Sermon: The emptiness of the tomb

Luke 24:1-12, Isaiah 26:1-9,19

Hearing today's gospel in the middle of a service of Easter hymns and anthems and alleluias can colour how we hear it - did you notice that it is actually about confusion and uncertainty, not Easter joy and hope? It is like the ending of Mark's gospel when the women said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. Here the women try to tell the disciples what they have seen and are disbelieved. Let me remind you of some of the words used to describe events and emotions: missing body, perplexity, terror, hiding faces in fear, an idle tale, disbelief at what they were told, going home alone, amazement. That is hardly the stuff of Easter joy.

All the gospel writers tell of how women had to face the ambiguities of the early dawn on that first day of the week since, as Luke says so vividly, they found the tomb but they did not find the body. I can't hear these readings without being taken straight back to an Easter service several years ago. A few months earlier there had been an enormous betrayal of trust by one of the church's leaders and we had spent the time since trying to come to terms with what had happened. Conversations were just starting with the person concerned to begin a process of understanding that we hoped would lead to reconciliation.  Then shortly before Easter, as a result of a bizarre incident several hundred miles away, the person was dying, in a coma with brain damage, and we knew that there would never be understanding or reconciliation or closure. That Easter as I heard about the women's despair at finding no body I realised, as never before, that the empty tomb was not good news to the women because, just as we needed to meet this person, they needed the physicality of Jesus' dead body not an empty tomb, and now both they and we were thwarted. Some of you may recognise their experience in your own if you have faced bereavement without a body. It is all painfully wrong and untidy.

And whilst the message of the angels took them back to what Jesus had said, it did not give them certainties now. In Eliot's words, they only had ‘hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses.' Janet Morley describes the feeling as she puts words into Mary Magdalene's mouth in a poem ‘I never meant you to roll back the stone':

(the text quoted is deleted for copyright reasons)

(Janet Morley ‘I never meant you to roll back the stone' in All Desires Known SPCK 1992. Copyright © Janet Morley 1988, 1992)

Even when, later on, there had been resurrection appearances, not just resurrection absences, and Jesus was actually with them, the disciples, in Luke's arresting phrase, ‘disbelieved in their joy.'

Now you and I know what followed, and so although I've said that the empty tomb was appalling news, that is not the whole story and it is also the prelude to some of the best news the world has ever had. But it is an essential prelude; the gospel writers won't let us go straight to resurrection appearances without the terror of absence in the empty tomb. And I suggest to you that that is in fact good news. Because if there was no story of the perplexity and terror right in the middle of the resurrection story, what place would there be for those of us who have doubts, fears and terrors ourselves, either about Jesus' resurrection or about our own daily lives? What hope when we face what seems like a harrowingly empty tomb? If all we had was a story of disciples coming instantly to faith, joy and peace, what hope for the rest of us who are not so lucky?

RS Thomas, the Welsh poet and priest who died a few years ago, has an unerring way of putting things. In his poems he is often to be found on his knees in an empty church, dealing with his questions before God and - unlike many of us - waiting patiently for the answer. Here he is in church, trying to analyse the quality of its silences, wondering if this is where God hides from his searching. He concludes his poem:

(the text quoted is deleted for copyright reasons).

(R.S. Thomas ‘In Church' in Collected Poems J.M. Dent 1993 copyright © R.S. Thomas)

The empty tomb, and the women's experience at it, assures us that we too can test our faith on emptiness. But if the empty tomb is all there is, that in itself is not good news. Instead the untenanted cross, the empty tomb, are the essential preludes and signposts to the resurrection encounter. Emptiness is a part of our life, and we shut it out at our peril.

On my day off this week I read a novel which gave me a different perspective on the themes in this sermon. About half way through the book, two people are talking about books and how their different ways of seeing things point to differences in their character:

‘All you had to do was look at how each had approached the same subject. Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow. Livitnoff's life was defined by a delight in the weight of the real; his friend's by a rejection of reality with its army of flat-footed facts.'

(Nicole Krauss The History of Love Penguin 2005 page 116)

At the end of the book when the two central characters are waiting to meet each other for the first time and describe their feelings and actions at that crucial moment, the author uses the clever device of putting only a sentence or two on each page, leaving the rest blank, so that each person has a page to themselves. This goes on for several pages and the white space becomes very important in expressing the emptiness and the possibilities that are part of each person's story. And at the very end, when they do meet, there is then a blank page before a short obituary of the older one, and then three more blank pages. I found myself slowly turning over each one in turn, not closing the book immediately, because I needed to inhabit the emptiness. So much was potentially said in that emptiness. I needed to feel the hesitations and possibilities that lay between the words I had read.

The emptiness of the tomb is a part of our Christian story, and we cannot pass over it altogether. Like the women, we need to inhabit it as part of our resurrection experience and not fear the times when our experience is more of God's seeming absence than presence. For those of you who like a physical example, the very architecture of this cathedral and claustral buildings puts and keeps emptiness at its heart: the cloisters enclose not a worship space but emptiness. It reminded the monks before us, and reminds us today, that we cannot fill every last nook and cranny of our life with things and busy-ness; there has to be an empty space if everything else is to make sense and not suffocate us, just as there have to be possibilities between words. The grass is also open to the elements, and they are beyond our control: it reminds us that the stability of worship in the church sits right next to the insecurity of things we cannot organise and direct. There is an empty tomb, with its terror and perplexity, alongside every certainty and joy.

But the good news that the angels brought to the women as they stood in the emptiness is that he is not here, he is risen. The empty tomb is not the last word, but it is a word and if we will hear its message when we are forced by life's perplexities to stand in the emptiness, we will have a surer ground for hope. The empty tomb is not, in and of itself, good news, but the fact that it is in all the gospels, is good news because we have the assurance that if we face it we, like the women, will find it has been broken open.

As a result of my experience in church that Easter I began writing a hymn, but it went unfinished until a few years later when my father died during Lent and I feared that there would be no Easter experience for me that year. Only then did the rest of the hymn come together and I was proved wrong: bereavement and Easter nuanced but did not negate each other. And that, in a world where suffering reminds us that we still await the coming of God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, is gloriously good news. There is an empty tomb, in all its barrenness, at the heart of the Easter story. But that is not the whole story.

They came, as dawn was breaking,to finalise their loss,
absorb death's grim, stark meaning,the horror of the cross.
They came, and angels told them"Recall the words he said.
You seek the one now living,why look among the dead?" 

We dream of resurrectionyet when it comes we cling
to things known and familiar,the boundaries they bring.
And we, who are not ready to let our grieving go,
reject the angels' story,hold to the loss we know.

You interrupt our mourning,an untrod path you pave;
for you bring resurrectionwhile we still seek the grave.
Our lives are wrenched wide open,the wounds we nursed exposed;
and, like a phrase of music,our death to life transposed.

(Rosalind Brown, copyright © 1995 Rosalind Brown)