THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

The stars of the Resurrection story are of course the women. Following the arrest of Jesus, and leaving aside Peter’s inglorious episode in the court of the high priest’s house, the men have almost entirely disappeared from the scene. Defeated, dejected, scared, they have hidden themselves away.

It is the women who, as women always do, keep the show on the road. Immediately after Jesus’s burial, the women who had followed him all the way from Galilee, and who had stood on Golgotha near the Cross, came back with the spices and ointments they needed to prepare their Lord’s body.

And then, very early in the morning on the third day, they return again to the tomb - Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others - to embalm the body. They were “puzzled” not to find his body in the tomb where it had been laid. Then the two men in shining robes tell them what has happened: that Jesus has risen from the dead as he said he would.

At once they rush back to the other disciples to give them the incredible news. But of course they don’t believe a word of it; they really did find it incredible. For the men, this was just a crowd of hysterical women; they must have been hallucinating; not surprising really when you consider the distraught frame of mind they were in, sick with grief for the death of their Lord. In Luke’s words, the men dismissed the whole thing as “an idle tale”, literally an old wives’ tale, as we might say.

It’s not until Peter goes to the tomb and sees for himself that the men start to take it seriously. You can’t really blame them, but it is worth noticing that all the apostles reacted just like Thomas did later on: until they had seen with their own eyes, they did not believe. It’s not only Thomas who took a lot of convincing.

So how did the women, and then Peter, react when they found the empty tomb and discovered what had happened? I think they experienced what a former Bishop of Durham, Ian Ramsey, used to call a disclosure situation. That’s to say one of those moments when, all of a sudden, everything falls into place, or as Ramsey used to put it, “the penny drops”.

It’s as if you suddenly find the missing piece of the puzzle which finally completes the picture, so that what had previously been profoundly puzzling suddenly makes sense. All sorts of things which had seemed mysterious, all sorts of apparently irrelevant details which didn’t quite fit in, suddenly come together with a sort of a “clunk” as everything falls into place, and you say to yourself “oh yes, of course, why didn’t I see this before”?

Luke tells us that the angels in white robes reminded the women of the things Jesus had said, about how he had to be handed over, and be crucified and “on the third day rise again”. And then the women “remembered his words” - and understand them for the first time.

There were indeed lots of things Jesus said that clearly didn’t make any kind of sense to his followers at the time. And you know what it’s like when you hear something that just doesn’t fit into your scheme of things, or something that you don’t want to know: it doesn’t really register; you forget it or you push it to the back of your mind. We’re very good at ignoring information that doesn’t fit into our existing ideas, although often it lodges in some half-hidden compartment of the mind, a place where we store things that don’t fit into our mental filing system. We put them in the pending-tray of our minds, where, like the pending-trays in our offices, they tend to fill up until we can’t even remember what’s in them.

So when the messengers from God told the women about Jesus having risen, they were suddenly able to dig out lots of things that they had all but forgotten.

Jesus had made a tremendous impact on them, to the extent that they had left everything to follow him, but at the same time he turned out to be a very strange and surprising person: so many things he said and did, and not least the way he came to meet his death, just didn’t seem to make any kind of sense. It was only now, looking back on things in the new light of the Resurrection, that suddenly the whole picture began to come together and make sense. In the light of the Resurrection, Jesus’s life-story turned from a disaster into a victory, and even the Bible started to make sense in a wholly new way.

We know this sort of thing for ourselves. Our own lives are full of puzzles. The world we live in is full of puzzles. There are lots of things that we can’t really make sense of.

Why is there so much suffering in the world? How can a God of love allow so many dreadful things to happen? Why do things go wrong in our own lives and the lives of those who are close to us? Or, what is worse, why do things go so wrong for some people while others have an apparently untroubled passage through life?

Why is everything so unfair? Why is there so much injustice? Why can’t human beings learn to live together in peace? And so on, and so on.

Looked at from an ordinary straightforward point of view, there are no real answers to these questions, so much so that it’s difficult to believe that a world like that is made and held in being by a gracious God. You can’t really blame people who conclude, rather logically, that there isn’t, after all, any ultimate meaning to our existence, and there isn’t any God, or at least not the loving God of the Christians.

And then something may happen that changes the whole way we look at things. Some kind of “disclosure moment” which suddenly shows everything in a new light, so that all these puzzling questions start to have answers.

In one sense, nothing has changed. All the brute facts about our existence remain the same. But at the same time everything has changed because we see the same brute facts in a new light. It’s a bit like the way the stark fact of the death of Jesus changed from being just one more in the depressing catalogue of human rights violations and became for those who had faith the key that unlocks the meaning of our lives and the purpose of our existence.

So, in the light of the Resurrection, nothing has changed and everything has changed. The facts of our lives remain the same, but to those who have faith they take on a wholly new aspect.

In particular, the Resurrection faith assures us that all our problems, all our sins, all our sufferings, however serious they are and continue to be, are nonetheless not the end of the story. In the light of the Resurrection, there is always hope, even in the darkest places and in the darkest moments of our lives. The Resurrection means that there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

That is the Resurrection hope which can not only help us begin to make sense of our lives, but can also start to transform them.

John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church

Easter Day, 8 April 2007

Year C, Gospel: Luke 24.1-12