All Saints’, Dorval
April 9, 2023
The hydro trucks in the parking lot on Saturday morning!
After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.
Why did they go to see the tomb?
This might seem like a question with a very obvious answer, especially if you’ve been hearing this story your whole life. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we’re told why the women went to the tomb: they were bringing spices to anoint Jesus’ body, presumably because he had been buried in such a hurry of grief and fear the night before the Sabbath that there had been no time for the proper rites to be observed. But Matthew offers no such explanation. Matthew is also the only Gospel account in which the women actually see the angel descend and roll away the stone, rather than arriving on the scene to find a fait accompli.
As I read and thought about this passage this week, I came across a new interpretation: what if the women came to the tomb on Easter morning because they expected Jesus to have risen?
The male disciples, as those of us who have been hearing this story our whole lives know, are cowardly, faithless, and generally useless throughout Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion and death – they betray, they deny, they run away. But the women stay with him. They are the ones who have been supporting his ministry, logistically and practically, from the beginning. They have heard him predict his own suffering, death, and resurrection. They – these specific individuals, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, as well as the mother of the sons of Zebedee, enumerated in the previous chapter – stayed near the cross, bearing witness until the bitter end.
Unfortunately, I cannot properly credit the source of this insight because it falls into that all-too-large category called “I saw it in a Facebook group somewhere and now I can’t find it again.” But I think it’s worth taking another look at this very familiar story through the new eyes of this question: did the women, going to the tomb, already expect – or at least hope against hope – to find their Master risen and gone?
When the angel descends, in a terrifying flurry of snow-white garments and hair like lightning, “for fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men”. But though the angel says to the women, “Do not be afraid,” I wonder whether perhaps they were actually unafraid (or at least less afraid), because they knew and trusted their Lord.
And so they are granted the commission to go quickly and tell the disciples to go and meet Jesus in Galilee; but before they do, they are also granted to see Jesus himself, to greet him and take hold of his feet and worship him.
Can we learn from these faithful women? Can we learn to expect resurrection, to go looking for it even where it seems impossible, to open our hearts to it even in the face of the crushing despair of the world?
Three years ago, we were celebrating Easter in COVID-19 lockdown. This weekend, we gritted our teeth through multi-day power outages in the wake of an ice storm. It hasn’t been fun.
But for the last three days and the last three years, this community has cared for each other tremendously. We have called and held hands and offered technology coaching and showers and outlets. We have learned to pray more deeply than ever before, we have shared meals and held each other’s babies and wept together at funerals. We have refused to accept that death and despair are the last word, and in doing so, we have found that resurrection is real.
If we expect to see the risen Jesus, we will see him, and like the women in the garden, we will be granted to greet him, take hold of his feet, and worship him. We may see him in a sunrise over the water or in green sprouts pushing up through wet soil, in the fresh face of a child or the wise eyes of an elder – or, let’s be honest, in the flicker and hum of the power coming back on after forty-eight, or seventy-two, or more, hours!
Yesterday morning, I was inside the building setting up for Easter services, with Grace Lavigne and Heather McCance and Darlene Scott. It occurred to me later that spreading altar linens and arranging flowers inside a church where you can’t turn the heat or the lights on is awfully like … anointing a dead and already-buried body.
And then the hydro trucks appeared in the parking lot, and we went outside and were given good news by a bunch of strong young men (these were wearing orange jumpsuits, not dazzling white garments), and we rejoiced!
And perhaps expecting the return of the hydro is like expecting resurrection – we cannot know the day or the hour, there may or may not be signs before it happens, we may or may not actually see it happen, but we know it will happen sooner or later!
In all seriousness, though – if we expect to see the risen Jesus, we will see him, and like the women in the garden, we will be granted to greet him, take hold of his feet, and worship him.
And then we will be sent forth to Galilee, commissioned to spread the word that resurrection is real, that fear and pain and despair do not have the last word, that our wild and absurd hopes were in fact based on the plainest and most practical facts: an empty tomb, a rising sun, and the warm, living, wounded hands of our friend as Saviour, as he embraces us and calls us by name.
Amen.
Leave a Reply