The Weekend is upon us…
The Good Friday-Silent Saturday-Easter Sunday Weekend.
And its quite a big deal.
The Easter Story…
The Resurrection-of-Jesus story
…does not begin with triumph, or hope, or shouts of joy.
Instead, it begins with
…
fear, and disbelief, and silence.
A lot of silence.
The story…according to Mark’s Gospel…
the first book written about the life of Jesus…goes like this:
“…Early Sunday morning, a small group of women arrive at the tomb of Jesus,
to find it empty,
and to find a man dressed in white
bearing a cryptic message that Jesus had been raised.
…
Their response isn't to raise their hands and weep with joy.
Nor is their response to cry out, 'Alleluia, Christ is risen indeed!'
…Rather, they run as fast as they can, and don't dare breathe a word
of what they’ve
seen or heard…so terrified are they.”
In the oldest version of the Gospel of Mark, the story ends there
…disarming in its abruptness, troubling in its lack of closure.
Even when later writers fill out the story with embellishments,
the first responses are almost always Fear and Disbelief.
I like The Gospel of Mark’s Easter story…
It refuses to tie up loose ends, and leaves the idea of resurrection
filled with conflicting emotions, and multiple possibilities.
It wonderfully absorbs both joy and fear…
both triumph and disbelief.
And it holds in tension all our contradictory raw emotions,
and molds them into A Profound Existential Mystery.
A Mystery that invites the expectation
that we might just run into this Alive-Again-Jesus…
anywhere…any time!
A Mystery that invites the possibility that Jesus’ story
can be our story, too.
And that invitation is a bigger deal than Easter itself.
At least it can be that.
Every one of us has been where the Weekend begins.
We’ve been in that Friday Nowhere Place
that feels like somewhere between
Life and Death…
Heaven and Hell.
Everyone of us has been in that Scary Place
where what is left of life feels fragile
and very, very temporary.
Where everything that is
is overwhelming…
and hectic, and hellish, and out of control.
Where if life did have anything more to heap on us
we could not imagine what that more would be.
Everyone one of us has been in that place that is
sucking the heart and soul right out of us.
Where who we are is folding back in on itself.
Everyone one of us knows exactly what the Friday
of this Weekend feels like.
And equally, everyone of us knows what the Saturday
of this Weekend feels like.
Silence.
It feels like silence.
Deafening, entombing silence.
And darkness.
And aloneness.
Abandonment even.
We are completely untouchable by any living being.
Friday.
Saturday.
And then…Sunday.
What makes this Profound…Existential…and Mysterious
Weekend
a bigger deal than Easter itself
is that everyone of us has…or yet hopes to have…
a Sunday that follows Friday and Saturday.
A Sunday when we realize…by experience…
That Love is stronger and longer than Death…
That Light will overcome the Darkness…any time and any place…
That Peace can come in spite of Circumstances…
That nothing but self can ever control the Human Spirit…
That Compassion will outlive Cruelty…
That Justice will ultimately prevail…
That the best of life is never ultimately lost…
That death will not have the last word…
That we are never ultimately forgotten, alone, despised, or worthless...
That any stone can be rolled away...
That there is always something bright and believable
maybe even miraculous and possible for us in this life.
And when That Weekend of Life takes place for us…
I submit to you that it is a
Bigger Deal Than Easter Itself.
Because when That Weekend of Life takes place for us…
It won’t matter if we are religious or not…
It won’t matter if we subscribe to a literal or figurative resurrection…
Not much of anything like that will matter…
Because for us The Whole Event Will Be Real.
