Episcopal Press and News

EASTER-1973

Diocesan Press Service. March 14, 1973 [73076]

By The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, Presiding Bishop

With an intimacy not often enough captured by recorders of events, St. Mark's Gospel tells about the two Marys, (Magdala and the mother of Jesus) together with James and Salome, making their way to the tomb just after sunrise on that first Christian Sunday! They were carrying aromatic oils with which -- they hoped -- they could anoint the body of Jesus. But there was an obstacle : the huge stone that they knew blocked the entrance into the tomb! Worried about this, they fell to wondering who would be able to remove the stone -- that they might discharge their responsibility of love. And "when they looked up, they saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. " (St. Mark: 16:4)

The Christian story really begins with the overcoming of inertia! It begins with the Resurrection! All that came before was prelude! With the resurrection of Christ Jesus a very heavy stone has been rolled away from our understanding of life and of history. T. S. Eliot puts a haunting line into the mouth of the Magi, coming to seek the child born in Bethlehem:

"... were we led all that way for Birth or Death?"

When the sun went down on the Good Friday scene, and Jesus' broken body was lowered from the Cross, the only possible, the only reasonable answer to the question of the Magi, was, "Death! " And every on-looker at Calvary, whether friend or foe of Jesus, was overtaken by the inertia of futility and despair generated by the destruction of a man who was too good for this world.

But God had other plans. He could not allow the rigid bonds of the past to block the future. He would not permit hatred and ignorance to block the healing way of love. He would not allow faith to be strangled by the inertia symbolized in the rock-sealed tomb! With one might thrust, in the resurrection of Christ Jesus, God rolled away all the drag that would fetter the human spirit. The tomb became not the repository of human hopes, but their matrix. And the guarantee of a deathless promise, "If any man will be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature." Amen -- and Alleluia!

The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines

Presiding Bishop