The Bright Spark of Resurrection ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
April 17, 2022
It would have been in the pre-dawn hours, maybe in the gray first light, when women carrying all they would need to anoint and prepare a body set forth for a tomb. What would they find? Would they be stopped, perhaps captured by those who had arrested their leader? How would they enter the tomb, if they could not move the stone sealing the entrance? So many unknowns, so much doubt in that dim first light of day.
When I read these ancient stories, I use the words as a starting point, but from there I try to inhabit the stories, to imagine the sights, and sounds, and especially the emotions as the story unfolds.
I invite you to imagine this scene with me: how does it look to you? What are you feeling?
We can imagine what the women were feeling. There would have been great grief, and despair. Their teacher, revered as a prophet and possibly the Messiah, was gone: tortured and executed. Their community that had followed Jesus from village to village, who had sat with him, listened to his teachings, was dispersed. Most were in hiding, afraid of the same fate that had befallen Jesus. And with no leadership, no one knew what to do.
And in this midst of this gray, dimly lit moment, the women emerged and sought out the tomb. What compelled them?
In that time and that place, there were expectations – requirements for the care of a body. It was expected. It was a final act of love that was required. And so they set forth, in this act of love, only to be plunged into mystery. Who had rolled away the stone? And what had happened to Jesus’ body?
Then — a mystical encounter, when the sound of her name being spoken shocked Mary Magdalene into recognition, and enabled her to see.
This story, all of it, is about the great power of love.
The poet and rabbi Chaim Stern wrote:
“Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing, a holy thing
to love.” (‘Tis a Fearful Thing, by Chaim Stern)
Traditionally, the emphasis of the Easter story is always on the resurrection of Jesus, and the great mystery of that. We have always been told that Jesus’s rising from the dead was the triumph of life over death. “Death in vain forbids him rise,” we sang earlier. We struggle to understand this, and to accept. We are asked to hold the mystery, to believe the story as it is told to us, and that is hard for many people.
And so, I invite us to shift our focus, to broaden it. In what other ways can we think about the idea of resurrection? Of course, here in springtime, this is easy enough to do; we look around and see life emerging from the cold bare ground, buds swelling on branches that had appeared lifeless. Life has great power, and we watch throughout the course of each year as the never-ending cycles of life and death turn and return, over and over. Some would say that life has the last word.
We can accept the idea that life has power over death in the broad sense, the historical and universal sense. But we each know that we will all die. We have all lost beloved ones. We accept that life in general conquers death, but not in our individual human lives. That is why the story of Jesus rising from the dead is so amazing, and why we still are absorbed by the mystery of it after thousands of years.
But what about love? “It is a holy thing, a holy thing to love.”
Can the power of love bring us back to life?
In the days and weeks following Jesus’ execution, the story tells us that he appeared, first to Mary at the tomb, and then, here and there, always suddenly and unexpectedly, to the disciples. We don’t pretend to understand the message of this. But think for just a moment of what we see in the story: bereft, grieving people are brought back to themselves. The disciples were hidden away, not knowing what to do next, or where to go, whether to simply return home and resume their lives as fishermen or carpenters or tax collectors. But something turned them, brought them forward, and brought them back to life again. Something compelled them to pick up the mantle left for them, to resume the itinerant ministry, to take Jesus’ message far and wide – to Greece and Turkey and Rome. Something brought them back to life, and they responded to that invitation.
And what about Mary, weeping at the tomb? UU minister Kathleen McTigue wrote, “We can believe in Mary’s resurrection. When Mary heard her name called, suddenly her eyes were opened to a new reality. She was called out from her grief and despair, and from within herself she found a new way to see and to understand what had happened to her.” (Easter Resurrection, in Shine and Shadow: Meditations, Skinner House Books, 2011, p. 22.)
It is love’s power that can restore us to life after great loss. It is love that calls us forward, that ignites a spark of life – calls us to return to the tomb, to set forth to distant lands to tell a story, to spread the word of a new way to understand life.
Love can do that.
Maybe there have been times in your lives when you thought you could not go on. We humans are born to sorrow. Every life has grief. We suffer accidents and injuries that can change everything in an instant. What calls us forward? We suffer losses that we aren’t sure we can bear. We might feel that life is over for us, too. “’Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”
But then can come that spark; the great power of love that can help us hear a voice or can offer us a glimpse of something we thought was gone forever.
Resurrection emerges out of love. Resurrection is the return of love, love that opens us, brings us back to life. Resurrection appears as love remembered: love for those who are no longer with us, but who live on in our thoughts and in our connections. Resurrection is love felt in the creation of beloved community. That is the great hope and the joy of Easter – not just celebrating the rising of one, but celebrating the hope that somehow, sometime, we all will be offered a way forward through love.
“You will not remember
the words—
they do not matter.
All you need to remember
is how it sounded
when you stood
in the place of death
and heard the living
call your name.” (Jan Richardson, The Magdalene’s Blessing)
The question for us today is not “Did this really happen? How could this story be true?” The question for us is what calls us forward? What might we hear, or see, that will bring forth life from within ourselves? The story is an invitation: to see and to hear in new ways, to think differently about love, and its power. Are you open to an invitation? What might it sound like, feel like, as you stand weeping in the pre-dawn darkness?
“I tell you,” said our poet:
“I tell you,
this is not a banishment
from the garden.
This is an invitation,
a choice,
a threshold,
a gate.
This is your life
calling to you
from a place
you could never
have dreamed,
but now that you
have glimpsed its edge,
you cannot imagine
choosing any other way.” (Richardson, ibid.)
My friends, my hope for you is that you can consider resurrection. Consider it, and practice it. Consider it, not as a supernatural event, a one-time event that happened to one beloved prophet, but as a promise to us all. My hope for you is that your eyes may be opened to all the resurrections, all the invitations, large and small, that surround us every day.
Will you join me in a moment of prayer?
Spirit of Life,
We ask for help to be open to the invitation of life, to life’s return, however we experience it, however it emerges for us. May we love and be loved, may we give and receive, and may this hope grant us life and joy, on this holy day and every day.
Amen, and Alleluia!
