The Uprising of Hope

The early hours of the morning have a holy silence about them, seemingly suspended in time as the rest of the world sleeps. Only a few determined birds chirp. The hum of background noise—talking, bustling, working, hammering, cooking—are all absent. The silence in these hours is almost as palpable as the presence of a person. Here, in this holy silence, Mary Magdalene attends to her own thoughts and senses in the thin place between this life and the next. In the silence and darkness even her weeping must have felt holy. This may have been what it felt like in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep. Dark, deep, holy, silent space. There is no fanfare or festival here. Not yet. Here, in this very thin place, is where Mary goes to find the Jesus’ body.

Here, after a walk enshrouded in quiet and tears, Mary Magdalene discovers the tomb empty. Here, in today’s gospel, she is confronted with grief that the teacher and messiah, whom she loved, had been taken from her and from the whole community of disciples who followed him. In an attempt to understand how to piece life back together—how find God’s hand in the midst of all this, she goes to the tomb to look after his body, and finds only emptiness.

Tears and grief are not what we want to think about on Easter morning. As the first bulbs of Spring push up through the ground, pushing hopeful exclamation points of color and life up onto the recently snow-covered ground, we are ready to run, not walk, into hope and new life. And we are not alone. When Mary tells the disciples that Jesus’ body is no longer in the tomb, they practically trip over one another racing to get there and see it for themselves. But Mary is not so hasty. Her grief lingers for a little while as she bears on her shoulders the weight of her loss, and the loss of the hope that her teacher and Messiah embodied. Like Mary, we come to this Easter morning carrying our own grief. We weep for those victims of the nerve gas in Syria, and those on the front lines of battlefields. We weep for those we love who struggle with illness. We weep for those we love who are no longer with us. We weep for lost jobs, broken relationships, and lost opportunities.

This morning, it is appropriate that the world’s grief if concentrated into Mary’s for a holy moment. Unlike the disciples who don’t pause for grief, Mary holds vigil at the empty tomb. It is only there, through the veil of her tears, that she beholds the angels. It is there, where she is brave enough to face the emptiness and darkness, that Christ himself appears to her. Everything in us wants to run, practically tripping over one another, away from darkness and emptiness. We want to be caught up in the fanfare, and put darkness behind us. But the great good news of Mary’s encounter with the angels and with the risen Christ at the empty tomb, is that God does not wait until the darkness passes to break into our lives. The Risen Christ appears to Mary right in the midst of her grief-stricken condition, as she is engulfed in tears. He comes even as the disciples are claimed by fear. He comes even as Thomas is crippled by doubt. God, in Christ, does not wait for sunlight or fanfare to invade our lives with hope, but meets us, even in the early hours of the morning, when solitude confronts us. This is no coincidence. Christ comes to declare that even darkness is a holy sacred thing when we allow Him to enter and transform it. His absence in the tomb and at the after the resurrection points us to the place he most wants to be. He wants to be seen in our bodies, in our lives, in our service. He rose from the tomb to live in us—His new body.

The risen Christ comes in the midst of darkness because it is God’s M.O. to use darkness to create, transform, and bring new life. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” The great good news of Easter is that God invades the darkness and the empty places, right in the midst of whatever condition we are in. God transforms it into a force for creativity, for new beginnings, and for new life. When our children were little we read them a book entitled, “On The Day You Were Born.” It reads, “While you waited in darkness, tiny knees curled to chin, the Earth and her creatures, with the Sun and the Moon, all moved in their places, each ready to greet you the very first moment of the very first day you arrived. On the day you were born, the round planet earth turned toward your morning sky, whirling past darkness, spinning the night into light.” This is the work and grace of God in Christ—to spin the night into light. To make something beautiful out of nothing. Out of the formless void, out of the chaos and disorder, God creates and transforms all things.

The miracle of the risen Christ—the miracle of the empty tomb—is that it changes, not only Jesus, but the whole world. It changes forever who God is with us. It changes the way we are. From now on, we know that we are never alone. As Christ sheds the wrappings of death, death loses its claim on us as well. Christ’s rising is also our liberation. Pain, suffering, fear, and hopelessness unwrap themselves from our souls and fall aside. In one holy moment, the chasm between our lives and the divine life of God is bridged.  This new relationship is clear in Jesus’ conversation with Mary. When the risen Christ is talking to Mary, the pronouns he uses in referring to God are no longer formal, as they were before his rising. When he speaks of “my Father” or “your Father,” the pronouns are intimate and familiar, not the formal, more distant ones. The space and distance is gone. In Jesus’ resurrection, God tore down all the barriers between us and the divine life of God.  Christ’s resurrection allows us to know God the way Jesus knew God. It allows to call God “Abba,” as Jesus did. The best translation of Abba is “Daddy.” Out of the darkness Christ has made all of us children of the Light. In Christ, the darkness is only a backdrop for the light. A holy space.

Christ’s resurrection is a Holy uprising. This uprising removes the stones that keep us from entering into our true identity in God. In Christ, God gives us the grace to transform our grief into mission, our fear into courage, and our doubt into faith. Violette is a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda. She lost her husband and was left to raise her children alone, when she learned about a program that was a true uprising of hope: Women for Women International. She enrolled and was matched with a sponsor in the United States - a woman named Liz Hammer, a Boston mother of two. Liz pledged to provide $30 month for one year to support Violette’s trainings, a portion of which also helped her pay for food, school fees and clothing. As the year progressed, Violette flourished. She learned marketable job skills and honed her innate leadership abilities. Despite having only a high school education, Violette has become a local businesswoman and a leader in her community.  Where Violette had been enshrouded in grief, left to wonder how she would put the pieces of her life back together, the Women for Women program gave her hope and a mission. Through the program God met her at the empty tomb, when she didn’t know who she was looking for, and offered her a new and fruitful life. Her hopelessness was transformed into hope. Her isolation was transformed into a new vocation. This is what God does. It is who God is. The hope of the resurrection is nothing less than God’s uprising. In the risen Christ God not only overcame the power of death, but gave hope a Body—that body is us. Each one of us is called to live out our baptismal vows by carrying hope out of the tomb and into the world. We are each called to participate in the uprising of Christ. As author Brian McClaren says, this is “an uprising of hope, not hate…an uprising armed with love, not weapons. This uprising shouts a joyful promise of life and peace, not angry threats of hostility and death. It is an uprising of outstretched hands, not clenched fists.”

When the Risen Christ says to Mary, “don’t touch me,” the more accurate translation is “don’t cling to me.” Christ’s command to her is his Easter command to each one of us. We are not called to remain in the tomb and behold Christ. We are not called to wait for the darkness to pass. We are called to run out from the tomb and carry the hope of Christ out into the world.  The risen Christ transformed us for a purpose—that we might transform the world by our very lives. So on this Easter Sunday, we come to the altar knowing that we don’t have to leave our pain, our weeping, or our brokenness behind. It is God’s M.O. to meet us right in the midst of it, to transform it, and make of us instruments of hope. So let us run headlong into that hope, claiming our identity as children of Light. This is what it means to be truly alive. Let’s tell others of the most hopeful uprising of all. The Lord is risen! Alleluia! Amen.