Standing Empty At The Tomb

Easter Year A

When Mary went to the tomb she was a true believer. She believed in the goodness of Jesus’ teachings as far as she understood them. She believed that he had been the most amazing man she had ever encountered. She had come to believe that he was the Messiah sent to bring his people freedom – and she believed he was dead and gone for good.  It was that one erroneous belief that filled her with such confusion and grief. She was a believer and her belief brought her to the tomb – and brought her more devastation.

To Mary and the other disciples who looked into the tomb, seeing the body gone but the linen cloths still there was worse than just thinking he had been simply moved. To them it looked as though he had been deprived of the last dignity of being wrapped in linen. Whoever moved him hadn’t even had that much respect. It must have ripped them in shreds to see that. 

You, too, are a believer. You may be a happy believer or you may be a struggling one but before you go headlong into the joy of the Easter season, be a Mary at the tomb just for just a little while. Leave all your knowledge about Jesus, your strong beliefs and your spiritual habits in a small pile on the ground and go as she did to see where they laid the Lord in the tomb. Go in aching sorrow to view him one last time. Go in despair. Go with your dreams shattered. Go stripped, broken, grieving and empty to allow yourself to be confronted by the shocking nucleus of our entire faith: the empty tomb.

When you gaze into that tomb, try to realize that what you are looking at is a stark question of belief. It doesn’t matter how deeply or for how long any of us have believed in the dogma of the risen Christ, we all need to face this unembellished question and face it often. We need to look at our small pile of precepts, understandings and beliefs that we left on the ground and then look again into the empty tomb and try to grasp that unless we have come to terms with the emptiness of our own tombs and have cried out to be shown where the Lord really is, our tidy and correct collection of creeds and dogmas does very little for us. The question we have to deal with is whether we really believe that Jesus rose from the dead.     

If our answer is, “Yes, I believe,” then we need to ponder what that actually means.

Whoa! Hold on there! Don’t go running back to that pile you left on the ground at the beginning of this exercise. I know that when you hear the question, “What does it mean to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead?” the first inclination is to run to that pile and pull out all the standard answers. They may be extremely good answers but for the moment, just be a Mary at the tomb. As you stand there, allow yourself to soak in the emotional and spiritual state of a grief of Magdalene proportions. Everything you loved is gone. Your master and your Lord, who was your whole reason for living, is gone. You witnessed him dying horribly on a cross; now he is missing from the tomb. You just wanted to come and be near his body one last time because you never had the chance to say good-bye to him, not one on one, not face to face. You didn’t know that his words about being lifted up meant literally lifted up on a criminal’s cross. You didn’t realize it wasn’t just a disturbing parable or an analogy. All that is left is to be near his dead body but now he’s gone and you don’t know where.

Look again at your pile of beliefs. Mary, too, left behind her a pile of beliefs and desires when she went to the tomb. Nothing was as she thought it would be. Nothing made sense anymore. The future was a bleak empty slate and all that was left inside her was a wild, aching yearning to be with him just one more time. She didn’t want to be with the rest of the community. She didn’t want to discuss endlessly what happened, who did what and why. She didn’t want to hear any more excuses or watch Peter huddled in a corner with his own brand of searing misery. All she wanted was a quiet space to grieve near her beautiful Lord and to not only grieve his death but also the crashing of all her beliefs, hopes and visions - her small pile of ashes left on the ground. She did not have any theology to fall back on. She didn’t have anyone to whom she could go for spiritual direction, encouragement and maybe some answers. The only one who had all the answers was Jesus and he was gone. Death is death. Gone is gone. There is nothing more brutally final than death. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows that. Mary was empty of hope.

It was to this state of complete emptiness that the ‘Gardener’ appeared. Mary probably did not recognize him at first because encountering him alive and well was the last thing she expected. It took the familiarity of him saying her name in the way he had always said it to awaken her to reality. Whenever he said her name before, she felt beautiful, loved and safe. When he said her name at the tomb, there was no mistaking who he was; his voice had been imprinted so deeply upon her soul. It was his voice and nothing else that filled her with living hope.

 Be a Mary. Hear your name and allow the dawn of full recognition to slowly light up the darkness within. Let the sound of his voice loving you, recreating you and keeping you safe be imprinted deeply on your soul. Don’t be distracted by all the “shoulds and shouldn’ts” in our pile that tend to try to crowd in on our face-to-face encounters with Jesus. This needs to be a moment of pure relationship: desire answered by love, need answered by fulfillment, death answered by life, grief answered by unfettered joy. He has risen indeed!

In the joyous revelation of realizing that Jesus is alive and well, you may be tempted, like Mary, to resurrect your meager pile of beliefs that you left on the ground. Your first thoughts may be, “All is not lost! My dreams, visions and beliefs have not been in vain; they are real because he’s alive!!”  But pay attention to what Jesus said to Mary when she clung to him. “Do not hold on to me because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” In other words, “Don’t cling to me as if nothing has changed and everything is the same as it was before. Don’t hold on to what you thought my mission was or your mission was or to anything you thought you knew for sure. Everything is still shifting and changing; completion has not yet taken place. Just go and tell my brothers and sisters that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Everything had changed. EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED. Mary could not be allowed to hold on to her old ideas; they would only trip her up and keep her from fully participating in the new order of things. They would inhibit her from opening herself to the new and radical dimension of a resurrected Lord. Everything Jesus taught when he was a man walking on the earth was real and true but Mary needed to let go of her half formed perceptions and limited understanding based on the past and allow Jesus to become the door to a completely new Way based on Spirit and Life.

In our spiritual lives, we are also called constantly to move from old orders to new ones. Sometimes we, too, need to find the courage to let our old spiritual habits go, face the empty tomb and simply cry out for a face-to-face encounter of the new order with the resurrected Lord.

Be a Mary. Someone is calling your name and everything has changed.