2022-11-06 A Meditation on the Empty Tomb

“I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”” (Ge 12:3 ESV)

When the body is gone, can you remember anything of it? We were those who walked and talked with the Man. We were those who knew that a New Dawn was upon us. Yet now words come out stumbling and blabbering; some holy canto as to just what all He was about. That canto, on our lips, is evolving and dynamic, just as the Man Himself was. It is a taught word, an educated outlay, that approaches scenarios newly, as He did, with newness of insight, with simplicity of effect, with basic cause, with determination to Love.

For we circle and observe, listening and reacting, ratcheting up New Knowledge, knowledge of a sort heaven-sent, illustrious, dynamic, and change-agent. It is knowledge that spoke to earlier pain and former ways, this hour brandishing Purpose to each hearer and winnowing Pain away, and turns out just the right words to catch the attention even of the most distracted in the midst.

And it goes in for the kill, done circling for a blinding, healing, visionary instance. We trade as though playing cards what ills He saved us from, the mud on the eyes to cure blindness, the direct confrontation to extract a Legion, demons, the garment’s hem touched to heal a persistent bleeding. We trade as though playing cards the Man still living and in our midst; we are those behind locked doors sometimes; in those times we fear the simple players of the church, the scribes, the Pharisees, people oddly uptight about Jesus, people still out of touch with the complete enervation of sin, the reversal of familiar ways, the restoration of a Church Message.

So the body is gone, and we are those awaiting like eager concert-goers at the stage door of the venue the Man as promised. Already, the Word is revolving and evolving; already, second comings are whispered about, for His apparition unto the gathered was an apparition with such future promise. Lest we forget what it was all about, He still bears His wounds. His time is still precious and cautiously meted out. His presence is sensitive, a dying Man, a Man with a little time left with these His people, a kind of success that has not forgotten it came about via failure.

Our entitlement, then, is to grab onto a relevant message, a message unto the stars as they revolve in each of our lives; a healing compassion, a ministering capacity, a diachronically positioned Otherness. He is Other. He is a wake-up call whenever we think, “There. I’ve said it, and now I can rest.” Instead, “saying it” is just the first fruits. The harvest is ours to enter into. When we put question mark over our best religion, then—give it a day or two—visions of miracle and service start to form, to gestate, to tack onto, to glue themselves together. For we only knew this, that our heaven was not of this world. That our Hope was vouchsafed unto us by One in our midst: could have been you, could have been me, who showed the simple, yes, painful, but simple dying of One Man. Dying for our sake. That we might be awakened in our cozy remnants and spheres, awakened to Serve and to Question and to Believe in a good turn just around said corner from us.

So we are no longer depressed and accomplice to downplaying spirits, cynical and untrusting spirits, messages antagonistic to the Message: God is for us; each of us is useful and purposed to service; each of us must find out what that service is, but it begins with remembering the Man, recollecting the ears burning as He spoke, allowing the Words most Holy to form and simmer, to knead out some leaven, to be for one a call unto holiness—fasting, imagination and imagery, experientially educated so as to be useful to their less consecrated peer—and for another a call unto incarnational ministry—presence in the community, taking part in activities and events, reminder that God makes Himself like us rather than making us over as something different—and for a third unto a reverence for the Cross—which Cross does teach us and does inspire us and does radically change us in our daily thoughts.

Many more are the possibilities, but this we know: bleary-eyed and not yet fully having entered in upon the requisite mourning, we are near to His tomb this early morn. We are called and conscripted to be people who were witnesses, apostles and disciples sent out, each of us in possession regardless of test scores or other false prophecies, regardless of family wellness, lack of traumatic experience, regardless of maimed soul or hurting heart; each of us contains within the agent of Witness, the dynamo of Change, the Right to Testify, to Understand, to Make Sense Of, to realize that His absence now is a call for the vacuum to be filled yes, by you and by me. Such He died for, anointing us beyond our wildest dreams, we who sometimes sin by not stepping up to the plate, by crouching hidden from attention. So the mouth speaking words it scarcely has time to prep and to plan, is on a Holy Chart and Course. It is a mind we have that inspires in light of the Body Missing. The Savior is evolving and living amidst dialog or monolog, of diaconate speech and priestly celebration, of a life, of a stranger become friend, of our hardships met with understanding of an undeserved kind.