The Weight of Easter
Scripture Reading: Mark 16:1-8
“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail…. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
You may recognize those words from the opening of Charles Dickens’ classic tale A Christmas Carol. Before you ask, yes, I know what day it is. The stores are stocked with Cadbury eggs, not candy canes. So why this talk of Christmas on Easter Sunday?
The narrator of A Christmas Carol wants the reader to know beyond any doubt that Scrooge’s business partner, Marley, is dead. We won’t fully appreciate the story he is about to tell unless we understand that Marley is truly dead.
The author of the Gospel of Mark wants us to know the same thing about Jesus. He died. He was crucified. Of this there can be no doubt. His crucifixion was a matter of public record. His hands and feet were nailed to a cross, and he was publicly displayed on the hill known as Golgotha for all to see. The bystanders who gathered at the foot of the cross, whether out of curiosity, scorn, or pity, saw it. The Roman centurion saw it. And the women who had followed Jesus and provided for him back when he was in Galilee, far from Jerusalem, they saw it as well.
When night fell and Jesus’s lifeless body was brought down from the cross, the women were still there. To be sure, the eleven disciples were nowhere to be found, but Mark makes a point of telling us that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid. They saw Jesus’s body laid in the tomb. Jesus of Nazareth was unquestionably dead.
So, early in the morning after the sabbath, the two Marys along with Salome, head to the tomb intending to anoint the body with spices—spices meant to mask the smell of death. But when the women arrive at the tomb they are startled to find that the large stone that had sealed the tomb has been rolled away. That’s odd! Why would someone have moved the stone? Has someone already anointed the body?
But in pointing to the spot where Jesus’s body had been, the angel is telling us that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not an act of imagination, or a hallucination, or worst of all, only a metaphor.
They peer inside the tomb, expecting to find the body of Jesus, but rather than a lifeless body they encounter a living presence, a young man in a white robe. They instinctively recoil in fear! I mean, wouldn’t you? A tomb is not a place where we’d expect to find another living soul, especially first thing in the morning!
But the young man tells the women not to be frightened. He knows that they are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. “He has been raised,” he tells them. “He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”
The angel directs the women’s attention to the rock on which Jesus’s lifeless body had been laid, the place where his hair had mixed with the dust of the earth, and the pools where his blood had stained the ground. “Look, there is the place they laid him.”
The angel highlights for us the physicality of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is profoundly physical in nature. It takes place in a moment in time and in a physical location, with coordinates that could be plotted by a surveyor. “Look, there is the place they laid him.”
Far from a metaphor, the resurrection of Jesus has weight and substance, mass and volume, flesh and bone and blood.
The physicality of the resurrection is all the more remarkable because, as Mark tells it, the women don’t encounter the body of the risen Jesus. All they see is the empty tomb. But in pointing to the spot where Jesus’s body had been, the angel is telling us that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not an act of imagination, or a hallucination, or worst of all, only a metaphor.
Would a metaphor have seized the women with terror and amazement, as Mark describes? Would a metaphor have the compassion and understanding to single out Peter for a special word of encouragement, knowing the guilt he feels for having denied Jesus? “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Would a metaphor make plans to meet his disciples in the coming days? Of course not!
Nor should we confuse resurrection with immortality. Jesus doesn’t have an immortal soul that rises from his body at his death like we see in cartoons. Humbug to that I say! No, Jesus is raised from the dead. His lifeless body is raised to new life by the Father. Nothing else explains the explosive growth in the number of his followers after his death, not to mention the transformation of his disciples from faithless cowards into fearless martyrs, especially Peter. Far from a metaphor, the resurrection of Jesus has weight and substance, mass and volume, flesh and bone and blood.
Why does this matter? It matters because Christian faith is not based on a myth but on a real historical event. It matters because the source of Christian hope is not some wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if fanciful wish but the actual defeat of death. It matters because resurrection is no more a metaphor than is salvation, a salvation that is at work in our bodies even now.
And speaking of metaphor, the great American author John Updike, primarily known for his novels, as a young man wrote a poem about the resurrection that often gets read at Easter. The poem, titled “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” was his entry in a religious arts festival sponsored by the Lutheran church that he was attending in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Top prize was $100. Out of 96 entries, Updike’s poem won. Word has it that he donated the $100 back to the church. Here is the poem.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.