Day: April 7, 2024

“This is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”

“The same day,” John tells us. What same day? The same day as Easter. It is as if time has slowed, as if we are simply in the moment and meaning of Easter Day. The same day but “at evening”; “there was evening and there was morning, one day,” Genesis tells us about the wonder of creation. Here is the greater wonder of redemption, the new creation through the Resurrection. Where are we?

We are caught up in the mystery of this same day, the eternal day symbolic of the sabbath of God in the radical meaning of God’s eternal life given and made known to us in Christ, as John says in the Epistle. That is what we are struggling to understand. We are very much, I think, especially in the confusions of our culture of fear and death, with the disciples on the evening of that one and same day. We are behind closed doors. It is a powerful symbol of our human uncertainties and fears. We are behind the closed doors of our minds; buried in ourselves, dead to life. Our minds are like tombs. It is an appropriate image for our culture of fear and death; closed in on ourselves.

Yet, what we are given to see is God opening our minds. How? By appearing in our midst. There is, first, as saw last week the witness of Mary Magdalene finding the empty tomb and running to Peter and John who confirm her finding but revealing their perplexity “for as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” The second Gospel reading from Mark at Easter (BCP, p. 185) makes this same point: the women coming to the tomb, finding the stone rolled away and “a young man sitting on the right side” of the sepulchre, “clothed in a long white garment.” As Mark puts it, “they were affrighted” or amazed but are told “be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” It is evidence from absence, the witness of the empty tomb, which is not the same thing as absence of evidence. For there is also the witness of the young man or angel. “He” who was crucified, whose body you seek, “is risen,” they are told. Something has changed. It marks the beginning of the process of learning the radical meaning of the Resurrection. It changes everything but not by negating the realities of the Passion. The Crucifixion and the Resurrection have to be thought together.

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