Facing the Terror of the Tomb

Easter beyond tragedy and triumph | The Word in the Wild, Easter Sunday, Year B

Galilee by Benno Rothenberg

Mark 16:1-8

Early in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which the elder monk, Father Zosima, is offering spiritual council to visitors. Among them is a wealthy woman struggling with her faith. She explains that at times she has a love for God and neighbor so great that she dreams of leaving all behind to become a nun and serve the poor. But as she imagines caring for a the wounds of a poor man, her love begins to falter. “I close my eyes and ask myself: could you stand it for long on such a path? And if the sick man whose sores you are cleansing does not respond immediately with gratitude, but on the contrary, begins tormenting you with his whims, not appreciating and not noticing your philanthropic ministry…what then?” In response, Father Zosima apologizes that he cannot offer much comfort, “for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams.”

Easter is a time of active love, a moment when its triumph in the resurrection is met with alleluias. Jesus loved the whole cosmos, even through the torment of the cross, and now God has vindicated him. It is easy in such a moment to focus on that victory; to cover over the dangerous path of discipleship with the soft pastels of a spring morning. We want to see Christ, radiant with light, bursting forth from the grave with all our dreams of love fulfilled. Mark’s Gospel will allow us none of that.

The ending of Mark is so stark, so abrupt, that even scribes in the early Christian world found it necessary to add a more satisfactory ending. But as most scholars now agree, in the original text, the gospel closes with this line: “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Close curtain. There’s no encounter with the risen Christ, no grand ascension, only an empty tomb and an angel’s message to three women to tell the other disciples that Jesus is going on ahead of them to Galilee. In response, the women flee in fear.

Such an ending leaves us wanting closure and that is exactly the point. Mark keeps us from the twin possibilities of reading the story of Jesus as an empty tragedy or an easy triumph. Looking at the story of Jesus, it would be possible to see him as just another Jewish messiah crushed by the Powers, both political and religious. His teachings were good, and so they live on, like those other martyrs for truth such as Socrates or Gandhi. Jesus’s life, however, his ongoing energy and power, has met its end and is now relegated to a place in the catalogue of history. This is the tragic view and Mark keeps us from it with the promise that Jesus is alive, not present, but going ahead where we will meet him.

Mark also keeps us from seeing the story of Jesus as an easy triumph. Christ does not burst from the grave like a superhero, rolling away the stone with robes of radiant light like a god of the pagan imagination. Instead, the women are told that they will find Jesus right where story began: in the everyday world of fishers and farmers, the familiar places of Galilee. The triumphant view of Jesus is undone by the dingy work of authentic discipleship.

In his monumental study of Mark, Binding the Strongman, Ched Myers articulates the meaning of Mark’s ending this way: “We do not entirely understand what ‘resurrection’ means, but if we have understood the story, we should be ‘holding fast’ to what we do know: that Jesus still goes before us, summoning us to the way of the cross. And that is the hardest ending of all: not tragedy, not victory, but an unending challenge to follow anew.”

Like Father Zosima, Mark invites us to wake from our fantasies and enter the fearful truth of active love. This is the call to discipleship, and it is a call that the women at the tomb heard, overcoming their fears eventually, for otherwise we would not be here. And many throughout the generations have also heard the call to that love, working up the courage to actually do the often terrifying work of caring it out.

The story about the rich woman and Father Zosima was a favorite of the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day. According to her biographer, Jim Forest, she would often repeat a version of Zosima’s line: “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” In her hard and faithful discipleship, Day had to face the fear that any true expression of active love will bring. As a result, Forest said that the elder Day was the freest and least fear-driven person he had ever known. Her freedom, her lack of fear, her active love, all came from her daily facing the terror of the empty tomb.

This Easter season, we would do well to join Day and all those other faithful disciples who have set with the empty tomb, listening to Mark’s challenge to return to the work of discipleship. The world is in need of love. Not the fantastical love of dreams, the abstract love of our “philanthropic ministries,” but the real and terrifying love that calls us to risk our lives for the sake of our neighbors, including our enemies. Though we are in good company with the women at the tomb to be afraid of such a call, like them we can step out despite our dread, knowing that Jesus has gone on ahead of us and will meet us along the way.