Early on the first day...

The Risen One

“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

                                        Mark 16:1-3

There they are again—those women, those fearless women. The very same ones who stood at the foot of the cross and watched him die, and who sat at his feet throughout his ministry to learn from him just as did the male disciples. Mary Magdalene and Mary his mother, now called the mother of James and Salome, since her first born is dead. They asked permission from no one to go and do what women did—rub the body with spices and wrap it in cloth, prepared in a sacred way for eternity. They expected to find him dead; their only concern in all of it, who will roll that big stone away? Joseph of Arimathea, who according to Mark, Matthew and Luke, had placed Jesus into his own tomb and rolled the stone against the entrance, was no longer there.

The gospel of John, written much later than the others, tells us that Joseph and Nicodemus anointed Jesus body with seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes before putting him in a new tomb in a garden—a borrowed tomb, a temporary holding cell (John 19:40-42). But all the gospels include the story of the women coming early on the first day to the tomb and finding it empty.

I wonder what the empty tomb symbolized for you. Most Christians look at this event as proof of Jesus' defeat of death, of his rising from the dead and walking once again among the living—certainly John has him appearing repeatedly behind closed doors, along roadways and at the edge of the Sea of Tiberias. The significance for me is that the tomb in question is described as 'borrowed', it is not to be a permanent resting place. We all die small deaths and large ones, we lose parts of ourselves along the way. We come out of these everyday deaths changed, just at Jesus was—so changed that Mary and the disciples did not recognize him. Losses, both necessary and accidental, alter us in innumerable ways, no longer are we the spouse, the child, the friend, the help-mate, the parent, because the other, the one who identified us as such, is gone. Now we are someone else, and we have to go about the work of discovering who that new someone is. Our role has changed. Our life is forever different.

Millions of Christians are celebrating the Risen Christ today. The Holy One who walks among us. I wonder whether we will recognize that One when we meet him as a homeless person on the street, as a black woman who serves us food, as a young mother jogging behind a stroller, as an old man in his wheelchair. Will we recognize the risen Christ when we look into the mirror?

                                         In the spirit,

                                            Jane