The social worker
moved slowly, unlike her normal crisp trot through the hospital ward. The
mother of the dead baby sat in a corner, looking like she had been scourged –
what other way is there to look, when your son has died? The baby, born with a
myriad of health problems, now lay even more still than he had in life, when he
was tethered to whirring machines that pumped and breathed and vibrated through
him. Now all was quiet.
And the social
worker slowly, reverently made plaster casts of the tiny feet and hands to
remember the baby by, so the mother could recall that this was not a dream,
that it was real, that he was dead, but he had been hers, growing within her
and then drifting away from life just a few days after his birth.
And then the social
worker softly lifted the tiny feet and made inked footprints, and asked the
mother if she wanted to hold her son, her tiny, still, dead son, in her arms
for a picture. Oftentimes, in the feverish clutch of loss, mothers forget what
their little ones looked like…and so, now that all the tubes and lines and
cords were gone, the mother could hold her boy and a picture could be taken,
all that mother’s love evident in her caress of his arm, in the kiss on the top
of his head, in the gentle rearranging of the smallest hospital gown you can
imagine, in the stillness of the moment, before his body would be taken away
from her forever. It was a moment of ritual and it was a comfort and a reminder of
holiness in the midst of pain.
One of the things we
learn about death, about loss, is that it is too much to bear in the moment,
and to help carry us through those first hours and days, rituals can be a gift.
When the reality is crushing, ritual can structure our space and time enough so
that we can survive. We can make some small meaning of what is happening by
following ancient patterns of behavior that distract us from the pain for a
moment, so we can catch our breath.
We need ritual in
the face of death, so that we can live.
That is one of the
reasons why ritual plays such an important role in the church, because we are
always in the midst of deaths of one kind or another. Sometimes it’s the death
of a beloved. Sometimes it’s the death of a dream, either our own dream, or the
dream of a parish, or the dream of a nation. Sometimes we dream of a return to
a past, happier time, then wake up and discover that we are in the here and
now. And so we structure ways of dealing with those deaths to comfort us, to
help us face the harsh reality, to begin to turn toward the future. We
structure rituals to remind us we are still alive.
In this poignant
reading from the Gospel of Mark, a ritual is playing out. The women who were a
part of the community of disciples had been unable to attend to the rituals of
death properly immediately after Jesus was laid in the tomb and the stone was
rolled to close him in – such a finality to that! – but they decided they would
go the next day to anoint him, to prepare his beloved body as had been ritually
done for centuries, to comfort themselves even if they could not comfort him
anymore. They arrived with the water to wash him, with the oils to rub into his
skin, with the cloth to wind around him, with the spices that would be tucked
into the folds of the cloth. They could hardly believe what had happened in all
its brutality and viciousness. They could hardly believe what their eyes had
told them, that their beloved, their rabbi, their Lord, had been killed, but
they knew it was done. And yet there was one last thing they could do for him,
for themselves, so that they might touch his skin one last time, so that they
could honor him…to carry out the rituals of burial, so that they could live.
We can picture them
walking in the early morning half-light, with the materials they needed slung
in carrying-cloths over their shoulders, walking to the cave in which Jesus’
body was buried. Perhaps they walked briskly at the start of their journey, and
slowed up, hesitating as they approached the tomb, wondering if they could
manage to roll the stone away, wondering if they could bear it to see his
broken body, wondering if they were strong enough for this holy and
heart-rending work, but relying on the rhythm of it, a rhythm that what so
familiar that they could do it with their eyes closed if need be, the rhythm of
ritual that would help them face the death of one who meant so much to them.
And then they looked
up from the path –they had been watching where they stepped on the uneven
ground – and saw the stone had been rolled away. Did they wonder about that?
Did they think that some of the men among them had come ahead, knowing they
would need this? Did they think that perhaps someone had not rolled it into
place the night before? But the cave was gaping open, and they bent and peered
in. It should have been hard to see, but there was some source of light there,
and a young man sitting there. Who was he? They shouldn’t talk to a stranger,
and what was he doing in there? This was a tomb, Jesus’ tomb, but the body of
their Lord wasn’t there. They were caught in that strange land between death
and life and an interloper had interposed himself between them and their ritual
work…
…and then he spoke. "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for
Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look,
there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he
is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told
you."
Incomprehensible. He has been raised? What did
that mean? They were braced to see him in death. Now he wasn’t here and this
stranger was telling them that he would meet them in Galilee.
There was no ritual structure to address this
situation. Jesus had been dead but now, apparently, he wasn’t dead. They had
been prepared to address his death with rituals that were prayer and comfort.
It seemed that was no longer required, and there was no substitute to face this
new understanding of what was happening.
The ritual had been broken open, cracked into a
thousand pieces, since death was no longer the dominating presence in the tomb,
in their lives…Jesus lived.
No, more than that: Jesus lives.
So what happens when rituals are broken apart,
when presence and possibility collide and that which breaks our hearts open
shifts and bends, and presents us with a wildly beautiful new reality? What
happens when the finality of death emerges into the glorious infinitude of
eternal life? What happens when the tomb cannot contain death, because life
triumphs over it?
Perhaps a new ritual is called for in these rare
moments when our hearts have been broken open and new life has flooded in…when
resurrection – incomprehensible, mysterious, transcendent – supplants death.
In orthodox icons of Jesus transcending death,
he stands atop the cross. He lifts the dead from slumber. He conquers what
attempted to end him, but could not.
This night, this Easter vigil, is the ritual
that takes our broken hearts – broken at the darkness of the world, at
corruption and sin and oppression and pain – and shows what has been born out
of that brokenness. This ritual is the retelling of the story of God’s love for
us all through generations upon generation, through our repeated failures to
honor the covenant that God made with us, through God finally sending someone
who walked with us and looked like us and talked like us, through humanity
killing that one who was sent to save us, to this one end: Jesus’ death is not
the end of the story. The burial ritual is not the closing of a door.
This is the ritual that reminds us that Jesus’
death is the START of the story. Resurrection is not just possible – it is
PROMISED. It is promised in that long and somewhat repetitive story of God’s
persistent love. We live into our understanding of the joy of the resurrection
in this ritual because we have experienced the power of ritual when we were in
pain. Our hearts are broken open so that the light can come in. And we learn
this night, above all other nights,that our ritual is not merely comfort, it is
promise. Jesus conquers death tonight and all nights. Christ is risen. He is
risen indeed!