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The Passion of Jesus ended on the afternoon of Good Friday, but the divine compassion continued, and does even up to now. They took the lifeless body of Jesus down from the cross. That happened in a big hurry, Jesus had to be entombed before sundown. We have no details, but the cross had to be lowered and the nails had to be pulled out. Jesus’ lifeless body had to be lifted up from the cross. Mary was certainly there, as she had been all along, and she had to experience the aftermath of death.
There is something shocking about a dead body, so different from a living body. The hardest thing for me to adjust to as a priest was being called to pray with the family of someone who just died in the presence of the dead body. Even worse was being called to anoint someone and arrived to find that they had died just before I arrived. I vividly remember the shocked reactions of our senior class students in St. Louis at the wake when they first saw the bodies of their two classmates who had been killed in an auto accident. It struck me never more strongly than with my mother. The night before her funeral, my father and siblings had all left the wake in the funeral home and were waiting in the car. I went with the undertaker to retrieve my mother’s wedding ring before he closed the casket. He took off her ring and gave it to me and I bent over to kiss her forehead. I don’t know what I expected. Here forehead was stone cold, so unlike my warm and living mother. It was a shock, like a harsh slap in my face.
Mary endured the shock of receiving into her arms her son’s dead body, also cold from exposure and loss of blood, so unlike the body filled with divine energy just 24 hours before. Just as one day 33 years earlier, she received His body through the Holy Spirit, according to God’s promise. Now she receives Him when everything has been fulfilled… almost everything. What must she have been thinking… fearing. This certainly isn’t what she thought she agreed to when the angel told her the child she would bear would be the savior of his people and inherit the throne of David. I wonder… was she angry at God? We human beings do get angry at God when tragedy strikes at our deepest loves. But God knows about us. He knows how we are. Fortunately, He doesn’t get angry with our reactions to pain. He has better things in store for us, as he did for Mary.
So, they placed Jesus in a tomb. We think of this scene tonight knowing what will happen at dawn Sunday morning. But they did not know… Mary, John, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, the other women and the Apostles hiding in the darkness, in fear, they certainly did not know.
God, pure spirit, became matter when Jesus became a human being. Jesus was placed in the earth, like other human material bodies are. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, not by death. Matter is sacred because it houses souls; matter goes into the earth and becomes the earth. Our bodies are made of matter, matter that was probably once other bodies and housed other souls. Our planet is made of matter, so it is sacred. As God created it, it is good… complete not broken. That is why Pope Francis has told us we must cherish and care for our earth, all its life forms and all its life-giving systems.
This tomb of Jesus represents every grave I stand before… those of my family, my friends, my former students, my brother monks… every grave I stand before with a primal fear, in seeming defeat, like Mary and the Apostles struggling to believe that grave could ever become empty.
There is a beautiful gospel song I love that this brings to my mind:
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish;
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts; here tell your anguish.
Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot heal.
Joy of the desolate, Light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot cure.”
Here see the Bread of Life; see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heav’n can remove.
And so we wait, in faith and trust, knowing God can and will heal, cure and remove our sorrow. We wait for Easter Sunday morning, which is our promise that our graves too will become empty and our lives will never be destroyed.
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Abbot Michael Brunner is the 4th abbot of Portsmouth Abbey. He currently serves the community as superior, regent, and teaches in the Christian Doctrine department in Portsmouth Abbey School.
Please click on his picture to the left or here to learn more about him.
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