Easter Sunday April 4, 2010 Cycle
C
Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-
9
As human beings, when we think of the word
“emptiness,” it’s a word we tend to want no part of. Such as
emptiness in a relationship. Emptiness in my job. Emptiness in
so much of my life, or even my whole life. We deal with this word
in such a way where we almost always attach a negative
meaning to it. And understandably so.
When the Red Sox play the Yankees tonight to open up the
Major League baseball season, when you look out at the Green
Monster after nine innings and you see a bunch of zeroes on the
side of the home team, you may feel a sense of emptiness, along
with a sense of defeat. After all, one side has to win, and one has
to lose. And that’s what happens on Easter Sunday. One side
wins, and the other side loses.
Easter Sunday is a day when humanity wins and the Devil loses.
This is a day when the victory belongs to every person who
loves God, allows God to be at the center of our lives – not
sometimes, but always – and for those who worship the only-
begotten Son sent into our world through the womb of the Virgin
Mary for the purpose of bringing us to the place of our true
citizenship, the glory of heaven.
And here’s the real kicker, being a small sign of how God
operates, but by no means limited to one sign or God’s approach
toward us; the kicker is that God wins the game through
emptiness. Through absence. Through not being there. Through
being gone, like a Big Papi home
run.
Whereas emptiness may be a threat to the joys and happiness of
our worldly lives, emptiness from God’s doing and perspective
will raise our joys and happiness to a level that is far beyond the
reaches of this world. Thank God for emptiness. For in God’s
emptiness of the tomb, we discover
victory.
Mary of Magdala goes to the tomb, and what does she find? She
finds emptiness. But not initially the good kind. She thinks that
someone stole Jesus’ body. Someone came in the night, rolled
back the stone, and took his body to another place. (This is the
mindset we are to be very careful not to fall into. It’s easier and
more sensible to think that someone came in the middle of the
night, somehow rolled back the stone with super-human
strength, and took his dead body elsewhere, than it is to believe
that Jesus was raised and walked out of that tomb on his own
power.) We should have asked the Green Berets, the Navy Seals,
and Wells Fargo to protect and watch over his crucified body! A
very human initial reaction. “They have taken the Lord from the
tomb and we don’t know where they put him.” Where’s the FBI –
the “Find the Body Investigators—when you need them. There’s
some bad emptiness going on here.
So Mary goes back to tell those in hiding. Peter and John run to
the tomb, with one running faster than the other. They can’t
arrive fast enough at emptiness. John arrives first. He doesn’t go
in. Is he hesitant to look upon the emptiness of his salvation?
Are we hesitant at times to look upon the emptiness that leads to
our salvation? Are we hesitant to stare death in the face, despite
the truth that we are coming out the other side of it with
victory?
Either way, John waits for Peter to catch up to him. Why? So
Peter, the lead Apostle, the one Jesus named “Rock,” on which
his Church is built, could go in first.
So the rock on which this Church is built goes in first for each
one of us, and gets a firsthand view of what God’s emptiness
looks like. Burial cloths are here. The cloth that covered his head
over there. Burial cloths, the symbol of death, are separated and
unoccupied. God’s
emptiness.
Then John goes in, and takes God’s emptiness to the 9th inning
of this game that started way back when Gabriel visited Mary,
making its way into Bethlehem. And John believes. He looked
out at the Green Monster at the end of the game, and when it
looked like his team was going to lose by crucifixion, God
justified the purpose of this whole game of life, which really isn’t
a game at all, and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. God
was down 3-0 in this series, and came back and won four in a
row. And He did so by way of
emptiness.
As we all deal with the many ways that emptiness can affect us
in this world, I pray that each of us will carry with us the
consolation and solid truth of God’s “emptiness” in our lives.
The emptiness of the grave. The emptiness that justified Jesus’
obedience to his Father. A joyful emptiness reserved and meant
for each one of us, who believe. The Green Monster says it all.