KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 16 April
They ran both together
Just as we buried ourselves in the Passion of Christ during Holy Week, so now we run in the Resurrection of Christ. The classic Easter Gospel is all about running. Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb in the early morning finds the stone taken away from the sepulchre and runs to Simon Peter and John. “They ran both together,” John tells us in his Gospel, to the tomb. The Resurrections sets us in motion.
The Resurrection is the fruit of the Passion, we might say, but there is the paradox that, in a way, the Passion comes out of the Resurrection. How? It is only in the light of the Resurrection that the Passion accounts come to be written. “Herein is love,” we must say about both the Passion and the Resurrection. “Never that which is shall die,” as Euripides says. Such is the love of God which now moves in us. Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection. It changes our perspectives. It changes our thinking about death and suffering; just, perhaps, it can speak to us in our current fears and worries.
I cannot think this Easter Gospel except in its juxtaposition with Mark’s account of the Marys coming to the empty tomb and encountering “a young man,” an angel, whose words to them and to us belong to the joy of the Easter Proclamation. “Be not afraid,” they are told. “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified: he is risen.” Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia! This is the ancient Christian greeting. Something has changed. Death is no longer the end of the road, the terminus ad quem of human life; it has become a means to an end, a transitus. Death itself is changed. Such is the great dynamic of the Resurrection. But in what is known as the shorter end of Mark’s Gospel, he says that “they fled from the tomb… for they were afraid.” Are we running away in fear or are we running in the path of learning and joy?
The stories of the Resurrection show the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples about the Resurrection. It is a process of learning, of seeing things in a new way, a way that does not deny the past of suffering, sorrow, sin, and death but instead shows us a way of thinking through those realities. We are learning the lessons of love. Love sets us in motion towards one another because it is the motion of God’s love in us. God’s love runs in us. That connects us even when we seem separate and isolated from one another. There is the greater connection of prayer and thought. It happens when we are running in the path of learning. Such is the real purpose and meaning of a school as a place of learning, of care and compassion, of love and service.