The empty tomb

A word for the week

He is not here. Of all the sentences ever spoken, this is one of the strangest and most important, and it is worth stopping on before we rush to the joy. The women came at dawn to a grave, which is the one place you can be sure of finding a dead man. They came to do the last sad kindness, to tend a body. And the tomb was open, and the body was gone, and the word that met them was: he is not here.

Notice that the first thing the resurrection produces is not joy. It is terror. Matthew says the guards shook and became like dead men. He says the women left with fear and great joy, in that order, both at once. This is worth sitting with, because we have made Easter into a tidy spring festival, and the first Easter was nothing tidy. It was an earthquake, and an angel like lightning, and grown men fainting, and two women running from a graveyard with their hearts slamming, not sure whether the world had just ended or just begun. Resurrection is not a comforting idea. It is a fact that breaks the rules everyone had made their peace with, and the first honest response to it is to be shaken.

Because here is what the empty tomb actually does. It takes the one thing every human being had accepted as final, death, the wall none of us gets past, and it says: not final after all. Everyone in that world, everyone in ours, had built their lives around the certainty that death wins in the end. You get your years and then it is over. The empty tomb is the universe saying otherwise, and if it is true, then everything you were resigned to is suddenly up for question. That is thrilling and it is frightening, because it means you cannot settle into despair anymore. Real hope is a more demanding thing to carry than resignation.

See what the angel tells the women to do with it. Do not be afraid. Go, and tell. The news is not for keeping; the moment they have it, they are sent to carry it. And then, on the way, the best thing happens: Jesus himself meets them. Not a rumor of him, not an empty grave only, but the living man, on the road, saying rejoice. They take hold of his feet, real feet, and worship. The resurrection is not an idea they were asked to believe. It is a person they ran into.

And notice the tenderness of the first thing the risen Jesus says: do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers. My brothers. These are the men who ran, who denied him, who were hiding while he died. He does not call them cowards or traitors, though they had been both. He calls them brothers, and sends word to them first. The very first act of the risen Lord is to reach back for the ones who failed him. That tells you what he rose with. Not a grudge. Not a reckoning. The same relentless mercy he died with.

He is not here, for he is risen. The grave is empty, and it stays empty, and that is either the most important fact in the world or nothing at all. The women were the first to have to decide. So are we. And the one who settles it is not an argument. It is the same man, alive, on the road, saying, do not be afraid.