It’s empty! (Luke 24.1-12)
Luke 24.1-12 (It’s empty!)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Easter C, April 21, 2019
Tom James
One of my pet peeves is opening a pantry door in the kitchen, reaching for that box of my favorite snacks, and finding that the box is empty. Why would someone leave an empty box in the pantry?! It’s one of the enduring mysteries at my house.
More than just empty boxes, though: things being empty is usually a bad thing. An empty gas tank is no fun, especially when it’s cold and rainy outside like it was yesterday. I hope not too many of you had to fill up in that blowing rain. An empty fridge is not good, at least when you’re hungry. And empty wallet or bank account isn’t great either, though sometimes we have to deal with that. Emptiness is also something that we at times find hostile and even forbidding. Being alone in a large empty space can make us feel even more alone. Being surrounded by emptiness can even make us afraid, unprotected and vulnerable. Sometimes, when we feel depressed, or when we feel like what we are doing is meaningless or pointless, we say that we feel empty inside, as if the abyss that surrounds us can become part of us.
It’s interesting though, that the greatest good news we Christians proclaim is that something is empty. He is not here. He has gone. This place you have come to in order to find him is empty.
Ancient tombs were sealed shut by a large stone, and the air inside would have been thick. The body in the tomb would fill the space with its fragrance. It wasn’t an empty space at all inside the tomb–it was filled with the heaviness of death. Of course, it was also filled with loss and grief. A death meant that someone was harshly removed from the dense network of human relationships in which we are all embedded. Losing a loved one, as many of us know, is losing a part of ourselves. In the case of Jesus, the tomb was also filled with disappointment and disillusionment–Jesus’ disciples were feeling lost and confused, defeated, afraid, and maybe humiliated. So, the tomb was filled, and its stone would have held in all the fulness, all the density, all the weight, of human suffering and loss. I always think about that on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter: “he descended into hell.”
The women who came to the tomb were playing the roles that women often played in ancient cultures–they were coming to the tomb to attend to a body, to make sure it was cared for. In life and death, women took care of the needs of people and their bodies. But these women, like all women, were more than whatever roles their communities expected them to play. They were disciples of Jesus—even, if the truth be told, apostles, since what an apostle did was announce the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Indeed, by that definition, these women were the firstapostles. The gospels are very shy about the centrality of women in Jesus’ circle of followers. The gospels were written in part to put a public face on the church, and the Roman world tended to be scandalized by the thought of women taking positions of leadership in any group. But these women were leaders. They were there as women, doing the thing that women were expected to do, but they came with Jesus’ teaching in their hearts, and they left with fire in their bones and a word of salvation on their lips.
These women, these first apostles, came to do battle with all the heaviness of the grave. They came with spices to beat back the ugliness of death. But what they found was the freshness of cool, empty air. It must have been confounding. Perhaps even frightening. In the Gospel of Mark’s telling of the story, in fact, those who found the tomb empty were terrified: the emptiness of the tomb was the emptying out of their sense of normalcy: tombs aren’t supposed to be empty. It was as if everything they knew had fallen into that abyss where they had expected to find Jesus’ body. Nothing made sense anymore.
The women’s first reaction was that they were perplexed. They were, we can imagine, disoriented by the emptiness. It wasn’t what they expected. When they saw two angelic figures standing there, they were afraid. But the emptiness itself didn’t make them afraid—only confused. He is not here. The tomb is empty. What now?
I don’t know if I’m remembering the story correctly—it was a long time ago. When I graduated from college, a friend and I decided to travel to Europe together for part of the summer. So, we got plane tickets, lined up a car rental in Paris, and then drove around several countries, not always sure where we were going or why we were going there. At some point, we found ourselves in Brussels. The traffic was thick, but as we were driving through the city, we found ourselves pushed out suddenly into a huge roundabout with no center. It was just a very large, wide-open circular space near what looked like the heart of the city. Now, I basically know how roundabouts work, but in the vast emptiness in that unfamiliar city I had no idea quite what to do—except keep to the right and hope for the best. It seemed like we could go anywhere, and yet the space wasn’t quite empty, either. There were cars diving in and out, and I knew that there would be wrong ways to navigate this traffic circle. But the problem was that I didn’t know exactly what the right ways were. I was disoriented by the sheer number of possibilities.
I have wondered if this traffic circle in Belgium isn’t a metaphor for many moments of transition in our lives. Being pushed by the flow of events in our experience out of our comfortable lanes with their reassuring solid lines into a wide-open space, sometimes we feel like we have no idea of what to do or how to be. Maybe it’s a move or a new job. Or maybe it’s a graduation or the birth of a new child. In our disorientation we become confused: the emptiness before us may feel like a loss, even a kind of death. But it is actually just the opposite. Sometimes, the times of transition that make us uncomfortable or even afraid are the very times when experience life at its fullest—we learn that our horizons are wider than we imagined, that our possibilities reach further than we thought.
When the disciples learned about the empty tomb, their confusion, the empty space they found themselves trying to navigate, was filled with memories. They remembered what Jesus had taught them. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has described the death of Jesus as an initial embarrassment for Jesus’ followers. They had expected him to continue to grow more popular, to gain more and more followers until the Jesus movement would become an irresistible force, and Jesus would be able to make real change, perhaps even liberating Israel from its bondage to Rome. The fact that Jesus died, crucified as a criminal and a rebel, was a shocking defeat. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way!
It was only as his followers began to search the scriptures, looking for the meaning of Christ’s death, Crossan says, that they began to realize that being crucified as a criminal and a rebel was written into his job description as the Messiah! It’s a grim picture: God’s chosen one is the one is to be rejected by God’s people.
And, yet, in the emptiness of the tomb, in the stillness of the cool air, the women feel something that will change the world. They don’t understand it yet. And, some two thousand years later, we are still struggling to understand it. But, like the women on the first Easter, we feel it. God’s choice of Jesus as the savior for humanity is not defeated by humanity’s choice to crucify him. God’s choice of the way of love is not destroyed by all the armed militancy of the forces of hate. God’s desire to claim us as God’s own people, to remake our lives, to rebuild our humanity, is not thwarted by our death-wish. God’s dream lives.
No spices are needed. The fragrance of death is dissipated. The air is fresh and cool. The tomb is empty. He is not here. Alleluia! Amen.
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