The Amazing Void

Luke 24:1-12

 

Sometimes a nod is as good as wink, don’t you think? As a kid I thought so. If I didn’t get a direct no to something I asked my parents, teacher or someone supposedly in charge, then I took it as a yes. A nod is as good as a wink.  The result; I was in trouble more times than I thought it fair.

 

On Easter eve we need to be careful to not invoke that saying here. The women come to the tomb. They have a special task to do. They had the necessary spices to anoint the body with even though the tomb had been sealed by the Romans. Were they aware of this or were they expecting to have the customary access to the body? They were surprised, not that the stone had been rolled away, like they were expecting to be able to get in.

 

What they were surprised at was the fact that the body was missing. As I am sure you and I would be. What they had expected was not the case. How did this happen? What had happened?  Even the words attributed to the young men in shining clothes only hint at the possibility of a resurrection. It is not enough for the Peter and the disciples. They need more than a nod is as good as a wink, and they go home and put all down to the emotion of the moment.

 

 David Ewart suggest "This passage contains no resurrection. But this lesson also contains trusting the amazing void."

 

What a powerful though for us tonight as we envisage what is to come, “trusting the amazing void”. Nothing is definite. It could be or it could not be. What we seek may come and it may not come. Children waiting for the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and Easter Bunny embrace the amazing void – that huge dark hole between when they start wishing for the special day and when it actually comes.

 

Dogs live in the present moment so much that when you say I’ll be back in an hour, they immediately look at you and go ‘are you back yet?” There is no gap between now and later, all is now.

 

Not for us humans and we often want to rush over the void to the moment when all is as it should be. We will do anything to get by the ‘amazing void”. The idea of trusting it is foreign to us. We need certainty, health, happiness, control. The dark place of emptiness and uncertainty is to be avoided at all costs. Yet for many of us we will spend a great deal of time in that place and be asked to trust it as a place of renewal, hope and possibility.

 

For example:

Only a handful of Rhodes scholars have had a disability but the newest Australian scholar Matt Pierri is not out to change the world, just people’s perceptions.

His own world changed three weeks before his 16th birthday in 2007 when he broke his neck playing Australian football at school and was left a quadriplegic.

He spent the next three weeks in hospital followed by five months in rehab.

The Year 11 student kept up his studies while attending rehab and regaining movement in his hands and returned to school to complete Year 12 the following year. He is now the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship”

He trusted the amazing void.

 

Our world is full of those, who like Matt and for various reasons, have had to trust the untrustable and find a new way of making meaning. Often it is no where as exciting as a Rhodes Scholarship, it is often just the courage to keep on keeping on, doing what needs to be done, and doing it over and over again.

 

Mother Teresa writes in her letters to her spiritual advisors that for some 30 years she had no confirmation of the presence of Jesus. Somewhere along the way Jesus had seemed to disappear yet she kept on doing what she was called to do, even in the midst of the dark and threatening void.

 

Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest and writer, Thomas Merton, modern mystic Eckhart Tolle and others all talk about the dark night of soul in which they were forced to trust when all seemed lost.

 

Easter Eve is that moment in the story of holy week. Jesus has died on the cross and been placed in the tomb. Now, when they thought they at least had the certainty of his body, they are left with no thing to mourn. The dark place of mourning just got darker. When you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Murphys’ rule and Murphy was an optimist!

 

Yet there is a glimmer of light, a word that points to the possibility of a risen Jesus. For Mary and the women this sends them running back to the men. For Peter it is just another strange event in his experience of Jesus and seems to far fetched and bewildering to even consider.

 

All this leaves them with a void, an amazing void, a void that is the tomb and the incredulity of the situation. So this is what Jesus talked about at the temple about pulling it down and building it up in three days, is this what he meant? Surely not. Yet…..

 

Sitting in the dark place of hopelessness and bewilderment allows our senses and reason to expand to embrace the possibility, to get us looking for something else, something that transcends and transform our situation. We need to take the time to allow the mysteries held in the void to become clear to us and to speak into our lives, not all at once, a little bit at a time. For Mary and Peter and the disciples the empty tomb and the possibility of a resurrected Jesus was too much to hold at one time, and needed time to allow them to begin to embrace the situation.

 

Loss of health, death of a loved one, a tragic accident, shocking news and more can hurl us into this amazing void from which we will eventually emerge transformed and different, but not all at once. We have to sit in it and allow it to unfold itself one frame at a time over, often, a lengthy period of time.

 

In the Easter story from Palm Sunday to Easter day we are asked to sit in each space and explore the experience of that day, the challenge of Palm Sunday, the love of Maundy Thursday, the violence of Good Friday and now the void of the empty tomb.

 

Each will unfold itself as it will and you will be transformed by the journey. Amen. 

After the Body Was Gone!

^{Mathew 28: 8}So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.

The noise of Friday was over. The bodies taken down. Only a few close family members and others stayed. They watched as the bodies were taken. Jesus to the borrowed tomb, the others to what ever space was available. 

The majority of the disciples had long since scurried back to a safe place, no doubt lost and bewildered by what had happened in one short, or was it, long day?

After the body was gone, the women and the one remaining disciple trudged off into the night, weary with sorrow and sadness. Grief is an extremely tiring experience, especially grief received under tragic circumstances. They walked home in the dark.

And how dark it was. Not just physically but spiritually and emotionally. You see they did not know about Sunday yet. Unlike us who leave the Good Friday service, they didn’t know Sunday was coming. They were to spend Saturday, and possibly forever, in the dark place of grief and loss of hope and a future.

Saturday would have been a long day. The day after a funeral when all have gone away and you are left on your own is a long, long day. There is no distraction, no action to keep you occupied. You sit and think about what was and what could have been. "If" only becomes something of a mantra. It is a day of no thing doing. The world has stopped and you can’t get off.

Saturday is the space in between the past and the future and as they had no idea what the future would look like, the space became more of an abyss than a short interruption.

It was something they shared with Jesus without knowing it. Jesus, too, was in the space-in-between. In the tomb he was alone, descending into the abyss that is death, without support, wisdom, love, without God, his Father. He was facing the loss of a life he had embraced willingly for a death he faced obediently. Now, what was the future to look like for him? Did he know or was this a journey into a new way of being for him? 

We can’t answer those questions. Nor should we try.

Yet the questions are answered, and as John Purdy suggests, amateurs not theologians, the religious elite or academics, found the answers. Amateurs. Amateurs are those who undertake something out of love for the task at hand. They are not professionals. Amateurs unravel the answer to the riddle of Saturday.

Purdy continues: “Surely the Marys' went to the tomb out of love...if we know anything of human nature, we know that love was the primary force that drove them there. Love is a more reliable alarm clock than Faith or Hope - more likely to get you out of bed and get you going early in the morning."

Just as love had led them to the cross, love brought them to the tomb. They could stay in the darkness no longer. They had to go and see where he lay and to hold a vigil if they could do nothing else. Their steps to the tomb would have been as heavy as those that lead them away from the cross. Their heart was no lighter, their tears no less urgent. Yet go they did.

Standing outside the tomb they experience the revelation of the empty tomb. Matthew tells the story with all the bells and whistles with the intention to get the reader to understand what a world changing experience it was. It was scary and exciting. Most scary things are exciting. One can hardly begin to understand the emotions they experienced. To say it blew their mind would be an understatement. Earthquakes, a moving boulder, an emptying and an angel!

How long they stood there we do not know but we do know, according to Matthew what they did next. ^“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” What a mix of emotions – fear and great joy. One could say it scared the hell out of them! Their fear was one of not understanding what had happened, what would happen, what it meant. Their great joy was because the one they loved was back with them, although I would have probably thrown something at him if he, after he had been crucified and buried, met me with “Greetings”! Was that all he could say? Didn’t he know how they felt?

In the midst of our darkness between Friday and Sunday we now get a glimpse of the light re-entering the world. Our darkness at the loss of Jesus is to be illuminated by his presence.

We know this as a personal truth. We know this as a church to be the truth. We are to celebrate this incredible moment with fear and great joy, because once you have encountered the resurrected Jesus everything, and every shade of things is possible. It is something to fear abut it is something to rejoice in.

Melinda Quivik suggests “The sermon on this day should propel the assembly to leave worship with both awe and celebratory power, eager to see where and how the risen one will meet them in their neighbours and friends, their prayer, their advocacy for what is good and just, and in their own gratitude for life and resurrection."

This moment changed our world. If it has changed your world what are you doing to be the change Christ brings into the world and your relationships? How does this event illuminate your darkness and empower you to go and do as Jesus requests, as the Marys do, despite a sense of fear but with great joy?

This evening we move from the space-in-between towards the coming light. Tomorrow we meet Jesus for ourselves, what is that going to be like for us? Amen