Well, Isn’t That Amazing?

For all its beauty, the Easter story is actually a little traumatic.  Mary hears her name spoken in the voice of the missing-presumably-dead Jesus.  The disciples are disbelieving and everything is more than a little chaotic and out of control.  I called it amazing.  Poet Ted Loder calls it madness.  Amazing things happen every day – the risen Jesus was just one – and we overlook them all the time.  Just so that we don’t dismiss the story of an empty tomb, and the experiences of a resurrected Jesus, as unscientific, illogical fairy tales – I’d like to say that their real importance, their real truth, lies in getting us to connect with what is amazing in our own lives; what is experienced rather than explained and objectified into a binary true-false.  We live in a culture that explains (or tries to explain) away everything.  The power of the resurrection story is that it does not try to explain away what people are seeing, and invites us to do likewise.  We are better, richer, fuller people by embracing a different reality – that there are things in this life that lie beyond the wordy logic of explanation, and dwell in the visceral place of experience … and amazement.

The scripture account of the empty tomb is really a way of pointing out God’s power to do things outside our understanding.  Whether or not it is literal, factual, historical rendition of events doesn’t matter.  It is “true.”  Casting the Easter story in terms of brand-new life that looks nothing like an old life is the most dramatic possible way of saying that beyond the sunrise, the flowers, or even forgiveness, something amazing happens every morning.