Easter – 2021
John 20:1-18
Marian Free
May I speak in the name of God whom death could not defeat nor the tomb contain. Amen.
[i]At 9:45pm on Saturday May 2, 2009 seven friends – all in Year 12 – were driving home from a BBQ ten minutes from their home in Toowoomba. At some point the car drifted to the edge of the road. The young driver over corrected and steered straight into the on-coming traffic. One of the seven teenagers died at the scene and two others within the next four days. Two more were taken to hospital where they remained in a coma – one for several months. A sixth sustained serious injuries and the seventh, Lech Blaine, walked away without a scratch. After years of grief, survivor’s guilt, imposter syndrome and depression Lech has written about his experience of that night and of the years since. In the excerpt of his book, printed in the Good Weekend, last Saturday Lech writes: “We were on a hiding to nothingness, and yet I never stopped searching for the right person or the perfect words. The great genius and insanity of human beings is our ability to laugh in the face of disaster. To fall in love after heartbreak. To keep breathing when the people we need could disappear at any given moment. To make art from the unspeakable grief when they did.”
Consciously or not Lech is using resurrection language to describe his life’s journey. Somehow, he has found a way to move on from tragedy, to move on but not to move past. No matter what, the trauma of loss and grief will remain with him in some way into the future. His life will be forever marked by the tragedy that took the life of three of his friends and changed the life of another, yet he is able to speak of “making art from unspeakable grief” and of “falling in love after heartbreak”.
At the heart of the resurrection is human experience. The Jesus who experienced the brutality and agony of the crucifixion was not some supernatural being oblivious to pain. He was flesh and blood and he hung on that cross knowing that one of his own had handed him over, that another had claimed never to have known him and that the rest had put their own safety before their friendship with him. The resurrected Jesus was a scarred Jesus. He was not miraculously brought back to life whole and unblemished. His hands, his feet and his side bore testimony to his harrowing experience. Jesus did not emerge from the grave as one to whom nothing had happened. His memory was not wiped, and his body was not restored. Jesus carried in his body and in his mind reminders of his ordeal. The pain may have diminished, the scars faded, and the betrayals forgiven but they could not be wiped out. As much as they were part of Jesus’ past, so they would be a part of Jesus’ present and future.
It is important for us to be reminded that the resurrection is no empty triumph rather it hard-won victory over cruelty and indifference, suffering and death, cowardice and disloyalty. It does not obliterate what preceded it, but rather it absorbs it into a renewed and transformed present and future.
Jesus’ resurrection is a promise for the future, the assurance that death is not final, but it is also a guarantee for the present, an assertion that somehow, someway, we will find a way to move forward even when moving seems impossible. The resurrection is not just the story of what happened to Jesus. It is the story of what happened to those who followed him – the terrified disciples who overcame their fear, the bereaved and the lost who found a way to go on and the confused and the foolish who found their feet and at the same time found their vocation. The horror of that Friday did not leave the disciples, the knowledge of their frailty and their failures, the awareness of their ignorance and their betrayals, their fear of the authorities almost certainly remained with them and informed them, but the raising of Jesus became their own resurrection to new life, their determination to do better and their motivation to spread the story of Jesus to all who would listen.
And so it is for us. The resurrection is our story. Our lives, like Lech’s, can change in a heartbeat. Fire or flood can destroy a lifetime of work. An accident can leave us bereaved or incapacitated. Disease can ravage our bodies and our minds, and a pandemic can stop us in our tracks.
Most of us will find a way to pick up the pieces and move on. We will learn to live with grief and loss, and, with luck and fortitude, we will learn from the experience and be better and stronger people as a result. Resurrection to new life is not a magic formula that erases the past, it is a promise that we can continue to live and that our lives, while not the same, may be richer and deeper as a result. Resurrection to eternal life is a promise that gives us the courage to hold on, when holding on seems absolutely impossible.
Like Jesus, we may not know resurrection unless we first know crucifixion. We may not know new life unless we are willing to let go of the old. This life will almost certainly throw up difficulties, heartaches and setbacks. When life throws us a curved ball, we know that the scarred Jesus has travelled the same paths, known the same betrayals and experienced the worst that life has to offer. Through it all he held onto his trust in the living God and the living God did not abandon him but brought him from death to life. In the same way when life gives us its worst, the living God will not abandon us, but will hold us and heal us until we are ready to live again.
[i] Lech Blaine. Car Crash: A Memoir (Black Inc) excerpt in Good Weekend (The Sydney Morning Herald, March 27, 2021, p 16.
Swallowsrest 