On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
We had an intern in the very first parish I was assigned to in Cincinnati, Ohio, after my ordination to the priesthood. Elizabeth, a woman in her mid-50’s, was trying to sort out her own call to the priesthood and had come to the parish to try on different aspects of that role and to interact with me, a newly ordained woman priest.
Very new to the role myself, I was aware that though friendly towards me, Elizabeth had many questions about me, many assumptions about me, many potential issues with me. As time passed and she heard me preach and listened to me teach, her agitation seemed to grow.
Then one day over tea, after an awkward initial conversation, Elizabeth said: “Melissa, exactly what do you believe??” I don’t remember my response, but I’m sure that it had something to do with my not being drawn to a kind of propositional faith or being the kind of person whose faith was tied to the literal truth of the Bible. And so I found myself telling her a good deal about what my faith was not grounded in.
As I was saying these things, Elizabeth’s expression grew more and more horrified. Finally, she couldn’t contain herself any longer.
“Melissa,” she said, “Do you believe in the resurrection?”
“Aha!” I thought, this is the ultimate question: the question she’s been wanting to ask me from the first day we met, a question to test me based on her standards of what faith is all about, and my response to this question, whatever that response might be, would shape her sense of my credibility as a Christian, my credibility as a priest.
I took a deep breath, wondering what in the world to say that would be true for me. What to say that might shift the ground a bit to what I thought was important. And then for a second my mind went back to the days, the weeks, and even the years after the death of my five-year-old daughter, an event that I had believed would destroy my life but did not. And then my mind went back to other events too, to defeats, wounds, and losses, all of which seemed to wield the power of death over me. And yet, there I was at a table in Cincinnati, Ohio, sipping tea and talking to Elizabeth.
Do you believe in the resurrection?
Finally words came: “I rely on the resurrection,” I said. “I rely on the resurrection.”
Perhaps it was a subtle distinction I was making, but for me, it was and is a critical one. And perhaps in some strange way it was similar to the distinction the two men in dazzling clothes were making when they spoke to the three women who had come to the tomb to tend to the body of their rabbi and friend in today’s gospel account. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the two men ask the women. “He is not here, but has risen.”
In their description of the resurrection, the men affirm the resurrection but emphasize that Jesus is among the living, inhabiting life in all its dynamism, still in relationship with us; Jesus is among the living where we are, where we must daily make decisions about what we will trust, what we will rely on, what we will, in the end, act out of.
I rely on the resurrection.
And if I’m not being clear enough, let me say it this way. Our Christian faith, the faith we have just baptized three sleepy people into, the faith we ourselves have been baptized into, is not about subscribing to a list of propositions or certainties that settle things for us, leading us into a secure building or a quiet tomb where we can sit before those propositions, those certainties protected from the real questions of our lives or the difficult issues in the complex and troubled world we live in.
Rather our Christian faith is somehow about our entering a larger story that God invites us into. And what we do in awe and wonder and even sometimes, in fear, is to give ourselves to that story. It’s a story about our being created in the image of God and our losing hold of that image. But it’s also a story about God recovering that image for us and never letting go of us in the process.
It is this God, the author of the story we have entered, that we can come to rely upon, the one who creates life, who finds and restores what is lost, who raises up whatever is cast down.
And we need each other to do this—to come to rely upon this God.
At my first Easter Vigil hear at St. Paul’s I was feeling musically challenged. And so when it came time for the Easter Acclamation to be chanted, it was not I who sang the first Alleluia. It was Howard Henry chanting it in my ear so that I could hear the tune and could then chant it to all of you.
And so we come to rely on the resurrection through hearing others sing about it in the stories of their lives: ordinary, amazing stories about people who daily inhabit the land of the living, not the land of dead: people going on with life after a crippling loss; people working for peace in the midst of intractable conflict; people working for justice in the face of overwhelming injustice, people responding to difficult situations with courage or generosity or forgiveness; people attending to the piece of the world that has been given into their care with humility and love. They rely on the resurrection. They rely on an energy not their own that is about life and renewal for all, not death. And in relying on this energy, they connect to it, they themselves become it, channeling that energy to the rest of us.
Years ago as part of team development exercises, we were asked to participate in what were called “trust walks.” During these walks we allowed ourselves to be blindfolded and led around by another person. The idea was that in doing this we would learn both about how to trust another person, how to rely on someone else, and in learning to do it in this way, we would learn to do it on the team and in a broader setting.
You and I do not walk through our lives blindfolded. Most of the time we have our eyes wide open, not only seeing but feeling the things that seem to have the power to bring death and indignity into our lives and into the lives of others. Relying upon the resurrection and the God who raises things up is not about closing our eyes to these things. As the women at the empty tomb are told, it starts with remembering—remembering Jesus words that he “must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again,” and it continues in the community in which the lives of its people bear witness to this reality.
