Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

When I was a child, my parents liked looking around in cemeteries to find the gravestones of our long-deceased relatives.  I have a vague memory of searching through what seemed like dozens, but was probably only two or three, cemeteries in Massachusetts looking for one Albert Haven Slocomb, the grandfather of the person for whom our son Slocomb was named.  In Princeton, Arkansas, a very small town known only to the people who live there or have relatives buried there, we found the graves of dozens of my great-grandmother’s relatives.  As a child, this activity seemed boring, pointless, and a complete waste of a perfectly good day.  Why would any rational person want to spend the day looking for dead people?  Now, however, I understand.  The cemeteries themselves are places of tranquility.  The graves of our loved ones give us a sense of their presence with us.  The stones remind us of our connection with our loved ones and with our past. For the people we actually knew, we are reminded of their impact on our lives. 

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary set out to do something very similar on that first Easter morning.  We are told that the two women went to see the tomb.  In Matthew’s gospel, the women do not come to anoint Jesus’ body for burial.  The tomb had been made secure by the sealing of the stone in the doorway, so there was no reason for the women to think they could get in, even if they wanted to. They simply came to see the tomb.  Perhaps they were looking for that sense of tranquility in the midst of the chaos of the past few days.  Or perhaps they wanted to remember all that Jesus had been and done for them.  Or perhaps they wanted to feel Jesus’ presence with them, even from the other side of a very large stone.

Whatever their motive, I doubt they expected an angel of the Lord, accompanied by an earthquake, to appear, roll back the stone, and take a seat.  The angel’s appearance was like lightening and his clothing was white as snow.  Between the angel and the earthquake, any hope the women might have had for a little peace and quiet was dashed.  If the women were wondering anything as they approached the tomb, they probably wondered how they would get past the guards.  In the presence of the angel and the open tomb, however, the guards shook and became like dead men, giving the women complete and total access to the surprisingly empty tomb.

“Do not be afraid,” says the angel, “Take a quick look, then go tell the disciples that Jesus has gone ahead of you to Galilee.”  There is no need for the women to linger at the tomb, nor is there any need for them to be afraid like the soldiers.  The person they came to remember is no longer there.  In fact, there is no need to remember him as if he is gone.  As the women run from the tomb, the Risen Christ meets them and repeats the message of the angel: “Do not be afraid.  Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee.  There they will see me.”

At the end of the Last Supper, after Jesus had shared bread and wine with his disciples, and after they had sung the hymn and gone out to the Mount of Olives, Jesus had said to his disciples “After I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee.”  Galilee?  Why Galilee?  Galilee was no place special.  Why would the risen Jesus appear to his disciples in such an ordinary place?  Why not a mountain top, or the temple, or some other place of grandeur and significance?  Why Galilee of all places?

Galilee is the place where Jesus had called his twelve disciples, healed the sick, told parables and taught about the inclusive kingdom of God, fed the 5000 plus women and children, worked miracles, preached the sermon on the mount, sent the disciples on their mission, grieved the death of his cousin John the Baptist, blessed children, settled legal questions in ways that got him in further trouble, and demonstrated the love of God to the people.  Galilee might have been an ordinary place, but extraordinary things had happened there. 

When Jesus tells the disciples that he is going before them to Galilee, perhaps he is telling them that he has been raised, not into some distant and supernatural place, or some place outside the realm of ordinary human life where there is no pain or suffering, but into our own common everyday world.  The promise to the women and to the disciples is the promise that Jesus will meet them in the midst of their ordinary lives so that they, too, can do extraordinary things.  The promise to the women and to the disciples is that even in the midst of the joy and the fear of their everyday lives, Jesus will be present. The women go into the tomb to remember a  dead Jesus, and they are sent away from the tomb, into the world, to encounter the living Christ, who will be found in the very same world that crucified him. 

Jesus’ message to the women, to the disciples, and to us is that the risen Christ will meet us where ever we are, in whatever situation we find ourselves, to proclaim that there is no stone that will separate us from the Risen Christ.  As St. Paul puts it in the well known passage from Romans “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

On this glorious Easter morning, as we stand before the empty tomb in the midst of the flowers, the music, and the resurrected alleluias, and we greet the Risen Christ, Jesus says to each of us what he said to the women: “Do not be afraid.”  And then the risen Jesus sends us out of this place and into the world with the promise that he will meet us in the midst of our ordinary lives to do the extraordinary.

Amen.