At Christmas and Easter the Church asks us to believe the two things hardest to believe: that God became an infant, and that a man dead as a doornail is having breakfast with his friends. The Faith doesn’t get any harder than this; the rest of it, frankly, is a piece of cake.
Resurrection faith is hard. John the Evangelist knew that, as any honest Christian does. Undertakers are just as busy this week as they were in January. The graves and resting places of those we dearly love are not like Jesus’ tomb; they are not empty.
On Good Friday, in the evening, I learned that Bruce Portner died that afternoon. Take Bruce, Kim, and Sutter into your prayers. The Resurrection doesn’t spare us from dying, from grief. We can’t gloss over this. The New Testament doesn’t. Take this appointed reading for the second Sunday of Easter from the first letter of Peter [1. 3 – 9]. “In this — in the living hope given to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead — you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.”
Easter fuses two seemingly contradictory emotions: joy and grief. Sorrow exists right alongside joy; the one does not confer immunity from the other. In John’s gospel [chapter 15], Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, said, “I tell you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” In the very next verse he talks about his death. “My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Moments later he was in the Garden of Gethsemane telling his disciples “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”
As for me, today, I see myself in the two Marys running away from the empty tomb, “with fear and great joy.” I see you in them, too. We are always feeling those two emotions at the same time. Fear and joy. Sorrow and hopefulness.
What leaves us brokenhearted doesn’t separate us from God. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” [Ps 34] “He will call on me and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble.” [Ps 91] “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” the psalmist says in Psalm 23. Intimacy with God is real at the worst possible moments of stress and anguish and fear in our lives.
Job writes, “Man that is born of a woman / is of few days, and full of trouble. / He comes forth like a flower, and withers; / he flees like a shadow, and continues not.” Speaking with God about what would follow his own death, Job says, “You will call, and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. ” Here memory and longing are fused, like fear and joy, like doubt and faith.
The Risen Christ saves sinners, and he does more than that. Jesus’ passion condoles and sanctifies our sorrow, baptizes it with dignity and beauty. Grief can be an ugly thing, but living with it is not an ugly thing.
We long to be free of our sufferings. They fill our minds as Job’s sufferings filled his, like a sea of unwanted dreams. I think there is a hope that sleeps behind the doors locked in the heart of all of us even when we do not know what to call it. I think we glimpse that hope when we are wiser or stronger or more loving than left to ourselves we know how to be, when we are overwhelmed by joy and tragedy and the beauty and holiness of life that lie deeper than either. I think that just our longing for it, our listening for it, can stir that hope to life within us. And I think that the Risen Christ walks through the doors we close the way he appears to Thomas through locked doors, not because he is less real than they are but because he is so much more real, more solid, the same way that you and I can walk through air or water.