For those not going to Holy Week or Easter Sunday

If you are actively choosing not to go to Holy Week this week, then you probably know, but I'll remind you anyway, that there are four stories of the death of Jesus the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. In some of the stories he is in control, he knows what is coming, he willingly goes into it, knowing that any power that is being held over him is the power that is given from God, stories where he says simply “it is finished.” And you know that there are stories where Jesus is devastated, where the cross is a symbol of full brokenness between him and the God he came from, where he cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And so I will remind you of one of the stories.

In one of the stories written down by the person we now call Luke, Jesus commends his spirit into God's hands, the crowds return home grieving, and then the text tells us, “but all his friends, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.”

This is for you, if you are standing at a distance and watching.

You have any of a multitude of reasons to be standing at a distance. You are a former church worker who feels every old weariness rise in you just at the thought of Holy Week and Easter Sunday. You are bearing scars of spiritual or religious trauma in which the Passion of Christ or the stories of Holy Week writ large were used to tell you who to be and how to be and who you belong to, which was never liberating, only confining. You are standing at a distance because you do not know who Jesus is for you, and you definitely do not know who the church is for you, and you don't even know if you are for you.

You are standing at a distance, but you are still watching. Still watching as the world continues to rend itself, as our country rends itself, as leadership supposedly duly elected rends itself in its quest for power and wealth (to a point at which I do not understand the quest for dominance; what else do you have to win anymore?)

You are standing at a distance and watching these things and I am standing with you, my loves.

All his friends, including the women who had come with him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.

I think about the women a lot. They are one of the groups of people that are consistently marginalized in Scripture and yet there are enough of us that our stories still got told somehow. In John's Gospel, the women come to the tomb because, I think, they are expecting to find that Jesus is resurrected. There is no reason for them to go to the tomb. In John's Gospel, the body is properly buried, wrapped in a hundred pounds of spices and long white linens.

But in Matthew and in Mark and in Luke, those same women who stood at a distance come to prepare the body for burial. The burial on Friday night in Matthew and Mark and Luke is hasty, because the Sabbath is about to begin, and no work can be done on that day, so a body cannot be properly buried. They have to quickly find a tomb and then, on Sunday morning because the Sabbath is over, they can go back and properly bury their friend, their teacher.

What's the greater act of faith? To believe that Jesus might be resurrected, to believe that when your rabbi, your teacher, your healer, your miracle worker said that “after three days I will rise again,” he meant it.

Or is it, when everything that you trusted in has died, to go anyway -- to leave the house where you all are hiding out of fear of your own imprisonment, trial, capture, and potential execution -- to go anyway and say, “I will bury the one I love with dignity and honor no matter what comes to me.”

What is the greater act of faith?

For each of you there is something that may feel dead, or may be very literally so. For each of you I hope, maybe not this Easter morning that is coming, but one day on your own Easter, your own resurrection and new life and liberation day, whether that be sometime this spring or some random day in August.

I hope that you have that same moment of coming to bury all your hopes that you thought were dead, of speaking truthfully of all that you have lost, of looking straight into the face of the rawest part of your grief, and finding out the tomb is empty.