The end became the beginning
Christians are resurrection people; we don’t pause very long to consider the painful slouch toward the cross or the uncomfortable silence that follows. Without suffering and silence, though, the resurrection of Christ is meaningless. One of my favorite stories related to Easter is the women at the tomb, because it contains the full scope of grief and glory that early followers experienced that first Easter. It is also one of the few stories all four gospels recount. How many women and how much detail readers get varies. But one thing remains consistent in each version of the story. The women, whether represented as one, two, or three plus, are tasked with carrying the message to the disciples that Jesus is alive. They are the first to receive the complete gospel of Jesus Christ. They are the first preachers of the good news.
Briefly, the story shares that [the] Mary[s] and (in Mark) Salome decide to take spices and oil to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ lifeless body. This was a common practice in their day. When they arrive, they expect to find a three days’ dead corpse in a robust state of decay. What they find instead is an empty tomb and a heavenly being.
What would it have felt like to suddenly and unexpectedly be in the presence of an angel, instead of a death? What would it have felt like to approach in a communal spirit of mourning and to rush away with a spirit of something else altogether? What was that something else? Once the angel convinces the women Jesus’ body wasn’t stolen, that he, in fact, rose from the dead, the four gospels concur that the women are full of both fear and joy.
Grief. Fear. Joy. What a roller coaster of emotions these women must have experienced in a short span of time. Though we may try, it’s difficult to put ourselves at the tomb’s entrance. The arch of the story is dramatic and pitched. The women knew Jesus Christ in the flesh, sat at his feet and learned, fell to their knees at his cross, confronted doubt (why didn’t he just climb down?), and believed all hope was lost. Whether we can relate to the particulars of their grief and joy in our post-resurrection age is not the point.
Note that so many of Jesus’ last days were shared with his disciples, in community. Jesus’ followers who traveled the dusty roads by his side made themselves into a community before they likely recognized it themselves. But Jesus knew. Resurrected Jesus knew the significance of appearing first before the community’s least valued members, of charging them with the important task of preaching the good news, of making sure that they were a part of God’s big story in a way that was impossible to ignore. He likely knew, too, that few would believe them, which is exactly what happens.
What knits the Christian community together is not shared demographics, status, or even culture. (At least it shouldn’t be.) What knits the Christian community together is the good news that the tomb is empty. This is news that was shared first in community. This is news that spread in communities of fledgling churches throughout the ancient world. This is news we still celebrate, in community. The gift of the empty tomb is not just the gift of individual salvation, but the gift of knowing that the roads we walk–of loss, of fear, and finally of fully realized joy–are roads we walk together. Rev. Jordan Miller-Stubbendick writes, “Holy Week calls us to many things. One of them is knowing that we are not alone” (“The Women at the Tomb”).
No account of the empty tomb is as detailed as John’s. By his telling, it is Mary Magdalene who first discovers it. It is Mary Magdalene whose grief plummets deeper still when she imagines that her teacher’s body has been ruthlessly stolen, along with her ability to perform her culture’s last rites of death for him. It is Mary Magdalene whose name Jesus utters. A single word. “Mary,” he says, which is not the first thing he has said to her in their life-after-death encounter. Only when he names her does she recognize his voice. “Rabboni,” she replies and reaches to touch him. Just at the moment she does, Jesus stops her. “Do not touch me,” he advises. What a strange reaction, or is it?
In that moment Jesus asks Mary to exchange one reality for another. He has not returned as he was, but instead as the risen Lord. The threshold of the empty tomb is both a physical and a spiritual threshold, a liminal space. In literature, liminal spaces exist where characters straddle two worlds or realities, one they know they must leave behind and the one to come, which often still appears unformed and frightening (Harry Potter crossing to Platform 9 3/4, for example, or Peter, Susan, Edward and Lucy passing through the wardrobe). What one gains by leaving the old world behind is often new life.
The empty tomb is not the end. It is only the beginning.
According to author and Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr, liminal space is where spiritual transformation takes place. “There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin.” At the tomb, the old world indeed fell apart, not just for the women who witnessed it, but for all of us.
Hardly believing what she has seen, heard, touched, Mary ushers the call that will help Jesus’ followers know what to do next. “I have seen the Lord!” she will cry out to the disciples, to Peter, who will run to see for himself. It is this cry that will span many thousands of years. Many lands. That will make many communities of believers.
The Easter story is not a “me” story, but an “us” story. It contains a full cast of characters. The women on the road, carrying spices to anoint their fallen Rabbi one last time. A radiant being to explain the shock of an empty tomb. The disciples, hidden and grieving. And finally, the proclamation of eternal hope spreading across lands. Across cultures. Across centuries. What the grieving-afraid-joyful women at the tomb’s entrance teach us is that faith is best lived out together. What they teach us is who and what matters. And it isn’t anything we could have imagined. It isn’t anything we thought possible.
When we look someone in the eyes who (we think) is not like us, someone perhaps without status or achievement, when we look into the mirror and realize we are the nobody we always feared becoming, that is when we begin to understand the gift. That is when we begin to understand how we ought to live. That is when we begin to see the beauty Christ gave us when he gave us not only the gift of himself, which is the gift of life, but the gift of each other as well.
Yes, the empty tomb meets us in the particularities of our individual lives–Jesus uttering Mary’s name, naming her–but when Jesus turns to the women and commands them, the marginalized, to go and tell, something he could easily have done alone without their help, we suddenly see how the empty tomb calls us beyond ourselves, toward one another, and into a unique kind of community. One that invites us to receive and then offer, without limits or borders, truth, love, and grace.
