Beyond
Easter Sunday
The stone is rolled away and death does not have the final word.
Christ is risen! God meets us on the way and leads us toward life. Alleluia!
Reflecting on your own life, how has God held you through the darkness of the tomb and led you to life?
Risen Christ,
you meet us beyond the tomb with grace and peace.
Lead us into the life you have opened before us,
that we may walk in resurrection hope.
Amen.
So often, we arrive at moments in life assuming this is the end of the story. But then the earth shakes, the stone is rolled away, and an angel in glory speaks from within. “He is not here.”
This is not a gentle moment. Mary had been prepared. Her eyes still red and swollen from weeping, she came to the tomb with the spices and the community of women who stayed and watched, holding each other through the horror of the trial and execution, through the long night of waiting, and now they were to prepare for the burial.
But, again God disrupts the narrative. Easter morning not only breaks open to an empty tomb, but the empty tomb breaks open all expectations, assumptions, even death itself. Easter morning is not just a revised ending, it is an invitation beyond all endings we can imagine.
The prophet Jeremiah reminds us of God’s promise, “I have loved you with an everlasting love…again I will build you.” Again, and again, and again. God’s pervasive faithfulness has been poured out fully in Christ’s surrender on the cross, to go to death and back in resurrection. Resurrection does not erase what came before, rather it transforms it.
Christ’s hands are still pierced, he still bears the mark in his side, and yet he lives! Not only does he live, but he has gone ahead of the women to Galilee. The women leave the tomb running with fear and great joy to tell the disciples, as the angel said. They do not have answers, they do not understand, but they have seen enough. The tomb is empty! And as they go, Christ meets them on the way. ‘Do not be afraid.’
To let go of all that resurrection cracks open can be scary. To let go of fear, expectation, even all logic, to trust that God’s ending is greater even than death - it takes both the angel and the resurrected Christ to share the message with the women.
‘Do not be afraid,’ Christ says, followed by a second command, ‘Go and tell.’ Resurrection then, isn’t just the transformed ending, it is also God’s sending into all that lies beyond. For Christ goes beyond, always ahead, calling, leading, drawing you into God’s resurrection promises.
The Lenten journey has come to an end this glorious Easter morning. The Signposts have guided us through wilderness and longing, through longing and thirst and blindness, and though we have come to the end it turns out the end is just another beginning into all that lies beyond. God brings us into life—beyond what we feared, beyond what we imagined, beyond even death itself. Christ is alive! Alleluia!
*Wesley, Frank, 1923-2002. Mary at the Tomb, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59189. Original source: Estate of Frank Wesley, http://www.frankwesleyart.com/main_page.htm.