An Easter Story!

“Gardening the Dead: Relearning Vulnerability in a World of Violence”

(This Sermon/Story served as an Epilogue to my doctoral dissertation. This is the first time its seen the light of day!)

Somewhere, treading along the rim of eternity, like tight rope artists whose slightest half-slip might cost them everything, Mary Magdalene, Mary, and Salome moved briskly amid the tombs. Between the brutality and violence of a public execution and the grey, glum, grunginess of a darkening dawn, they found themselves on a new day seeking out the same old ways, seeking the dead, seeking to anoint the dead body of one whom they loved. Love and loss, always the same.

Magdalene mused as she moved among the stone markers: “What a business this is,” she thought, “gardening the dead; corpses among the copses, growing things amid decay.” She limped along the well-marked path, having tripped at the start of their journey over a clearly, well-marked stone. Meanwhile Mary and Salome kept babbling on: “Who will move the stone for us?” And it irritated her. Why did she feel such rage inside? Finally, she turned: “I’ll do it myself if I have to!” She barked. They fell into silence.

He had troubled her, he had troubled her to the depth of her being and somehow, though she could barely admit it for shame, somewhere inside of herself she was relieved, relieved that he was dead, because now life could go back to its old logic, life that ends in death, people acting the way you always expect them to act. She couldn’t protect him as she prayed she might; now that burden was lifted.

He had opened, pried open, something inside her that she had fought against with all she had. But it was as if every word he spoke pushed at her insides, forced it to move, this blockage, this rock-hardness, and when it rolled away there it was, the deepest, darkest abyss she had ever seen. It was in her and yet so alien to her, so familiar, so frightful, she shook, literally shook in her body as she gazed into it. And he, with his words, kept crow-barring it ever more open, she fought it, she pushed back, but he kept talking, kept looking at her that way and she didn’t like it! Yet she never wanted it to end and she knew that the only end would be for her to fall, fall headlong, into that black gaping hole that somehow threatened to undo her, to untie every knot of her sinews and tissue and turn her around, or turn her inside out, whichever it was. She resisted but found something unexpected and wildly attractive about this empty hole that threatened death, but yet promised something she had never known before.

It slammed shut yesterday! Everything was now back to the way it had always been. These petty men, boys really, always jockeying for power, wrangling over words, seeking for someone to destroy. It would have been comical to her if it was not so unstoppable, so implacable and fixed like a rock-hard seal defending the living against what they already know: Dying comes to everyone. She could have predicted all of it from the moment they took him in the garden; the fleeing of friends fraught with fear, the arrogant claps on the back between those who thought they had won something. And yes, the blood, all that blood, which she had seen too many times. She felt as if she were steeped in dead men’s blood. “How many bodies, Mary?” She asked herself. “How many bodies of the dead have I stooped down to caress away the dried blood that once animated life?” No one else would do it. “Women’s work!” The men folk would declare. And then sneer at them, about issues of impurity. “How many senseless victims, lost loved ones, sacrificed, made sacred, in death because the sacred is always safer the deader it is!”

Her musings had gotten them lost. Caught up in her revelry she didn’t hear Salome asking, “Are you sure this is the right way? This path doesn’t look right to me. It’s hardly a path at all. The first one we were on, that path, made more sense, it was clearly marked. Mary, I think you’re leading us astray!” Magdalene counted to ten then turned and said, “I know where he is. I know where I am going. Trust me, would you please!” Her imperious tone hid the fact that she was bluffing. She couldn’t help but to half-smile to herself. How many times did he call her on her pride? And what was her usual response: “I’ve earned it, Jesus. I’ve had to fight my way through.” But he simply replied something about seeds having to fall and die in order for the garden to bloom. “Well, here’s the garden Jesus!” She said with a deep sigh meant to push down a new surge of overwhelming grief. “And look at the growing stones,” she continued, “all that grows in this garden are stones. How many stones? Fixed markers of that which we can no longer hold. Cold reminders of that which we will never find again.” Yet she longed to at least embrace the rough rock that now covered over what she had lost.

She was so tempted…tempted to hate! Hate them like they hated, without cause, without justification, except the justification they had created in their own minds, within their own safe systems of power and control. She wanted to subject them to what they had so blindly subjected so many victims. What was it he had said that day in the Temple when the blind man saw? “You say you see,” he said, “and therefore your sin remains.” “Blind guides!” He had called them. She mused to herself, “What are you so afraid of?” Not really sure if she was addressing them or herself, because she had seen herself in them that day. Ah yes, that safe and secure feeling welled up in her. That invulnerability of being a part of an “Us” set against a “Them.” What did Salome just say? “Mary, I think you’re leading us down the wrong path!” Blind guides indeed! “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do.” She was standing right there when he had said it, convulsing in grief but she knew she didn’t hallucinate that. He forgave them even there, yes even there, those prideful boys caught up in power games and a life of winning or losing.

Magdalene slipped again and down she went. She somehow saved the oil from spilling out, the cap barely moved, but she took a tumble, tripped up by a rock she hadn’t seen. “Where did that come from?” She exclaimed. Mary and Salome ran to her side. “What happened?” They asked nearly in unison as they set down their shrouds and offered a helping hand. “I don’t know,” Magdalene responded, “I must have hit a stone or something.” “Well, there’s nothing there,” the other Mary offered, looking about. “We were actually on the flattest part of this journey. We are not on a path any more though and I think we need to go back and retrace our steps.” Magdalene looked up and said with an unexpected tone of solemnity, “Somehow I just know. It’s this way. This is the way. Trust me on this!” Mary and Salome simply smiled at each other and nodded their heads. They knew not to argue with her as they knew how right she could be, or could think herself to be. Then Magdalene laughed. It caught her entirely off guard. At first the other two women seemed shocked, as if she had violated the sacred silence of the deaf dead. But as always Magdalene’s laughter was contagious and before they knew it they couldn’t help themselves. After a night of crying unheeded, they now laughed out loud amid the garden of tombs and sat and rested awhile, reconsidering themselves, reconsidering what exactly it was they were seeking.

That laugh broke something open inside her and it rang in her ears as if it had come from somewhere else, from someone else. It was both familiar and at the same time completely strange and something inside her slipped open, a crack in the hardness, a rolling back of that rocky facade in which she had taken refuge and comfort. “But he is dead,” she thought to herself, “how is it I’m feeling this again, this push, this prying at my insides, this forcing open of that dark place I fear but I want it, I long for it, I want to jump in it full force and fall…fall freer than I have ever fallen in my life.”

Tears sprang up in her eyes again and her friends reached out to console her and she waved them off. “This isn’t sorrow,” she said, “I’m overcome with some strange joy!” They looked at her as if she had perhaps cracked her head in that recent tumble. And then she said, “He is not dead!” Where did that come from? Now they really looked worried for her. She rose to her feet. “This way,” she said, “it’s this way.” And she knew it without knowing it. Hobbled and tired and feeling herself so profoundly vulnerable, as if her foot had slipped off the rim of eternity and she had taken the plunge she had feared her entire life. But somehow she knew it was the only way to go. In the garden of the dead she discovered something unseen; deep black holes threatening death could not swallow her, or could swallow her and somehow it didn’t matter, not anymore. She had nothing to hold onto, nothing to grasp, and yet she never felt so free, so liberated. They turned a final corner. Salome gasped and Mary let out a yelp: “Oh no!” They groaned in unison. Magdalene looked up, confronted by a wide open, dark abyss of a gaping grave-mouth within which was no dead thing, no death. And then the darkness inside her surged, and the darkness inside her took her as light, and she didn’t know where it came from or how she knew it, but she said it out loud: “He is risen!”