The Stone before the Tomb

(The Nifty Word: Alleluia)

To the church in the diaspora[1]

& to the church of the unchurched[2]

APRIL 8, 2007: Easter Sunday

Acts 10: 34-43 Colossians 3: 1-4 Mark 16: 1-7).

Introduction

The huge stone rolled before the tomb

On Good Friday Joseph of Arimathea placed the dead body of Jesus in his own new rock-hewn tomb. Then he rolled a huge stone across the entrance and went away (Mt 27: 58-61).

The huge stone rolled back

After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome, were on their way to the tomb with spices to anoint the body of Jesus. Mark writes that, “On their way they said to one another, `Who shall roll away for us the stone for us?’ (It was a very huge one.)” (Mk 16: 3-4). When they arrived, to their great surprise and relief they saw that the stone had already been rolled back.

Who rolled it back? Matthew writes there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and rolled it back and then sat on it (Mt 28: 1-10). Mark writes that when the women entered the tomb they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe. He told the women not to be afraid and that the Jesus of Nazareth whom they were seeking had been raised from the dead (Mk 16: 5-6). Luke writes that as the women were puzzling over the stone rolled back and the empty tomb, two men in dazzling garments appeared to them and asked, “Why do you seek the living among the dead” (Lk 24:1-12)?

Who rolled back the stone--an angel of the Lord or a young man wearing a white robe or two men in dazzling garments? The gospels are not historical documents whose bottom line is to deliver historical facts. The gospels are religious documents whose bottom line is to deliver a religious message. The message is that the stone before the tomb of Jesus holding Easter faith (Resurrexit!) captive was so huge that it took an angel or hefty young men to roll it away.

The huge stone of doubt

What is that huge stone which blocks the tomb of Jesus and holds Easter Faith captive, and which is so ponderous that it requires an angel or hefty young men to roll it away? It is doubt. Doubt blocks the entrance to the tomb of Jesus where we discover the good new that the Lord is not among the dead but the living.

That huge stone of doubt is an accumulation of many things. It’s an accumulation of the indiscriminate acts of God like tsunamis sweeping away whole seas of humanity. It is an accumulation of the inhumane acts of man like the apocalyptic event of 9/11 which buried alive three thousand innocent human beings under a pile of rubble so mountainous that it took a ten-month operation working day and night to haul away two million tons of debris containing twenty thousand body parts. It is an accumulation of the inhumane acts of man like the Holocaust which incinerated or starved to death six million Jews in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, and which momentarily gave rise to a school of theologians who declared that God is dead. The Nazis, those theologians claimed, had not only succeeded in killing Jews but God as well!

The huge stone of doubt before the tomb of Jesus is also an accumulation of our own personal experiences of death as we carry the bodies of loved ones to their graves. There amidst the rows of the silent dead, death assumes an overwhelming proportion, and we find ourselves crying out for help and saying, “Who shall roll the huge stone away for us so that we can peer in and believe that our loved ones somehow and somewhere live?”

That call for help at the graveside of loved ones is a catholic call for help. That is to say, it is universal. Not only Christians but Jews and Muslims cry out for help to roll away the huge stone before the tombs of those they love. There’s Easter in all of us. So as we Christians go through our liturgical cycle of Good Friday and Easter Sunday we remind ourselves that we are not as alone or as separated from our Jewish and Islamic brothers as we sometimes think we are. Easter does not separate us from them. We all have a bottom-line in common: before the tombs of our loved ones we all cry out for help to roll away the huge stone.

Spring/ Easter and the stone

Every year a robin helps to roll away the stone for me. In Wisconsin, we always know for sure when it is summer and when it is winter. One evening in late fall we pull a cozy quilt over our self and fall asleep and wake the next morning buried under a fluffy quilt of snow. It's a yearly delight, but it doesn't last long. In a typical winter, the thick layer of snow on top turns into a shroud, and winter becomes a tomb with a huge stone rolled in front of it holding spring captive. By the end of February we are crying out, "Who shall roll the stone away for us?" And then one day, a solitary robin appears and hoists her wings against the stone. Some think she’s silly and snicker at her; it’s only early March, and there’s surely one more good blizzard lurking in the wings. But the lengthening days, the mystical smell of spring in the air and the biological clock within us assure our human spirit that the back of winter has been broken, and that from now on it's the snow that's silly. The robin eventually wins. She rolls away the huge stone for us and spring bursts forth again.

For a young lady friend of mine who died of cancer it was a cardinal who helped to roll the stone away. In an Easter card she wrote, “I like spring a lot. It's a time when so many things are giving just the slightest inkling, the smallest sign, that perhaps things aren't really what they appear to be; trees aren't really dead and barren. Seeds aren't really lifeless pebbles. There is even a lady cardinal taking twigs, one at a time, to a secret place in the fir tree. It's the merest whisper of a promise of things to come. Perhaps, just perhaps, things and people aren't quite what we appear to be. There just might be more."

With spring comes also the yearly liturgical celebration of the Easter Vigil with the deacon standing before the Paschal candle, singing in the darkness that, “This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death” (Easter Proclamation). Easter is the church’s yearly attempt to roll away the huge stone of doubt for us which has accumulated in the past year.

Though spring and Easter don’t strictly prove anything, they do encourage us to trust our hearts which demand de profundis nothing less than eternal life for those we love and reunion with them one day. Spring and Easter encourage us to trust that our hearts know something that our heads don’t know.

The CDF and the stone

At the present moment the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (SDF) is investigating the writings of Jesuit Fr. Jon Sobrino, a former theological adviser to Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador whom rightwing social elites martyred because of his love for the poor. The CDF wishes to roll away any stone of doubt about the absolute uniqueness of Jesus and his divinity, which Sobrino’s writings might cause in the minds of the faithful. The current investigation seems to be a shot across the deck in preparation for the Pope’s upcoming visit to Brazil, May 9-13. The writings in question are Sobrino’s book Jesus the Liberator, originally released in 1991, and Christ the Liberator, first issued in 1999.

Fr. Sobrino, 69, was born in the Basque region of Spain. He joined the Jesuits, in 1958 he arrived in El Salvador and became a leading voice in Liberation Theology—a theology designed to break the traditional alliance of the Latin American Church with social elites and to support justice for the poor. The movement aroused fierce opposition, and in 1989 Sobrino narrowly escaped a bloody attack on the University of Central America that left six of his fellow Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter dead.

The CDF maintains that Sobrino does not sufficiently emphasize the absolute uniqueness of Jesus and his divinity. That, it says, could be harmful to the faith of the people. With all the urgent issues screaming to be addressed in the church (like the collapse of a system of pastoral care built up over a thousand year which managed to provide sufficient priests and pastors for parishes) many of the faithful find it perplexing that the Vatican should spend so much time and psychic energy censuring the books of a priest who is very dedicated to the poor of Jesus and to a church of the poor. Many feel that Cardinal Bernard Law and others have proven to be far more harmful to the faithful by their mishandling of sexually abusive priests than any book written by Sobrino could ever prove to be. The misdeeds of these hierarchs are a huge stone blocking the tomb of Jesus. They keep Easter faith (Resurrexit!) captive far more effectively than any heretical book could.

Mychal Judge and the stone

Vatican theologians fault Sobrino because, “he does not sufficiently comprehend the communicatio idiomatum, i.e., the possibility of referring the properties of divinity to humanity and vice versa (which is the immediate consequence of the unity of the person of Christ in two natures).” Theologians filled with such lifeless and incomprehensible language do not very effectively roll away the stone of doubt for anyone; only living and life-giving people do that.

On that apocalyptic morning of September 11^th, 2001, Fr. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest and one of the four chaplains for the New York City Fire Department, rushed to ground zero where he died in the line of duty. Almost immediately legend sprung up around his death. The story started circulating that he had taken his helmet off to give the last rites to a dying fireman when suddenly a mass of debris came crushing down upon him. He died there on the spot, and his body was carried off to a nearby church where it was laid upon an altar.

The articles say that Fr. Mycal had an encyclopedic memory for people’s names, birthdays and passions. He knew everyone from the homeless to Mayor Guiliani. Though he was a true New Yorker, born and raised in the City, he lived on an entirely different plane of priorities from that of most New Yorkers: he was non-acquisitive (not grabby), unselfish, and uncomplaining.

New York City saw how powerfully Fr Mychal had rolled away a huge stone of doubt for a whole sea of humanity. When a memorial was held for him, a steady flow priests, nuns, lawyers, cops, firefighters, homeless people, rock-and-rollers, local politicians, middle-age suburbanites, straights and gays, recovering alcoholics, streamed into Good Shepherd Chapel on Ninth Ave, an Anglican church, to do a memorial for a Roman Catholic priest, himself a recovering alcoholic.

Fr. Mychal rolled away a huge stone of lifeless faith for Michael O’Shea who got to know him well. O’Shea writes, “In the wee hours of Oct. 23 (shortly after 9/11), my wife, Tauna, went into labor. At 11:47 AM I helped deliver a healthy 7-pound, 15-ounce boy. We decided to name him Mychal. I’m such a jerk about my son. I spend hours each day holding him. He is so gorgeous, and I think he already has Fr. Mychal’s great Irish smile. He now has his name. I hope some day he will also have his humor, his courage, his incredible humanity and his shining faith.”

Conclusion

The nifty word: Alleluia

No super scholarly and incomprehensible defense of the absolute uniqueness Jesus and his divinity by the CDF or anybody else can roll away the stone of doubt for us as can the image of the Risen Lord alive in people like Fr. Mychal Judge. At Easter, therefore, words are useless. So Paul Simon sings,

And so you see I've come to doubt

all that I once held true.

I stand alone without beliefs.

The only truth I know is you.

On an Easter Morn there is nothing worse than a long homily trying to prove that Jesus rose from the dead, and that we too will rise.   There are no nifty proofs or arguments for Easter; there are only nifty robins and cardinals and nifty Easter Vigils and especially nifty people like Fr. Mychal Judge who help roll the stone away for us. They don’t deliver long homilies. They are all brief and to the point. They all set a song singing in us, and that song has but one word: Alleluia and Alleluia isn’t really a word at all. It’s just a kind of ecstatic babble which we sing over and over again, because it says everything there is to be said, and anything else says almost nothing on Easter Morn.

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[1] Diaspora is a Greek word meaning dispersion. Originally it referred to the settling of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile. It’s now come to mean the migration or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland or parish!

[2] By the “the unchurched” is especially meant not those who have left the church but those whom the church has left!