the fate of all tombs
The lively quiet of the tomb on Easter Morning tells us that there is no stone that can contain God, no safe that God can’t crack, no heart that God cannot open.
Adapted from my Easter message to my congregation.
In John’s gospel, each of Jesus’ friends look into the empty tomb and sees something different. Peter and the beloved disciple look in and see neatly-rolled linens. Mary Magdalene sees two angels sitting where Jesus’ body had been lain, but even she doesn’t see them for who they are because she was still stuck on the idea that Jesus’ body had been taken.
They could not yet comprehend what had happened.
Yet, even before they do, before Mary meets Jesus outside the tomb (she mistakes him for the gardener) and before the disciples meet him in the days afterwards, they all see evidence of what Jesus has done: they can see that something has happened to the tomb where Jesus had been laid.
The stone was gone. The burial crypt was empty. Yet more to the point, the tomb itself had been transformed.
This burial site that was all about finality and farewell - even containment - was now a vessel for openness and mystery. That which contained death was now the springboard for life. This cavern of decay and grief was now a vessel for a miracle, and a spacious spiritual energy that hung in the silence.
It was the most beautiful empty thing they’d ever seen. Stone had given way to softness, heaviness to lightness. There was no body, to be sure, but there was also something else that was decidedly missing: it was a space that was cleansed of fear and dread, of ego and anxiety.
Even before they found Jesus, they began to believe in something, and that something may have been that the tomb itself had been changed from a container for death into a vessel for new life.
It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure images of modern-day tombs, of hearts calcified by fear or greed and stones rolled into place to keep us buffered from vulnerability or uncertainty. This world of ours groans under the burdens of tombs that we have constructed, of containers of decay where the image of God becomes diminished or suppressed. To be a people of love and compassion is to share that ache when tombs are built but never transformed.
Still, the lively quiet of the tomb on Easter Morning tells us that there is no stone that can contain God, no safe that God can’t crack, no heart that God cannot open. Including our own.
I invite you to celebrate Easter not only as the day of Jesus’ resurrection, when we are reminded of the eternal promise of God’s love, but also as the day to dance in front of the empty tomb. That which was a container for death has become a vessel for new life. God’s promise is that this is the fate that awaits all tombs: stones will never be able to contain life, and love will burst out to restore this world to what God created it to be.