Easter Day

Mark 16:1-8

We had already been in church all day —

    all our life, it seemed

tracing the well worn pat down from Bethlehem to Calvary,

    from Creation to Apocalypse

        the way of redemption, our Life-story

like the women, we had been warned of resurrection

    but were almost too weary to credit it.

Besides, it was not April, or March, but mid-July

        it was cold and green and wet, not like Easter at all….

        playing at Easter for academic purposes

we were far from home and sanctuary

Still, habit and hope won out

And when we were told to Rise and Go Forth,

    we did

    singing our simple songs

    following the scent of flowers and myrrh,

    following the faint sounds of tinkling bells in the distance

In our hour,

reversing the path the women had trod in the hard darkness of early day

    that first easter.

Light carried them toward the dawn of an unexpected day

but we, so many years later,

    were merely a people a memory—out of place as well as time—

        re-enactors looking back, as in a play

Our path lay through gathering dusk…our candles, not needed at first

    as we lit them in the season of bright remembrance

    became essential tools of our survival

as we wandered away toward the threatened resurrection and the empty tomb

the light around us fading as memory faltered,

and darkness fell

We clutched our small lights before us like talismans,

signs proclaiming that, because we belonged,

we would find our way through night to Easter’s dawn.

We were three hundred strong, sure at last of our lines,

    marching toward resurrection.

In another world, there was a car

        at cross purposes

    Idling at the crosswalk we had commandeered on our

        headlong rush toward new life.

Four people sat in the soft darkness of ordinary time,

    Accompanied by the quiet hum of the engine,

    the murmured conversation of friends in front and back,

        the radio tuned to a classical station.

Who were they? Where were they going?

It seemed evident they would be late, wherever it was:

    the procession that passed, one or two at a time,

        was mostly slow and measured.

We were three hundred people on the verge of new life…

    almost, it could be said, sleepwalking toward resurrection

What were they thinking?

Were they irritated by our religious display? Impatient?

Worried?

On their way to the nearby hospital to visit a sick friend,

    their first grandchild,

        a newborn son?

Were they, in the ordinary time world,

    trying to make a curtain at the theater?

    Gliding toward a valet spot near that hot new restaurant?

Did they have reservations at eight? Too bad.

Who among us knew (or even wondered) about them?

We were,

    like the women at the tomb, those disciples in the gospel of Mark,

    Amazed and Terrified.

Fear—or holy reverence—was upon us

And we said nothing to anyone

not even those four in the quiet, dark sedan

    who waited, their faces in shadow,

        while our procession passed by.

What were we thinking?

    We who marched by on the way to our own private Easter,

        absorbed in our liturgy

            surrounded by our friends

        intent upon our learning

        our loving

    our leaving behind the long hard days of holy week

    of passion and betrayal and death?

We had neither time nor inclination to pause

    on our headlong march toward the empty tomb

        to consider the strangers

who were stopped in their very tracks

    stuck on the edge of whatever new life awaited them

because of our imperative, impending resurrection…

No reason, we thought, to consider how they were stuck

stopped in their tracks

    because of us.

Unthinking, we flowed on,

    more than one hundred of us

        if we noticed the car at all it was to cry

    Happy Easter! as if they should have known.

As if their world should of course have yielded to our own.

We were too busy, we thought.

    We might we late to the Vigil, we said.

Stay with the group, we muttered to ourselves,

    tightening up the spaces between our small clumps of light and music,

lest the driver get some inkling he might break free,

    move through, get on with his life.

They can wait, we thought, if we thought at all.

And we said nothin’ to nobody,

    as the scripture says,

Because Awe was upon us

    And that is not a bad thing.

We all need holiness.

We all are seeking our own salvation.

But is it enough?

From one side of the road to the other

There is a white line that marks the edge of the path

    That separates our path from theirs

And it is as if those slender strips of white paint, made by men,

delineated all the world to us:

It was our bridge to new life across the awful, yawning chasm of

the secular the ordinary, the profane, the everyday

Our Chance at God.

We were clearly at Cross-Purposes.

The gospel of Mark tells us that it is hard for people of faith to cross that chasm

    To make the leap of faith

from the ordinary to the holy

    from death to life.

Even when we know better.

When the women of Mark, who had, like the men,

    been warned of resurrection

got up on Easter morning to go to the tomb

    it was not to meet a risen Lord,

but to anoint his dead body.

It was the day after the Sabbath,

Ordinary Time.

For the sad work they had come to do, they brought spices:

    Forgetting that one of them had already done

        what was needed

Breaking jar of costly nard,

    washing Jesus’ feet with her tears,

        wiping them with her hair.

He had said: leave her alone, she has done what is needful

    She has anointed me beforehand for my burial.

So the things the women have brought cannot be used as they were intended

    for the holy purposes of sanctifying death.

They cannot perform the ritual of sealing up the body

    Because there is no body.

What can be done with the spices? All the important, expensive things

    we have gathered to make our mortality bearable,

        to cover the smell of our inevitable descent into death?

Mark and his readers knew something important that most of us do not:

    that Jesus and the women, in their time after the Sabbath,

Had a use for those spices that had nothing whatsoever to do with death

    And everything to do with Life.

When the holiness of Shabbat was over

Jesus and his friends would have celebrated Havdalah,

The liturgy that each week marks the end of Shabbat,

And the beginning of the work-week,

    By erasing the white line between them.

With spices, sweet wine, with songs and a braided candle flickering light,

    The Jewish people sweeten the ordinary time to come

        With the memory of sabbath peace.

With spices such as the women carried to the tomb,

    The liturgy for death becomes a ceremony for hallowing ordinary life.

And the cross-purposes vanish as though they had never been.

As long as we remember what to do with our candle and our spices.

Mark knew that the women remembered.

And when they meet the young man in white who tells them that

    They should not be afraid

    Because Jesus is risen

    And he has gone before them into Galilee

    Just as he said.

Their silence is not the silence of terror.

But the silence of memory and ecstasy and awe.

The ordinary horror of death has been drowned in sweet wine

    And spices

That are not just for once a year,

    but for everyday, and for everyone,

        who needs to know that life is holy, that their life belongs to God.

We were poised in the middle of the street, I think it was James Way

    And the car was idling above us on the other side of the white line

    And we were marching toward resurrection with our candles

And in our silence there was a question:

    What was the purpose of the Cross, after all?

    Why are we here, marching from cross to empty tomb,

        after all those years?

It is to sweeten the hardness of life

    And to hallow our work in the ordinary

to break down the dividing walls of hostility

    with which otherwise we will have come to terms

to overcome betrayals with love.

To say a final, definitive NO to the powers of dominion

    The voices that urge us to believe that

        Violence is a way to peace

        Poverty is the collateral damage necessary to an affluent culture

        Separation between haves and have nots, us and them

        Believers and unbelievers, me and you is the way of things,

            the order of life.

Didn’t Jesus’ death put all that to shame?

We have forgotten so much, so soon, in our eagerness to escape

    The cross and achieve this Easter day of joy

        Of eggs and bunnies and life eternal and the Feast

            that is prepared for US.

And our cross-purposes are not what we think they are.

There’s an old, simple song, attributed to Reb Nachman of Breslav,

        He sang: all the world is just a narrow bridge, just a narrow bridge, just a narrow bridge…the important thing is, not to be afraid.

These are the Cross-Purposes of Easter,

    the reasons for resurrection

        the heart of the good news.

This is why we cross this narrow bridge,

    balancing our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our losses

        gripping the neighbor’s hand tightly as we

            maneuver how to stay in the Center

        how not to fall off.

This is why we keep our heads down, focusing too often only on our own small candle

    Lest its flame be blown out if we fail to protect it, and we fall off the path

        Into the chasm of darkness,

            Because we cannot see the way.

This is also why at last we look up,

    and let go…and pass the flame from hand to hand,

    noticing the people in the stopped car, idling nearby

        on the other side of the white line.

All the world is just a narrow bridge…

AND the important thing is not to be afraid.

On James Way, the stream of small flickering lights flowed on toward resurrection.

When the darkness on the street had almost been restored

    the narrow bridge cleared,

    the happy murmuring procession fully on the other side and

        our exodus at last complete

I looked back:

    the car was dropping into gear,

        preparing to resume its passage through the world

    Ordinary time was restored.

But not altogether.

For behind the breath-fogged windows of the passenger side seat,

    Cupped carefully in the hands of the driver’s companion

        One of our candles—Christ’s errant light—

            Shown

Someone had stopped.

Someone had understood what to do with the spices, the silence, the awe.

Someone had stepped off the path,

    Knowing that all the world was just a narrow bridge…

        And the important thing was not to be afraid.

At their approach, a window rolled down silently, and an arm was extended

    A candle passed from hand to hand

    Two strangers from different worlds touched,

The bearer of Easter stepped back,

    Her face now in shadows, as he turned to rejoin the procession.

But in the car, there was a flicker

that cast a warming glow

        over the faces of the four strangers,

            Suffused with joy

As they rolled on quiet wheels back into the world of the ordinary,

    Bearing Light.

Christ is risen, alleluia.