All Lent, we’ve been sharing weekly reflections by members of The Saint Francis Foundation’s Church Relations team. The Rev. Benjamin Thomas, Th.D., has written a few thoughts for today, The Feast of the Resurrection.
“Where are you, Judy, where are you, Anne?
Where are the paths your heroes came?
Wondering out loud as the bandage pulls away,
Was I, was I only limping, was I really lame?
Oh here, come over here …
Once again, once again,
Love calls you by your name.”
Although Leonard Cohen wrote these words about a purely human loss of love and all the pain that this loss entails, the emotion is pretty close to what the the disciples must have felt on that first Easter. Some of them were hiding. Mary seems a little braver perhaps, or so heartbroken as not to care what happened to her, and she goes Jesus’s last known location, a tomb.
She arrives there, searching for answers, not really expecting to find anything except grief.
Instead she finds a puzzle. She finds the tomb open and apparently raided. Where there should have been a body, there were angels sitting in its appointed place. Mary, however, was clearly not in the best emotional shape. A person with any hope or even anger instead of sorrow might have shouted, “Hey, what are you and why are you here?” But Mary is silent, and it is the the angels who ask the questions. She answers their questions and turns to leave.
But during this conversation, Jesus has come looking for Mary. When she starts out of the tomb, he stands at the entrance, resurrected. He is alive on the other side of death’s door. Mary does not immediately recognize Jesus and continues to ask her grief-stained questions.
Finally, Jesus calls Mary by her name. And in that moment, she finds everything that she had hoped for and everything that she had dreamed.
Death was not the end, the proof of life eternal stood before her, and her sorrow was turned to joy.
This is the story of the resurrection: God brings life out of death. Whenever and wherever we find ourselves lost in grief and looking for answers, there is hope, even as we wander into the very doorway of death. For life, eternal life, stands waiting just beyond that door. And that life is Jesus who is looking for us, calling out to us, in our heartache, in our pain, and
“Once again, once again,
Love calls you by your name.”
