THE EMPTY TOMB

The symbol for Christmas is the star – or the manger or, in the secular world, the tree. The symbol for Good Friday is the cross, either bare or with a corpus-in-agony on it. The symbol for Easter is an empty tomb. Nothingness and yet everythingness. As Frederick Buechner writes: “You can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide….

   “He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death. What is left now is the emptiness. There are those who, like Magdalen, will never stop searching it till they find his face.”  (Whistling in the Dark)

   And there will be those who will spend their lives whistling in the dark because of their refusal to open their eyes and see something, nay everything, in the emptiness of the tomb. For when our eyes are opened, we see not the darkness of a tomb, empty or otherwise; rather, we see the brightness of the glory of God in all of creation. More importantly, we find the face of Christ when we see that face in and on the face of every person our eyes behold.

   If all that is true, there is nothing left to say, as Buechner says. All that needs to be said is said. Our search for the one who once occupied that now-empty tomb has ended. We have found him. We see him. We encounter him every time we open our eyes to the light. If it is not true, if the tomb was never empty, then there is not much that one can say or even needs to say. So the question asked to believer and unbeliever alike is quite simple: “When the stone is rolled back, what do you see?”

   The problem for non-believers is that they don’t believe; but that’s their problem. They have to deal with it and answer for it. But at least what they can and do say is that they do not see what we claim to see. Our problem is greater. We know what we see when we look into that empty tomb. We see resurrection and new life – for Jesus, for us, for everyone. Our search is over. We see the face of Jesus everywhere we look – when we open our eyes to see.

   The temptation is not to, to shut our eyes to the brightness of the empty tomb and the responsibility that emptiness brings to our own lives. There are times when we in fact do give into that temptation and begin to act as if, as if, the tomb was never empty, even as we know it was and is.

   The Feast of the Empty Tomb, Easter, is the celebration of our discovery of the fullness of life itself, our life now and the life of the community of believers whose lives are now living proof to the resurrection. “The tomb is empty. Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!” No more can be said. No more needs to be said except “Alleluia!” and the living out of that Alleluia in our daily lives.                                                                      

WJP