Easter Day reflections
Pulling the lens wider
The resurrection of Jesus is told often with a sense of immediacy – whiz – bang – blinding light and earth-shattering suddenness to Jesus’ appearance out of the tomb.
There are risks to storytelling that highlights the instant return to life of Jesus from Friday to Sunday
When we focus on the coming back to life, we may spend too little time paying attention to the death, the fact that Jesus died, and how it came to pass. We may then warp our understandings into unhealthy assumptions of, for example, ‘God’s’ will in this situation …
When we focus on the having come back to life, we may spend too little time attending to the grief for Jesus, the grief of the disciples. The pull away from grief is strong in the culture in which we live – we feel pressure to move on from our grieving, or at least hide it when it seems to be taking a long time to process. Again, this leads to unhealthy outcomes;
When we focus on the sudden resurrection of Jesus, we may not pay sufficient attention to the time he and the disciples take, to learn to breathe again with growing ease; to learn to walk again in bodies that have endured loss and are being restored; to learn to live again, forever changed by this loss, as we are by each death of one kind or another .
Stages, or states, of grief
For we do experience many deaths in life, losses, circumstances that bring about grief: relationships end or change; careers and occupations; parenting’s constant letting go; health challenges of many different sorts; homes, neighbourhoods, communities left behind for somewhere new …
The griefs we experience are not always entirely brought about by sadness or unwanted circumstances – new opportunities, natural growth, liberation, still cause grief.
Of course, there is much grief caused by the unexpected, the unwelcome, changes of circumstance we would rather not have to accept.
So I’m sure I won’t be telling you what you do not know: grieving is complex – each grief unique and unpredictable, except for the fact that grief does take time. It is a process, with acknowledged ‘stages’ of grief I’m sure you’ve heard of. I learned this week that the older five stages of grief has been expanded into a more comprehensive seven stages, or as they’re rarely experienced in a linear way, I’m calling them states.
A process of return to life
I got to wondering, then, as I considered the story anew these past few weeks, how grief and resurrection both might be understood as return to life processes.
Resurrection, obviously is a return to life. The process nature of resurrection, however, is not always acknowledged in our telling of the sudden appearance of Jesus alive again.
Grief, we do understand to be a process. Is the process not only processing death, but a process of return to life?
Perhaps like a seed that seems buried, even seems to die as it ceases to be the seed – discovers it has been planted in order to return to new life.
Is life like seasons spring/summer of growing, autumn/winter of dormancy; or like tides that constantly, dynamically flow and ebb – is life, I wonder, actually life and death?
The seven stages of grief begin – for they must start a list somewhere – with shock and denial. We see these all through the stories of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus tries to prepare them for the inevitable use of power that will seek to quell this movement of empowering love – No! Peter shouts. No. Shock. Denial. I will not let you die.
He draws a sword in the garden to try and stop the arrest in some accounts; and in all, of course, we know well his three denials before the cock crows.
And Peter is again in shock at the empty tomb – and again, he runs away, his body screaming denial, this can’t be happening.
Then there’s poor Thomas – who bears the burden of the disciples’ denial, disbelief, of Jesus’ return to life. But really, they all stay locked away for days even after they hear and see this restoration to life.
Shock.
Denial.
Jesus turned everything upside down as they walked beside him through Galilee and Judea; here he is, doing it all again. Death isn’t even death anymore??!
The Holy, upside down Way of Love
Restoring his life, Holy One has affirmed the Way of Love to which Jesus stayed true. Love, which is peaceful not violent; love, which seeks to reconcile, not divide; love that empowers and does not diminish the power of another to sure up one’s own; love that works hard for the wellbeing of all, not only a few.
This Way of Love cost Jesus his life.
For, to empower the many threatens the power of the few. We still see daily what those with power over others will do when that power comes under scrutiny, is challenged, is at risk of being dispersed.
Holy One affirms the peaceful, reconciling, courageous, and generous way of Love that Jesus embodied by restoring life after death. I wonder if he is known to Mary in the love with which he says her name …
To have caused such transformation and healing through his presence, there must have been something markedly different about Jesus of Nazareth. To have caused such fear in the religious and political leaders who even through their resistance seem to recognise the depth of his authority that so challenges them, that authority must have a quality beyond human.
Divine Love embodied among us, calling all that lives into our dynamic ebb and flow return to life.
The Divine restoration of life is the grandest affirmation of the life of love to which Holy One calls all creation – an affirmation of this way of life that is life even through death.
And the disciples are faced with a choice: buried, or planted? Stay in death, or, as they have with Jesus before, let go of life as they knew it, in order to move into life anew – that will take time. And will not be a ‘restoration’ of how things were before. The constant return to life with Jesus, with Holy One, is moving ever forward, always renewing, always becoming.
Like the seed, which both dies and lives in its breaking open into roots and shoots, buds and leaves and petals …
Life is always a shedding, a letting go of what has been, in order to become, to grow, in order to live.
We often resist, for to let go of what we have known, hurts. The process of letting go what has been and letting be what is emerging is painful. I often wonder if it hurts a seed to break open …
Further states in the return to life
Guilt can accompany the pain of grief; anger, bargaining also, in what can feel like a prolonged wrestling match. Letting go is hard.
The disciples, to return to their story, wrestle with this restoration of life. Oh, how they wrestle with what life is becoming for them on this way of Jesus, this way of life that doesn’t end with death.
Doesn’t that wrestling continue for followers of Jesus through time – we see it in the NT letters to early communities of people living on the Way; in later centuries in the councils held in Nicea and Alexandria; later again, in the reforming movement of the 16th century; and on and on into the 21st in our own movement’s struggles to let go of ideas and practices that have not given life to all in order to embrace new understandings of relationships, human being, the Divine Dream, life for all.
It is natural that letting go of what we have known brings deep sadness; we may even feel empty for a time while we wait to discover who we are becoming in a new season, through each ‘death’. Acknowledging the process, leaning into the ebb and trusting the flow; remembering we do not do this alone, will all help us keep moving with that Holy impetus into life. There is trust in this process of resurrection life.
As life starts to flow again – as it will – we make our way into an upward turn. We experience moments of peace, and calm, the wrestling eases, the discomfort abates as we grow familiar with life’s renewed turn. Gradually, we learn to navigate life as it is now, after this loss; it might be a rebuilding or reconstructing of a home, a career, our inner self. Entering the flow state bring acceptance, and daring to hope and dream again. …
Until the tide changes, seasons turn, seeds fall again – loss comes again – probably not before we’ve entirely found peace or familiarity with life after the last loss – it’s dynamic, always renewing, flowing and ebbing, sometimes even all at once.
Not the expected ‘happy ending’
Oh, did you expect that we would arrive – ta daa! – at a happy ending?
Sorry.
I am not here to promise you that resurrection – return to life – is a one-way trip; one death to navigate and all plain sailing from there. I want to invite us to play with the idea that resurrection life is life and death: life through the inevitable deaths we experience.
If it is, what matters is that we learn to embrace the process of return to life; to trust the constant movement of letting go and letting grow.
With each death we must choose; with the seed, we choose – am I buried, or am I planted to rise again into life?
