Encountering the Empty Tomb Between the Two Waves of the Sea

A Reflection for the Sunday of the Resurrection All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 5, 2015                                                             Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 25:6-9                 Acts 10:34-43                Mark 16:1-8

Encountering the Empty Tomb Between the Two Waves of the Sea

In Mark’s Gospel for this Sunday of the Resurrection, Mark tells us about the women who had been at the foot of the cross when Jesus died - Mary Magdalene; Mary, the mother of James and Joses; and Salome. It was sundown on Friday, the beginning of the Sabbath, when Jesus is taken from the cross, and they do not have spices to anoint the body. Jesus is dead; they understand totally and completely about that, and they know that unless he is wrapped up in spices, his dead body will stink because that is the way it is. They understand totally and completely about Sabbath Law and that they will have to wait until after sundown on Saturday to buy the spices; that is the way it is. They understand totally and completely that it is the custom in an occupied city that they as women cannot go out at night without being assaulted, and they understand totally and completely that none of the male disciples could accompany them since they run the risk of arrest as accomplices to Jesus in blasphemy and sedition; that is the way it is. On the morning after the Sabbath, the women are walking to the tomb and they are afraid because they know and understand completely that the stone rolled over the tomb is too big for them to move; that is the way it is. They know and understand completely that the center of their lives is gone, and he, like their hopes, are as dead as dead can be; that is the way it is.

As they walk to the tomb prepared to complete one last act of devotion to the body of the man they loved and to the hopes they once had, they turn the corner and see that the stone has been rolled back. They do not understand; that is not the way it is supposed to be. Their minds search for an option they can understand and the possibility of grave robbers come to mind, because that is the way the world works and there is always evil around; so that must be the answer. 

They move slowly toward the open tomb and listen for the sounds of the robbers. Straining their ears, they hear nothing unfamiliar. They can hear sounds coming from the city - the roosters crowing because, in their arrogance, they believe that only they have the power to make the sun rise and to awaken those still asleep. The women know that the roosters don’t make the sun rise, just as their prayers did not stop the death of Jesus. That is the way it is. In the sounds from the city, they hear the calls of men to their donkeys and camels as they begin the new day; life goes on.  You live, you work, you die - that is just the way it is.

They move toward the opening, and they enter into another dimension of life - the life of Holy Vision. Visions, like dreams and myths, are not explained; rather, they are encountered and experienced. Last week I met with a friend who was writing some rap music. I usually don't pay attention to rap music, but I felt that since it was poetry, and it was my friend, that I should pay attention. T.S. Eliot once said, “Genuine Poetry can communicate before it is understood.” 

My friend asked me to “empty my cup”. I understood what my friend meant - it came from an old Zen Koan about a Zen Master and a bright young pupil. The bright young pupil was perfect in every way as he understood totally and completely about the ceremonies of Zen Buddhism. The master invited him in for Chado - “the way of tea” - a tea ceremony of delicate precision of living  in the moment, and the proud pupil prepared it perfectly. But as he was about to pour, the Master stopped him and said that he would pour. The Master raised the pot and poured expertly into the cup - and kept on pouring until the tea in the overflowing cup was spreading over the table and on the floor. The startled student cried, “ Master, there is no more room in the cup for more tea.” The Master said to him: “So it is with you; until you empty yourself, there is no room for anything else.”

I realized that I had to “empty my cup” in order to really listen to my friend's rap poems and, in the same way, I have to “empty my cup” in order to encounter this Holy Vision. Let me invite you now to “empty your cup.” Close your eyes for a moment and just breathe. This is an invitatioin not a demand; “All may, some should, none must.” Just breathe and be aware of the moment as I invite you to come with me as we enter a tomb.

We are outside a carved out cave in the Place of the Skull, Golgatha.  As we center ourselves let us in our imagination bending down low to crouch through the claustrophobic opening into this skull, this tomb, dug into the womb of the earth.

In my imagination we are walking into the tomb as they did. The tomb is limestone, white, a carved out cave, and there are ridges in the walls and ceiling. It reminds me of a brain, and I was aware that, as I  enter the tomb, I am entering into the depths of my mind. I and the women are entering Holy Space where symbols speak from the right side of the brain rather than the language of left side of the brain. We - the women and I, as the women were part of me – and you if you wish to be here, see that the ledge on the left, on which the body was placed when they ran out of time, is empty. There is no body. The left side of the brain, which logically processes the facts of life, does some linear thinking and comes up with the information that the body is gone. On the right side of the tomb, our “brain”, there is a seated man and, in dreams, the right side of the brain is used for mystical, intuitive metaphors, not facts. Dreams and visions are not linear but spiral, where the end is a beginning again: “Spirals beginning as endings must”. 

This man, is he an Angel? Angel means one who gives a message from God, and he is telling me, and them, and you, not to be afraid. The left side of the women’s brains, and mine, are processing the fact of the non-present body and can make no sense out of it, while the right side is listening to the non-logical good news from the Messenger of God that Jesus has risen and is telling the disciples to meet Jesus where they first met him in Galilee. 

I remember the beginning words of the Gospel of Mark

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, As it is written in the prophets; “See, I am sending my messenger before your face who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

The messenger, in saying that we should go back to Galilee where we first met Jesus, is telling me to go back to the beginning.   The beginning of the Book, yes; but also maybe to the beginning of my life, before I was born and was in my mother’s womb - also a cave of no language – and God knew me and as the Psalmist says, “We were fearfully and wonderfully made.” The womb is the place of birth and the tomb is the place of rebirth. God knows and loves me in the tomb and in the womb.

Maybe to go before even my life but to the beginning of all life when the loving energy of God, the Christ, through whom all things came to be, set in motion all that brought me to this day. If Jesus is proclaimed as the Christ in the beginning and the body of Jesus is not there, then what has happened is that we go back to the beginning of time when all things were created through Christ. Jesus has returned to the beginning and has been absorbed back into the Christ energy of creation. So it will be when I live, or die, in Christ in resurrected life, in this life and the next.

Which side of the brain responds?  The left side cannot make sense of the notion, and the right side opens up to many options of alternate realities. So what do the women do? The women ran away in fear. The vision is at first glance a nightmare, but even nightmares are dreams that come for healing.

This ending is how the Gospel of Mark ends, with the empty tomb which is beyond all logical explanation calling us back to the beginning. In essence, Mark points us to the question of how will we, the receivers of this vision, this fantastic dream, respond? The people in Mark’s community in which his Gospel is written cannot explain it. What they do is to look at how lives have been changed. They try to use symbols as a way of encountering that which is beyond understanding. Using symbols, death in a vision is usually about change, and the community of followers, the body of Jesus, changed into who they were created to be and into who they were to more fully become - the body of Christ. Jesus is the human being and Christ is the energy of God through whom all was created.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20^th Century French philosopher, Jesuit priest, paleontologist, geologist, and mystic said that we are not human beings who have a spiritual experience, rather we are spiritual beings having a human experience.  Using symbols to encounter our spiritual beings, we are drawn as spirits of the Logos of God, the beginning, the Alpha Point of all creation, the Christ, to move with all creation into what Teihard calls the “Omega Point” where all things converge in Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. In the Book of Revelation, the Risen Christ says, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end!” Our lives move spirally toward that Omega point and then back to the beginning so that we enter into each new day dedicating it to moving toward the Omega Point where the fullness of Christ dwells within us and we in Christ. 

So how do we approach the empty tomb? Is it to understand what happened twenty-one centuries ago or is it to encounter what happens each new day? We are free to understand it all we can, but perhaps the only way for me is to not use my brain to understand but to stand under it in faith and enter the empty Tomb and, as T. S Eliot ends Little Giddings, the last of his Four Quartets,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

This Easter God issues an invitation to come back to the Empty Tomb after going to the beginning, to the source of the longest river, and know it for the first time.