: the scene begins to fill.
But there is no time for lingering here. An angelic exhortation not to fear, then a brief speech by the angel (which means “messenger”), perhaps a hurried look “where he lay”, then quickly off to tell the disciples, who are out of the scene but now part of the story. Then Jesus appears, it doesn’t matter from where because the action points forward, what’s next, rather than filling in all of the backstory details.
Jesus, too, does not say much but echoes that angelic admonishment not to fear but to keep moving on and out, to the disciples, to “my brothers and sisters”, to the neighbouring country of Galilee… and later in the gospel story far, far beyond that.
There is nothing more still and peaceful, unchanging and rooted in place, than a grave… and there is nothing more dynamic and growing, restless and expansive, than resurrection.
The boundary between the two would seem to be unbreachable; Jesus breached it. The grave with all its many faces, as very real as it is, is not the last chapter of the story but just its beginning. The grave gives way to resurrection.
The power of fear and death could not hold Jesus entombed. Thanks to him, it cannot hold us, either.
Thanks be to God on this blessed Easter Day!
Life-giving God, whose child Jesus broke the bonds of death and scattered the powers of sin: fill us with such faith in him that, facing injustice and death, we may overcome as he overcame, Jesus Christ, our hope and our redeemer. Amen.