As I meditate on the Easter story, as recorded by Mark, I keep seeing verses that I have glossed over and not really noticed before. One such verse is the women’s question: “Who will roll away the stone for us?”
There are many stones that stand in our way. There are stones of education, finance, opportunity, unemployment, racism, prejudice, disability, and health. People often feel that they have been hemmed in by big stones surrounding them and they can’t roll them away on our own. We need help to break out. These walls would confine us and halt our progress but it is possible for them to be rolled away. And if the stones can be rolled away, the walls that pen us in are demolished and resurrection can come to us too.
This sort of resurrection will be most likely to emerge in a faithful community, attentive to God’s transforming presence. This will be a community where people look to other peoples needs and not just to their own. It will be a community where those with problems and weaknesses will be helped by those who are strong. A community where those with little will benefit from the sharing of those who have plenty. A place where all sorts of varied gifts will be valued and no one sort of giftedness will be considered to be superior to the others.
This will be church living as a resurrection community. Resurrection will always be a mystery but we can recognise it when it happens. The resurrection story in Mark's gospel ends with the women in awe, fear, and silence. This is the natural reaction when things turn out in a way that is completely unexpected. It is the only response that is believable when the unbelievable happens before our own eyes.
Resurrection seems impossible when faced with what we all know to be the reality of death. But this final frontier is exactly the place that is affected and the empty tomb shows us the way to a new future - a future of possibilities where we thought there were none. The risen presence of Jesus himself is with us when he brings resurrection to hopeless situations and love where you would least expect to find it. The risen presence is there when justice is resurrected in places where justice seems to have been absent for a long time. Christ is alive, resurrected and bringing the possibility of resurrected life to all situations where we need courage, strength and wisdom. To those situations where we can work together to roll away the stones that imprison people and shut out the light. Resurrected we can join together in healing the world.
I acknowledge a short paragraph that I read by Bruce Epperly as inspiration for this post
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