Wait and See!

Matthew 28:1-10

April 12 MMXX

I.

The familiar story is that the women go to Jesus’ tomb early on Sunday morning with spices to embalm Jesus’ body.  But Matthew’s account doesn’t mention the spices.  He also may have them going to the tomb much earlier, perhaps even shortly after sundown, which is when the Sabbath officially ended and “the third day” would begin, in spite of the way English translations often clean this up. 

It makes me wonder if maybe the women don’t go to the tomb so much to tend to a dead body, as to wait and see what, if anything, is going to happen.  They still have a fragile spark of hope.

So they go to see.  They show up at the tomb in the dark expecting to see something.  

How much of life is just showing up?  Just opening our eyes and looking at what is happening around us is important.  As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”  Yogi had the wisdom to realize that most of the time we are not “watching,” that is, we are not present, we are not paying attention to the things that may be happening in front of us, in our field of vision.  Things are visible, but we are not really observing them, we do not understanding their meaning.    

The first part of showing up is actually hearing the promise.  The whole promise.  Earlier in the gospel, while they are all still up in Galilee, Jesus tells the disciples that “he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”  The male disciples do not get it.  Peter even rebuked Jesus for being too negative.  That doesn’t go well for him; Jesus calls him “Satan.”  Other times, Matthew just says they didn’t understand.  Probably they were afraid to ask, after Peter’s experience.

But here in the final chapter we discover that some among the disciples actually are paying attention.  Some are hearing his words and mulling them over, perhaps among themselves, separately, out of earshot of the men, who wouldn’t have cared what they were talking about anyway.  They are watching all along.  Maybe while they are doing the daily, hourly work of attending to the needs of the group of disciples, as they provide for Jesus, as Matthew describes it, they are also listening, observing, processing, warming and stirring all this experience over in their hearts and minds.  

By now the women realize that the first part of Jesus’ prediction, about his suffering and death, has come true.  They are eye-witnesses to those events actually horribly occurring just as Jesus says.  It happened three days before.  Indeed, they will never forget any detail of it.  Anything we know about Jesus’ crucifixion, we know because the women are there and remember it. 

But Jesus also says he would “on the third day be raised.”  That part had not yet happened.  So perhaps the women go to the tomb in which Jesus had been hastily laid on Friday evening, to see whether and how those words of Jesus might come true as well.  As soon as the sun sets on Saturday, it becomes “the third day.”  So they go to the tomb.

II.

Another aspect of showing up is going to the right location.  We have to put ourselves in the right place at the right time.  The women have to have the courage to go to Jesus’ tomb.  It is a place, obviously, of death, loss, pain, grief, and incredible, unbearable sadness for them.  No doubt anger, bargaining, denial and the other stages of grief are beginning to set in as well. 

It’s not always about a physical location, of course; sometimes it’s about going to difficult interior, mental, emotional, spiritual “places.”  Sometimes it’s about facing bad memories.

Who wants to go back to the place of our worst experience?  Who wants to remember the worst day of our lives?  We all know how just being back in certain locales — a neighborhood, a house, a room, a school, a hospital, even an article of clothing — can bring back bad memories.  Many of us have “rooms” in our minds that we know better than to ever reenter; they bring us back to bad, bad places.

I mean, Jesus’ tomb was only a couple of hundred feet from Golgotha, where he was crucified.  (Today they are both within the same building in Jerusalem.)  The women would have been able to see the place where Jesus had been publicly tortured to death, only days before, from the site of the tomb.  They would have to relive all that horrible day.

Sometimes, when we experience a trauma, we choose for the sake of our own sanity to repress and forget it, but its effects continue to echo through our lives and influence our decisions and relationships.  Sometimes the only way to get our lives back to manageability is to revisit those places.  

We need the assistance and guidance of a community, or a professional, to do this.  Simply “going there” on our own can unleash all kinds of thoughts and feelings we may not know what to do with.  

What makes the difference for these women when they go to the tomb is that they also remember the odd, tantalizing last words of Jesus’ prophecy, that after his death he would “on the third day be raised.”  The Lord elsewhere refers to this as “the sign of Jonah,” the prophet who emerges after three days in the belly of a whale.

Maybe the women realize that Jesus is saying that out of his worst day will emerge his best day.  Maybe they are beginning to understand that the time of the greatest loss, deepest pain, worst humiliation, and absolute defeat, will turn and be transfigured into an amazing victory beyond all imagination.  

III.

Surely they remember that other Mary from the Bible, Moses’ sister, Miriam, whose spontaneous praise-song celebrating the miraculous deliverance of the escaped Israelite slaves at the Red Sea becomes the very seed from which the whole Jewish (and Christian) tradition grows.  She too witnesses victory emerge from catastrophe, as the people safely pass through the divided waters of the sea, which then return to demolish the pursuing enemy army.

Maybe they remember how, 800 years after Moses, the people were again delivered from exile in Babylon, victory again emerging from utter defeat.  Maybe they realize that theirs is a God who is about bringing good out of evil, light into darkness, and life from death.  Maybe they remember that God births the whole creation out of nothing at the beginning, and infuses nature with cycles in which nothing is ever lost and life always triumphs and grows.  

Maybe they remember how Jesus makes a point of including… people like them!  He liberates Mary Magdalene from the possession of demons!  He welcomes the outcasts and the marginalized, heals the sick, and even raises people from death!  These are things they have seen with their own eyes, involving people they know personally.

Maybe they realize that bringing life out of death is in God’s wheelhouse, as we say, meaning that nothing is more easy, natural, and characteristic of God than acts of amazing deliverance, redemption, salvation, enlightenment, and liberation.   

Maybe they go to the tomb to see what will happen, even expecting something amazing.  They don’t know what it will be, specifically.  But it will be described by Jesus’ words “be raised,” and it could be very good.

Imagine what God can bring out of our bad places.  Imagine how God can turn our defeats and losses into spectacular victories.  Imagine what God can make grow in the dark soil fed by the compost of our grief, pain, humiliation, failure, and defeat.  Imagine what light God is even now ready to shine into our darkness.

They are ready to see something.  And what they see is first an angel, a messenger of God who shows them that the tomb is really empty.  That place of greatest darkness and fear?  There is nothing there.  It is not real.  It is not to be feared.  

The angel tells them that Jesus has been raised.  He is not a decaying dead body; he is not an inert and malleable historical figure; he is not “here” in the sense of still subject to the police, laws, courts, soldiers, judges, nails, spears, and graves by which the Empire keeps us enslaved in terror.

“He has been raised,” the angel says, and he is “going ahead of you.”  Always ahead of us, so we may follow him in lives characterized by his love and justice, his compassion and peace, his healing and joy, his humility and grace, his welcome and inclusion, his eternal life and oneness with God and all.  

IV.

Which means he is also always with us.  For the Lord then appears to the women, and tells them not to be afraid.  In the end it is our fear that kills us and keeps us dead.  Our fear of going to the dark places in our soul, our fear of failure, loss, pain, and death, our fear of rejection, abandonment, or just the consequences of our decisions.  

These days it is our fear of getting or spreading this infection.  We may fear losing our parents or grandparents who are already infirm.  Some fear running out of food or other consequences of being out of work.  Some fear just having to be locked in with family, for various reasons.   

The women in the story have to not let themselves be dominated and throttled by fear.  In that they remind me of health-care workers today.  They do still carry some fear; we never totally get rid of it in this existence.  But it is controlled and overcome by their calling to care for others. 

That is our calling as well.  Maybe as we show up together in some of our darkest places, we will find that the true light will shine even there.  In some ways this experience is actually bringing us together in mutual support.  We even see signs of the earth healing.  

Maybe if we show up and pay attention, we will see the Risen Christ emerge in our own hearts, in our own neighborhoods, in our whole world.  Maybe when this is over we will find ourselves in a new environment, a new place, where we provide for all in a new community united in gratitude, service, praise, and joy.  

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