The "R" Word

That Sabbath before the first Easter must have been hell.

I can see it: the disciples huddled together, hiding, waiting in fear for what would happen next. There was no trip to the temple, no synagogue, no rest. This day that commemorated God resting from the act of creation was filled with sorrow and grief. Hope had been sucked out of their lives. Despair hung heavy on their shoulders. They were hurting, confused, lost.

Everything they had trusted, hoped for, and believed had been stolen from them, arrested, put to a mock trial, and executed by the state with the help of most of the religious leaders.

Jesus was gone.

And when Jesus is gone, everything changes.

How do we recuperate from such a death blow to the very core of our beliefs?

How do we resist when the one who taught us to resist is absent from our struggle?

How do we remain faithful to the cause of love when love itself has been crucified?

When Jesus is missing, we can only fill the space with cries of grief and lament. We call out to God, and heaven remains silent. We pray to see the work of the Spirit in the world around us, and the words we’ve thrown in the air fall to the ground with a dull thud. We look for the breaking of the dawn, for our savior to come, and all we see is more of the long, dark night.

In the political and religious climate of the U.S. these days, it’s easy to find ourselves hiding in fear just like the first disciples did on that silent Saturday after the crucifixion of God. It feels like Jesus—the real Jesus—is absent, missing, gone. God has been killed and in their place an edifice has been erected that demands people worship with violence, domination, exclusion, and fear.

They call it God, but it looks nothing like love.

They call it Christianity, but it looks nothing like following the one that was crucified, the one who was put to death by the state, the one who died and whose absence left the disciples disoriented, fearful, and grieving.

In the name of their Christ, they are inflicting a war of terror. Immigrants aren’t safe, no matter their documented status. People of color aren’t safe despite following the law and complying. Women aren’t safe whether they speak up about sexual violence or not. Queer people aren’t safe because their very existence challenges the hegemony of patriarchy.

In desperate grasps to keep and regain power and control, the powers and principalities of this world take the name of Christ and twist it into a demonic force, using it to justify their actions of violence and dominance.

But this isn’t the Christ the disciples wept for on that first silent Saturday. This isn’t the Jesus that gave the bread and wine to all his disciples—even Judas—telling them all to eat and drink in remembrance of him.

Their anti-Christ looks nothing like the humble Lord that lowered himself and washed his disciple’s feet.

Their Christ would never weep and sweat blood, anxious over the ordeal about to befall him and yet still choose to drink from the cup of suffering.

Can you imagine their God allowing betrayal and arrest, going through a mock trial silent, embracing their fate?

This false idol, this golden calf of a god, looks nothing like the true Jesus who beckons us to come and die with him that we might truly live.

If Jesus was crucified by the state as an insurrectionist, and has now been replaced with an anti-Christ idol of wealth, dominance, and violence, then we are forced to ask: where is the living God? Jesus walked up the hill of death, cross on his back, and embraced his death. Now Jesus calls us to follow him to the cross where we can die to hatred, to the systems of violence of this world, to our own ego… but then what?

What are we to do after we’re dead?

What do we do after God is dead?

When God is dead, resurrection happens.

Jesus stepped into the hell of that silent sabbath and harrowed the grave. He emptied it, calling out each and every soul locked in the grip of death. Jesus broke the chains of bondage and fear, releasing the captives. He liberated us from the icy grip of death because death couldn’t hold him.

Jesus refused to play by the rules of empire; he refused dominance, violence, and fear as the tools to gain and retain power. Therefore, death, the final, fearful tool that empire wields, had no power over him. Jesus refused to be changed by the very worst that the systems of this world could pour out and put him through. Instead, he continued to live love, to pour himself out in self-donation and compassion, refusing to grasp at his position of godhood, but remaining the servant of all.

That surprising display of humility and tender love when he washed the feet of his disciples wasn’t some stunt or some abnormal move. It made sense because that’s who God is, who God remains.

Is it any wonder that death couldn’t hold this might in its feeble grasp?

Because Jesus refused to be changed by empire, the ultimate tool of empire—death and hell itself—couldn’t do anything to him. Jesus was killed by state sanctioned violence, and he walked out of the tomb in defiance of the power we think violence has.

God had died. Long live God.

This is the reality that Mary stepped into when she went to the tomb early Sunday morning.

But she didn’t know it. She didn’t know Christ had risen. She didn’t know that Jesus had walked out of the harrowed grave. She didn’t know God wasn’t still dead.

What she knew was that the stone that covered the cave of a tomb where Jesus had been wrapped in spice and linen was rolled away, and the tomb was empty. How could she know what this meant? This was different. This was a surprise. This was brand new.

So, of course, she assumed that they had stolen the body. She assumed that the Roman guards, in conjunction with the political and religious leaders of Israel, had conspired to move the body somewhere unknown, somewhere the disciples couldn’t find it, somewhere Mary couldn’t go to finish the burial preparations.

Her response to a missing body? Lament.

Jesus was missing, literally. His body wasn’t where he was supposed to be. So, she wept, the grief of the past three days welling up inside her chest and escaping with sobs that wrecked the body down to the bone. This wasn’t just a few tears shed. She threw herself into the sorrow of the death of Jesus and now a stolen body. He had been taken from them through death, and now Jesus was again taken from them.

The sound of lament began the revelation of resurrection.

The lament, the grief, the sorrow we feel at the absence of God in the middle of the clusterfuck of life, politics, religion, that feeling that hollows and harrows our body and being is the beginning of resurrection.

See, Jesus isn’t absent, just as he wasn’t absent at the tomb. Jesus is here, just not where we expect.

We look for Jesus in our church building, in times of prayer and praise. We look for Jesus in religious practice. We look for Jesus in the clean, sanitized halls of holiness. But Jesus isn’t where we expect him to be.

That divine gardener is where the mud is. He works the dirt of our lives, getting grubby and covered in filth.

Jesus is with us.

This crucified one who is the first in the resurrection of all is in solidarity with our suffering, our pain, our grief. Jesus is lamenting the felt absence of God with us—after all, didn’t he cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from the bowels of the cross? Jesus is crushed with us as the machine of empire turns at our expense. Jesus sits in our fear with us as rights are stripped by our government, as wars are waged and lives are lost, as we have to decide between groceries and rent. Jesus is with us through all the shit that we are knee deep in.

And it is there that we see the resurrection. We see the resurrected one with us, calling our name, telling us that he is with us, and promising our own resurrection if we will only believe that death is the doorway.

Death is not the end, and we don’t have to fear it. In the face of an empire that uses threats of violence and death as its ultimate tools of terror, we don’t have to fear the death they can cause because life has triumphed. Resurrection is the proof that we don’t have to play by the rules of empire anymore. Our resistance is rooted in resurrection because new life shows that there truly is another way to live, another way to love, another way for light to break through the cracks.

We carry this truth in our bones that ache for resurrection. It’s up to us to announce this truth, just like Mary did to the other disciples. Mary, the first apostle, shows us that while resurrection begins with lament at death, empty tombs carry messages we can run to tell others: Jesus is alive and we all will live in the end.

John 20.1-18, LIT Bible (translation by Brandon C. Vélez Johnson)

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