Mark 15:33-47
Jesus tomb in the Edicule within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
What a devastating ending for a man who had brought abundance, healing, and hope to so many. The twelve disciples, overwhelmed and full of fear, had deserted Jesus. They did not even reappear to claim the body of their leader as the disciples of John the Baptist had done for him.
The disciples must have sadly said to themselves the same thing that the chief priests and the scribes so mockingly taunted Jesus with as he was dying on the cross. “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Why did Jesus accept death on a cross?
The disciples must have believed that everything that they had hoped for was over, that maybe Jesus wasn’t the Messiah after all. Messiahs don’t die. But Jesus did die, and ended up in a tomb hewn from rock, with a stone rolled against the door of the tomb.
All of the gospels give us the gift of the tomb, that cold, dark, lifeless and airless place.
The fact that Jesus lay in a tomb, lifeless, gives us the courage to accept the tragedies in our own lives—not just the failing of our bodies and physical death, but the death of our dreams and desires, the hopes that we hold for ourselves that are so easily destroyed by outside forces and also by our own mistakes.
We have hopes for those we love so desperately, but our hopes for them are not necessarily the hopes they have for themselves. Our dreams for them don’t get realized, and that sort of tragic disappointment is hard to accept.
Our beloved family members and our friends die, destroying the hope of living out our lives with their love, support and physical presence.
The disciples had hoped for a new kingdom on this earth, new and better circumstances for themselves and their people. The death of Jesus destroyed that hope as they had understood it.
The particulars of our tragedies will be unique to each of us, but we all experience these disappointing and tragic times throughout our lives. Our temptation is to fight back, to go to battle against those who destroy our hopes. Or, to end up full of despair, becoming victims of the tragedies in our lives. Or simply to walk away from these sorrows, by “putting them behind us”, to reject those who have hurt us, or to seek some pale version of joy that cannot possibly take away our pain.
Jesus invites us to enter the tomb with him, to accept the death of the various hopes in our lives that we tried to keep alive for so long, to finally and to truthfully say, “God, not my will, but your will be done.”
Sometimes we will be forced into the tomb, but other times we can decide for ourselves that it’s time to lay down our wills and to let that grain of wheat that we had held onto for so long go ahead and fall into the ground and die, and to enter the tomb that holds our shattered hopes and dreams, place them into the arms of God’s will and God’s mercy, and let them rest.
Jesus has gone before us into the tomb.
That is why the words in our burial service ring so true.
“Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.”
It is in the tomb of our hopes and dreams and in the death of our unruly wills that we come to know that only God is immortal, the creator and maker of all that is, and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth we shall return…all of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave, we make our song, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
The tomb, even in its cold finality, is not a place without hope, for only God is the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, and the Lord, the giver of life. Jesus, true God from true God, has been there before us, and will meet us there.
And it is there, in the tomb, that God brings life out of death and makes all things new.