Posts Tagged ‘Resurrection’
On the Hard Road
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We never thought life would be like this, never considered we could lose so much. Death keeps shattering our plans and expectations with loss. Everything is upended. The world feels doomed, and things don’t make sense anymore. What will happen next?
It’s hard to believe he’s gone. We’ve been together so long.
The doctors said there’s not much they can do.
If I lose this job, I don’t know how to keep supporting them.
We can’t go back. We have to find a way here.
Our words of disbelief and grief today could echo back, nearly unchanged, those spoken two thousand years ago, when two grieving companions talked together on the road to Emmaus. They shared their grief at losing Jesus, their friend, whom they expected would save them, but who was betrayed, killed, and buried. They talked of the body missing, and people supposedly seeing angels.
As these two walk to Emmaus, Jesus comes walking alongside them. They don’t recognize the one they love. The man asks about their conversation, sees and hears their sadness, and then shares about his own suffering, speaking through the language of scripture.
Our words of disbelief and grief today could echo back, nearly unchanged, those spoken two thousand years ago, when two grieving companions talked together on the road to Emmaus.
Hard as it is to believe, this is resurrection: feeling loss and disorientation, long talks of grief, and receiving a stranger’s compassionate presence. Easter does not come with quick fixes or easy answers. There are times when we do not even see that Jesus is here, alive, with us: Jesus came to Mary as she visited the tomb, and she supposed him to be a gardener; he came to a frightened community gathered behind locked doors; to a group out fishing for whom he provided breakfast; and to these two friends, on the way and linked in sad talk.
This is still true: Jesus comes where we are now, amid difficult emotions, perplexing questions, as we walk and eat. Frederick Buechner wrote: “Jesus is apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments. … He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.”
One way to see Jesus is to stop and look back. Ignatius of Loyola taught that reflecting and then giving thanks is a key way to pray. I see Jesus more easily by looking back. In the past day or more, for what are you most thankful? Perhaps a kind word or gesture, a fear unmanifested, a beauty glimpsed, a memory recalled. “How did you receive love? When were you most fully alive?” Sometimes it’s only after an experience that we can see what it truly held and meant for us. When the two disciples finally recognized Jesus in Emmaus, they were then able to remember their “hearts burning within” while Jesus spoke to them on the road. Recognition comes later. We have to stop and look back to not miss it.
Hard as it is to believe, this is resurrection: feeling loss and disorientation, long talks of grief, and receiving a stranger’s compassionate presence. Easter does not come with quick fixes or easy answers.
To see Jesus, we often have to seek company. If you feel blind and weighed down in grief, you are not alone. Many of us feel the same. Like the two companions on the road, speak your grief to compassionate friends and strangers. Pray even when God feels absent. Jesus is present alongside us including when we do not see him.
Pray your pain. If you’re wanting help with words, about half of the psalms are honest examples. Start with Psalm 13 and Psalm 102. Lament is a cry of pain and a cry of trust. It is stark and boldly real about pain and suffering, and it assumes being heard.
Lament is not just for Lent or Holy Week but for life. Even God grieves! In Genesis 6, God “grieved in the heart” at how people behaved. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. From the cross, Jesus cried out with words from Psalm 22, trust and question in tender, wrenching symmetry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Lament is our ancient prayer and part of being human.
Consider this: How do you know when children are upset? They flail, cry, hit, stomp, and resist. How do children look when at ease, trusting? They slump, lean into us and objects, hug back, and rest.
As a child of God, I find that one way I am praying is like a child: with my body. I hit the air with my fists, then slowly push and pull as with a heavy object. Tensing arms and clenching fists, I curl or twist and stay in that tension offering my constricted self. This is a way of praying, expressing the pain.
Then I let go and relax, leaning against a wall or lying on the floor, letting my whole weight be supported. Taking deep breaths, I trust God holds me fully. I also stand with my arms outstretched and tilted back imagining I am floating in the ocean, or alternately tilted forward as if floating on a cloud. These are ways of expressing and feeling trust.
Music beckons the body to move, to dance, to express sighs too deep for words. Pray with music that prompts such tensing and hitting pain or such floating trust – or find music that invites both. Children of God, pray your confusion and pain, what is hard to bear. Ask for grace to trust and move in such a way that you can feel free to express and receive what is true for you.
Children of God, pray your confusion and pain, what is hard to bear.
Psychiatrist Curt Thompson encourages us to not deny our losses or diminish them by trying to compare our experience with someone else. Your grief is real, and it is yours. Thompson suggests writing down each day at least one thing you have lost or are losing. Then also name a couple things for which you are thankful. In this way, pray both grief and gratitude.
A tree with a large broken limb hanging down inspires both these moods of prayer in me. I let one arm bend, droop, twist, and hang, feeling the weight of what is broken and hurts. I then raise the other arm upward like healthy limbs in gratitude. Like the tree, I experience both realities at the same time and thus pray weight and wonder, grief and gratitude.
Jesus persistently comes to us, with us, alongside us – including when we do not see him. Not in dazzling power, but in the glimmering presence of shared stories, Jesus walks and eats with us. Pray your story wherever you are in its unfolding, perhaps with movements, shaking pain or floating trust. Jesus is with us, grieving with us, listening with love, and gently fanning our soul’s faint embers into flame.
Jesus is with us, grieving with us, listening with love, and gently fanning our soul’s faint embers into flame.
Questions for Reflection
– When have you met Jesus on the hard road? How did you know it was him?
– How does your body ask to pray? Do you pray with walking, or dancing, or other forms of movement? Will you try a new way of moving your prayer?
– Pray both grief and gratitude. Which one feels more present to you right now?
Is it possible this this is easter: the pain, the grief, the confusion, and the loss we know only too well? On the hard road of life, Br. Luke Ditewig promises us, we do and will encounter Jesus, who comes alongside us even when we do not see him. This is resurrection.
Overlightened by Good News – Br. Jack Crowley
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Br. Jack Crowley
Don’t worry, each of these sermons is only five minutes long. You won’t be here all day. There will be plenty of time for the garden party.
One of my favorite parts of today’s Gospel passage is how it is overshadowed by good news. Overshadowed is probably not the right word, so I’ll make one up, maybe overlightened would be better.
The good news of Jesus’ resurrection overlightens the bad news of how this Gospel passage starts. That morning started really dimly. The only thing the Beloved Disciple knew that morning was that Jesus was dead and his body was missing.
So he ran. The Beloved Disciple ran, but he did not run away. He did the opposite. He ran to the tomb.
I always try to imagine how the Beloved Disciple’s felt during that run to the tomb. At some point in life, we all get acquainted with that feeling of anxiety and excitement swirling together. That feeling that makes your leg wobble, but you keep moving because sometimes that’s the only thing you can do.
The race to the tomb was an act of desperation, an act of faith, and an act of life. We all have our own race to the tomb. More importantly, we all have our own race to the resurrection. Our own jagged journey to the realization that life continues after death. This is not it. This thing of ours keeps going after we die.
Can you imagine the joy the Beloved Disciple must have felt when he realized what had happened? The good news that Jesus had in fact risen. The Beloved Disciple realized not only what had happened, but what Jesus’ resurrection implied. We too will rise again.
Until we get there, we too have lives to live. Lives mixed with action and contemplation. Lives full of running and realization. The good news is that we know the good news. We have time. We have time and more than a lifetime to figure it all out. What we cannot get done now, we will get done on the other side of this life.
Of course this does not mean we get to be lazy. The Christian life is a demanding life. It’s a life that demands meaning, and for us to make that meaning with God, ourselves, and one another. We must do this every day of our lives and beyond.
Meeting Us Where We Are, and Sending Us Out – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
Has the Risen Christ ever come to you when you were in a place of need? If so, how did he come?
I’m moved by the resurrection accounts in the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus returns to his broken-hearted disciples as the Risen One, meeting them just where they are.
Early in the morning of the first day of the week, he appears to Mary Magdalene just outside the tomb.[i] She is confused and desperate, weighed down with grief and loss, and can only imagine that someone has, for reasons incomprehensible to her, removed the body from the tomb and laid it somewhere else. Her teary eyes fail to recognize the One who speaks to her. She assumes he is the gardener and pleads with him to tell her where they have laid him. Then Jesus speaks her name. “Mary.” And her world immediately brightens. Instantly, the weight of grief is lifted from her shoulders; hope springs anew; her teacher is alive!
Recall how Jesus appears to Peter, the faithful and devoted disciple who, swept up in a moment of fear, denied knowing his Lord three times.[ii] Now he meets Jesus on the shores of Lake Galilee, where he has been fishing with the others.[iii] Jesus speaks to him so tenderly. “Peter, do you love me?” Never a word of blame is spoken; Jesus does not criticize or shame. Three times the question is asked; three times Peter affirms his love for Jesus; three times the charge is given, “Feed my sheep.”[iv] Jesus offers forgiveness, accepts Peter’s pledge of love, and restores him to a position of leadership among the disciples. So kind, so tender, so sensitive to Peter’s pain, Jesus absolves him. Read More
Open Eyes, Burning Hearts – Br. Lain Wilson
“Jesus himself came near and went with [the disciples], but their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Lk 24:15-16).
Stop and think about that. “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” This was the man whom these two disciples had chosen to follow, the man for whom these disciples had given up their jobs and left their families. His good news defined their reality. And suddenly he was gone, brutally executed, his body now missing from his tomb. Imagine how they must have felt.
I can imagine these two disciples, shocked and confused by the recent events, walking down the road. I can imagine them praying the words of our psalm this morning: “The cords of death entangled me; . . . I came to grief and sorrow” (Ps 116:2). I can imagine their eyes, taking in their surroundings but not really seeing them. Is it surprising, really, that they perhaps failed to see what was right in front of them?
But is there something more going on? After all, their eyes were kept from recognizing Jesus. The word translated as “kept” can also mean to hold, to seize, to restrain, to arrest. It’s a forceful word. The disciples don’t just fail to recognize Jesus; they are actively hindered from knowing that this man walking and talking with them is their Lord and teacher, risen from the dead. Disciples in other accounts may not recognize Jesus immediately, but only here are they kept from recognizing him. Only here are the disciples’ eyes made to be closed, to be unable to perceive the reality in front of them.
So what’s happening here? In the way the evangelist distinguishes seeing from perceiving, I am reminded of how Jesus, quoting Isaiah, explains the purpose of parables: “to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’” (Lk 8:10, quoting Is 6:9-10). This seems to be what is happening here. These disciples look at the man accompanying them, but they do not perceive him. Read More
We Stand on Holy Ground – Alleluia! – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Today is Easter Day; the glorious culmination of these days of Holy Week. Today, our Lord Jesus Christ has been raised gloriously from the dead. Today is a day for rejoicing. Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
Although we’ve had to wear masks for much of the time, this has been a wonderful Holy Week. But during the week, my mind went back to a very special Holy Week I had, many years ago, when I was rector of a parish in England. What made it especially memorable was that I had invited a friend of mine to come and stay with me for the week. Richard and I used to teach together, and it was great having him to stay for Holy Week and Easter. But Richard was not a person of faith. It was a very strange experience to be immersed in all the preparations and liturgies of Holy Week, and then to go home to someone who wasn’t really very interested. Perhaps some of you know that experience, with perhaps a spouse, a child or close friend. In fact, quite a lot of my friends don’t believe in God, and I sometimes feel a bit of a failure: these friends who know me so well – so why don’t they believe? I can’t be a very effective evangelist, and I’m a priest as well! Read More
The Hope of the Resurrection: What We Can Remember – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
On this day of resurrection, we all share something with these faithful women coming to the tomb. We also share something with the disciples and with Jesus. We share woundedness. We are all wounded. Jesus is wounded by the scourgings that preceded his crucifixion, and the horrific piercing wounds hanging on the cross. None of these wounds is yet healed. And Jesus’ heart is also wounded by the betrayal and abandonment of his closest friends, the disciples, who literally left Jesus hanging. The women, who were there when they crucified their Lord, witnessed it all, a horrific experience. They are wounded with trauma, with grief, and with fear. Meanwhile we know that the disciples are hiding – hiding in their own fear, and guilt, and shame. So much trauma.[i] On this day of resurrection, everyone in the Gospel story is wounded, and this is likely true for many, if not all of us here. You are bearing your own wounds in body, mind, or spirit: wounds that have come at you from beyond your control, or wounds self-inflicted. You also may know the wounds of the cross, what it has meant for you “to take up your cross and follow Jesus.”[ii] Here we all are on this day of resurrection: Jesus, the faithful women, the disciples, and we ourselves alive, wounded. All of us. We acknowledge Jesus’ resurrection and, at the same time, acknowledge that everything is not all right in our world and in our own lives. We are wounded. Read More
Jesus, the Prism of God’s Light – Br. Keith Nelson
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2 Corinthians 4:1-6
John 14:6-14
How does Jesus show us the nature of God? One resounding answer is: as Light. Reflected light, shimmering into the world we see and know, igniting into conscious awareness. The primordial light shining in the darkness of John’s Prologue; the light that replaces that of sun and moon in the eternal city of the Revelation to John; the light of Christ we kindle at Easter; the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”
Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Philip is done with all the poetry; all the elusive and allusive imagery John’s Jesus has woven to evoke, to awaken, to captivate, to bestow the relational knowing of God found in and through himself. Philip wants a clear shaft of light outlining a straightforward vision. Before Jesus leaves them, Philipp wants just a single flash of definitive truth.
But this is not the way John’s Jesus reveals God. Instead, the words and the works of this Jesus are like the sides and angles of a prism. The clarity of a prism enables a beam of invisible, light to pass through. But it also refracts that light into something new: the visible color spectrum. “No one has ever seen God,” we read again in John’s Prologue. “It is God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made God known.” Jesus refracts the Father’s invisible light, scattering constellated colors that draw our eyes toward their source. It is the interplay of the pattern that beckons us – through dots we can connect, the words and works of Jesus that reveal the truth in the measure we can receive it. Receiving the light is the long slow work of conversion, not epiphany. Read More
The Resurrection Gives Hope – Br. James Koester
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Growing up as I did, not far from the geographic centre of North America,[1] I was completely unfamiliar with tides. I was unfamiliar with them that is, until I went swimming one day in the Pacific Ocean. I had taken off my sandals, shirt, hat, glasses, and put them carefully under my towel, to be retrieved when I came out of the water. Eventually I did, and returned to reclaim my things. Except they weren’t there. I looked up and down the shore, thinking I had gotten out in a different place, or that someone had stolen them. It was only after several minutes of scouring the beach that I realized the people who had been sunning themselves were still in their same spots, except that the water was now much closer to where they were lying. That’s when I realized I had not forgotten where I put my things; nor that someone had taken them; but that the tide was coming in, reclaiming, and renewing the shoreline. When I phoned the diocesan office to begin an insurance claim, all Betty could do was laugh and say, oh James, you really are a prairie boy.
Since then, I have been cautiously fascinated by the tides as they ebb and flow, back and forth, in and out, day by day, year by year, eon by eon. Over time it is possible to note changes, as the ebb tide reveals what lies hidden, and the flow tide covers what is familiar, and creates something new.
This act of revelation and renewal, uncovering and covering, unmaking, and making, destroying, and creating, however is not an act of gently lapping waves. It is an act of force, even of violence, as surging waves crash upon the shore, moving boulders, reshaping rivers, tearing out trees, lifting buildings, pushing them inland, or sucking them into the ocean, until at last what once was, is no longer, and coastlines are reshaped, made new.
It is no accident that I have been thinking about tides a lot these last two years. Many of you have heard me reflect on how this season in our lives has been a tidal season, as our lives have been unmade by forces beyond our control, and what was once covered is now uncovered. Like the ebbing tide which leaves behind the detritus of rotting seaweed, garbage, and dead fish, we see around us the detritus of injustice, inequality, environmental destruction, nationalism, and greed as the ebb tide of the pandemic recedes. The smell of dead fish left behind by the ebbing tides, or caused by the pollution of our earth’s waters, is no different. Disparities revealed in restrictive voting rights, or vaccine availability are no different. They stink just the same.
Today we look out at a world that stinks of injustice, inequality, environmental degradation, nationalism, and greed. Two years of the ebbing tide of a global pandemic have revealed a host of things now uncovered, or which before we had chosen to be too blind to see.
In the same way, the events of that first Holy Week uncovered the stinking detritus of human greed, pride, and arrogance. Like an ebbing tide, that first Holy Week revealed the injustice and jealously that infect human hearts. It was into that stench of injustice and jealousy that God chose to walk. As R. S. Thomas, the Welsh poet described it in his poem The Coming:
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.[2]
Let me go there, and into a world stinking with war, aggression, religious intolerance, political power games, and military occupation, the Word was made flesh and lived among us.[3] It was this same world littered with greed, pride and arrogance, injustice and jealousy, and everything which infects the human heart, that was shaken to its foundations that first Easter as the stone was rolled away, revealing a tomb empty, unable to contain the life which had been sealed into it.
For Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and those first followers of Jesus, the resurrection was good news, not because it covered or masked the stink of death. The resurrection was good news for them, not because it covered over the stink of war, aggression, religious intolerance, political power games, and military occupation. The resurrection was good news for those first followers of Jesus because it gave them hope. It gave them hope in the midst of a world that stank of death, for if God can give life to the dead, then God can mend, heal, and cleanse a broken, stinking world. If God can raise Jesus from the dead, then all things can be made new,[4] not by masking them, or covering them up, but by recreating them, and making them new, even as they bear the wounds of the cross.
The resurrection of Jesus was good news to those first followers, because it gave them hope.
We come to Easter this year exhausted, not by our keeping of Lent, but by our keeping on, keeping on. We are exhausted by two years of uncertainty, sadness, and anxiety brought on by a global pandemic. We are exhausted, by two years of blatant inequality and injustice. We are exhausted by fear, that what is going on in Ukraine, will plunge the world into even more chaos, and uncertainty. We are exhausted, by the stink of these past two years, as the pandemic tide ebbs out revealing, what has long been hidden.
But if the resurrection was good news for Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and those first followers of Jesus who lived in a world stinking with war, aggression, religious intolerance, political power games, and military occupation, then the resurrection is good news for us, not because it covers the stink of these past years, but because it gives us hope. It gives us hope that in the midst of a world that stinks, God can give life to the dead. If God can raise Jesus from the dead, then God can mend, heal, and cleanse a broken, stinking world, making all things new, not by masking them, or covering them up, but by recreating them, even as we bear the wounds of the cross.
If the resurrection is not good news to a Covid world, then it was not good news to a few dozen people who lived under the heel of a brutal Roman occupation. But the resurrection was good news to them, and it is good news for us.
The resurrection is good news for us, because by it we live in hope, that our broken, stinking world is being mended, healed, and cleansed as the flow tide comes in, not covering the stench, but recreating and renewing the shore.
The resurrection of Jesus is good news for the whole world, because the promise of God for life, is a promise for all creation, and not simply for certain individuals.
In a world that stinks with the detritus of rotting seaweed, garbage, and dead fish, of injustice, inequality, environmental destruction, nationalism, and greed, we see a world not so different than the one those first followers of Jesus saw, that stank of war, aggression, religious intolerance, political power games, and military occupation. In a world that stinks, the resurrection of Jesus is good news to all, because it is a promise of life that is mended, healed, cleansed, and restored.
It is that world, a world mended, healed, and made new by the flow tide of Jesus’ resurrection, which will bring hope to the people of Ukraine and Russia, just as it will bring hope to us, just as it brought hope to Mary Magdalene and those first followers of Jesus, living under the brutal heel of Roman occupation.
The good news of the resurrection is not simply a promise to you and to me. It is a promise to all creation, that all things will be made new. Behold, I am making all things new. That is God’s promise to us today in the resurrection of Jesus, even as the surf surges and pounds, moving, reshaping, tearing, lifting, pushing, and sucking, until at last what once was, is no longer, and all things are made new.
The promise of the resurrection is not a promise of gently lapping waves, but a promise of force, dare I say, a promise of violence, which heals, mends, and cleanses our world.
Lectionary Year and Proper: Year C, Easter Vigil
Solemnity or Major Feast Day: The Great Vigil of Easter
[1] The city of Centre ND claims to be the centre point of North America and is about 330 miles SE from Regina SK.
[2] R.S. Thomas, The Coming,
[3] John 1: 14
[4] Revelation 21: 5
The Hope of the Resurrection – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
We hear proclaimed in our Gospel account that Jesus is resurrected. But one thing has not changed. Even though Jesus is resurrected, Jesus’ heart is still broken. Just several days earlier, from the Mount of Olives, Jesus had wept as he looked upon Jerusalem, grieving his own people’s neglect of “justice and mercy.”[i] That wound in Jesus’ heart has not changed. And Jesus is also still wounded by the betrayal and abandonment of his closest friends, the disciples, who literally left Jesus hanging. And Jesus’ resurrected body is still wounded by the scourgings that preceded his crucifixion, and the horrific piercing wounds from his hanging on the cross, and the wound in his side. None of these wounds is yet healed. Other witnesses are also wounded. The women who were there when they crucified their Lord, witnessed it all, a horrific experience, leaving the women traumatized. And the disciples, wounded by their own culpability. On that first Easter day the disciples are hiding – hiding in their own fear, and guilt, and shame.[ii] On this day of resurrection, everyone in the Gospel story is wounded.
And so for us: the wounds of life. We can acknowledge Jesus’ resurrection and, at the same time, acknowledge somuch woundedness around us and within us: woundedness from the residual trauma and ongoing suffering and loss because of COVID; woundedness because of our own personal experience of loss – be it our own loss of health, or our loss of security, or our loss of dignity; or our loss of loved ones who have meant the world to us. Jesus is resurrected; however meanwhile we witness such woundedness in our world because of the appalling wars and political upheaval going on right now on every continent of the earth; the woundedness for so many people who have been displaced, who have fled for their lives in terror, having lost their homes or lost their hope. There is also, in our own time, the woundedness of the earth, our common home, in the face of the climate emergency. Saint Paul is speaking to our own day when he writes about “the whole creation groaning in labor pains… and waiting for adoption.”[iii] Read More
Bold, Brash, and Incredibly Audacious – Br. James Koester
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I have always loved these two days, All Saints and All Souls. They evoke something deep within me, that I often have difficulty putting into words. This is especially true as I get older. Somewhere, deep in my soul, I feel as if I am letting out a great sigh, not so much of contentment, although I am content, but of consent, because these two days put into words, what I believe to be true in the very depths of my being.
The history of these two days is actually quite fascinating. It takes us from the earliest days of the faith to the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, from the Pantheon in Rome to the trenches of France. Since the earliest days of the Church, Christians have attempted to put into words not simply what we know from experience, but what we know in the very depths of our being, to be true.
What we know from experience is that death is real. Yes, we do our best to deny it, delay it, and pretend it didn’t happen. We mask it with make-up and hide it away with polite euphemisms. Yet in the end we cannot outrun it, and like Jesus, can only weep[1] when faced with it. Once however, our tears are dry, we are left trying to put into words another reality: having lived and loved on earth, do the dead continue to live and love in that place where they can no longer be seen?
For some the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Death is the ultimate disaster because it is the end of all things. All that is left are our memories, like the lingering scent of someone’s cologne. Anything else is wishful thinking.
For the Christian, the resurrection of Jesus challenges the notion that death is the ultimate disaster, for in Jesus, life is changed, not ended,[2] and death becomes not the end, but a door, not a wall, but a gate, not the end, but a new beginning. It is this which we proclaim on these two days, as we put into words our belief in the intercommunion of the living and the dead in the Body of Christ.[3]
We do so, not as wishful thinkers denying, delaying, and pretending that death does not happen. We do so with the stink of death in our nostrils. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord already there is a stench because he has been dead four days,”[4] or, as the King James Bible puts it, “Lord … he stinketh.” She says this, having just made her great confession of faith, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”[5]
Martha’s great confession that Jesus is the Messiah, is an affirmation that the long-awaited messianic age, when the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, [and] the poor have good news brought to them,[6] has arrived, with the coming of Jesus into the world.
In the face of so much contradictory evidence, such a claim is bold, brash, and incredibly audacious. Yet that is the claim we make as Christians. Evidence to the contrary, these are the very things we see happening today. The blind do receive their sight, the lame do walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf do hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. If these are not true, then Jesus is not who Martha claimed him to be, and we of all people are to be pitied, for if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.[7]
And we make this claim, not for ourselves alone, but for all those whom we love, but see no longer.[8] And that is the crux of these two days. We are making a bold, brash, and incredibly audacious claim, not simply for ourselves, but for countless women and men who have lived lives of faith, or even just attempted to, in ages past.
Like Martha, we too confess that [Jesus is] the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. In making that confession we say something specific about the dead. We boldly, brashly, and with incredible audacity claim that the dead are raised to life. This does not deny the reality of death. After all, even Lazarus stinketh.
Such audacity claims for the dead, and for us, that death is not a disaster, nor a wall, nor the end. It claims that death is a door, a gate, and a new beginning.
And so, we come to these two days, All Saints’ and All Souls’. While the stink of death is in our nostrils, we say: I believe in the resurrection of the body.[9] In the face of overwhelming grief, whether it be from COVID, or the trenches of France, we say: I believe in the resurrection of the body. When someone we love dies, at a great age, or a young age, ripe in years, or full of unrealized promise, we say: I believe in the resurrection of the body.
I love these two days, not because I am a romantic, lost in wishful thinking, pretending that death is not real, but because I am a realist, who has smelt death. I am a realist who has smelt death, and who with Martha knows Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, even while someone I love, but see no longer stinketh.
The world stinks right now, and the answer to that stench is not wishful thinking. The answer to the stench is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, who cries out in the face of all the stench and grief of the world, “Take away the stone … Lazarus, come out! … Unbind him, and let him go.”[10]
Today and tomorrow, as we remember the countless saints and souls, known and unknown, who have lived lives of faith, or simply tried to, we do so with the echo Martha’s confession, and the sound of Jesus’ command, ringing in our hearts, as we proclaim boldly, brashly, and with incredible audacity, in the face of all the stench, I believe in the resurrection of the body, and once more Lazarus emerges from his tomb, and we take from him the rags of death.
I love these two days, because somewhere deep in my soul, I breathe out a long sigh of consent, as I say once again, I believe in the resurrection of the body.
Solemnity or Major Feast Day: All Saints’ Day (Transferred)
[1] John 11: 35
[2] Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer, Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979, page 382
[3] Episcopal Church, Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Church Publishing Incorporated, 1997, page 410.
[4] John 11: 39
[5] John 11: 27
[6] Luke 7: 22
[7] 1 Corinthians 15: 14 – 19
[8] Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer, Church Publishing Incorporated, page 504
[9] Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer, Church Publishing Incorporated, page 96
[10] John 11: 39, 43, 44