Looking for the Living

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
April 17, 2022

Easter

        Graveyards are fascinating to me.  As children, our parents took us to graveyards in Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Alabama to see the graves of those who had gone before us.  Some of the people had died recently enough that our parents could tell stories about them from their own experience.  Some had lived in their parents’ generation so my parents had heard stories about them.  Others were mostly just names, great-grandparents, great-great grandparents, and on and on, without whom our family would not be here but whose stories have been lost.  I walk through graveyards now and see the graves of people I have known and even buried and remember the stories of their lives.  Graveyards are peaceful places, full of memories and stories known and unknown to the living.

          This morning we hear the story of women going to a tomb.  The women know what they have come to do.  They have come to prepare Jesus’ body for burial.  They have gathered up the supplies they will need and summoned the courage for the task ahead.  I wonder if they walked in silence or if they shared memories and stories about Jesus as they walked.  I imagine they anticipated a peaceful place where they could tend to Jesus’ body and their own grief. No doubt, they have done this work before and they are simply doing what needs to be done for their Beloved.

          We know what will happen next. The stone will have been rolled away from the tomb, and the tomb will be empty.  We are here this morning to proclaim that the tomb is empty!  But the women are perplexed, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable response to an empty tomb.  Then the women are terrified, also a perfectly reasonable response to the sudden appearance of two men in dazzling clothes at a tomb that should hold a dead man.  The men remind the women of the story.  They remind the women that Jesus told them that he would be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day, rise again.  With their memories jostled, the women remember what Jesus said and leave the empty tomb to find the other disciples. 

          The first thing the men in dazzling clothes said to Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women was “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”  I am perplexed by that question this Easter.  The men in dazzling clothes do seem to be implying that the women should look elsewhere for Jesus, not in the place of the dead, but among the living.  And I understand that. 

          But this Easter, I hear the question differently.  I hear the question more like a quiz.  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”  I hear the women being challenged to think about life rather than being chastised for looking for death.  After all, the women were simply going about work that needed to be done, work they were doing in love, and work that was not particularly pleasant when they discover the empty tomb.  Had they not been going to the tomb to do that work, they would not have found the tomb empty.  The tomb would still have been empty but the women would not have known.  The women need to be looking for the living among the dead to hear the good news that Jesus has been raised.

          I also believe that looking for the living among the dead is precisely what the resurrection calls us to do.  Looking for the living among the living is hardly good news and worthy of neither perplexity nor terror.  That I feel the good news of new life and the love of God when I hold my new baby grandson is hardly a surprise.  But looking for the living, looking for signs of resurrection life, in the midst of a pandemic that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and altered many more, in the destruction and devastation of war, when gun violence strikes again and again, in the midst of our own losses, and in so many other situations where death and hatred seem to have the final say….looking for the living among the dead is precisely what people of Easter hope do.   The resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the empty tomb, calls us to see God at work even in the midst of what looks to all the world like death.  Where in our world is death being conquered?  Where are people being set free?  How can the work of our own lives, the proclamation of our own faith, point toward all that God is doing in the world now so that the news of resurrection is not an idle tale, but a present reality that points to the eternal truth of the empty tomb?  We may be perplexed about this, and we may even be terrified if we pause long enough to really take in the power of resurrection life and love.  But Easter calls us to go about the work of our daily lives, the work God calls us to do, just as the women were going about their work, with resurrection conviction that even in those places where hatred and death seem to have won, we will find resurrection life and love. 

                                                                             Amen.