[December 6th]

The Resurrection

My excuse for yesterday is basically that my work slammed right back down on my head after my wonderful wedding weekend in Houston. Not entirely satisfactory, of course, but I did fall asleep at my computer trying to finish the presentation I had for the morning (that went fairly poorly, by the way).

But these are also proving very hard for me in themselves. I think what I found easier about the Bible verses was being able to pick up on a tiny detail and extrapolate it up, to where it was important and significant in itself. I worry that with the Mysteries I am trying to cycle them down.

Because everything that's true, everything that's startling, about the Resurrection, looks kind of silly written down. Because it's basic, because it was so remarkable and strange and shocking.

That being said, I wrote on it for Easter, but even then I had to include other stories to link it.

This story is old and sometimes I feel like now it's in every story. And I'd like to think that it's not watering it down in that process - that Hermione's resurrection in Winter's Tale or Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia or any of the other dozen examples (currently not at the top of my head in a frustrating turn of events), do not diminish the true story by placing it in a new version.

And Aslan is straightforward allegory for Christ, but the stories like Hermione or Harry Potter show that we've started telling this story constantly. Victory over death. That's become something that's ours, a story and a reality we can let ourselves have. We can imagine a world where we are free of death, where it does not have the power over us it once did.

The way it did one Sunday morning when Jesus's closest disciples looked for the Son of God in a tomb. Because even they who had faith in Jesus as the Son of Man, as the Messiah, could not believe that even God could turn back the rules of death. They believed that once He, whom they had seen conquer death before on behalf of others, quite recently his friend Lazarus, let Himself be killed it was over. That not even He could come back from that.

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Why would you ever believe that you had God figured out? That there were any rules by which He was bound? Why would you ever think that He could be defeated? Why would you ever fail to trust?

Because Calvary was a terrible day. Because the sky turned dark and even the sanctuary ripped itself, destroying itself in a gesture they were not disposed to understand at the time. Because of terror and horrible people spitting at the Messiah, the Son of God, because of the way His face twisted in agony.

What kind of plan was that?

Perhaps the more remarkable thing is that they came to the tomb. Did Calvary leave intact their view of the Messiah? Of Jesus as The Christ, the Son of God? Their belief in the divinity of the man they followed and the victim of injustice one cruel Friday - it could survive death.

They came to the tomb with simple love, with unwavering but greatly mistaken faith. Their spirits were willing, were loving and faithful, but their flesh was weak, surrendered to death and turned away from hope. Blessed are those who do not see yet still believe.

We aren't equipped to understand His plan, His creation, His victories. We were asked to love and believe anyway. We were asked to have hope over and beyond what our very bodies scream at us is possible and probable and makes any shred of sense.

We were meant to go to the tomb, ready to cry and wash His body, and believe in His divinity despite the horrors of Calvary. Maybe we were meant to believe that we would find His body gone and maybe we were meant to be surprised. The point, perhaps, is that we were meant to go to find out.

What He had in store is beyond what they could imagine. It always is.