i feel myself unraveling
Easter, so says Scripture, begins with a strange ritual. At least strange to us…
“On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared.”
No, the women aren’t going to Jesus’ tomb to do a little baking. They were there to finish the work of preparing Jesus’ body for burial. You see, the ancients didn’t dump the work of death off to professionals like we do. There were complex rituals about how to make the dead suitable for burial.
And while this may sound strange to us, I want to suggest that we are just as ritualistic. Perhaps even more so, now that we have denied ourselves the opportunity to reckon with death so closely and candidly.
It’s not that we’ve done away with rituals. It’s that we’ve transferred them from death to life. And the outcome is that our rituals have only become more involved. And we’ve only grown more fervent about them!
Life is full of rituals these days. We have rituals of health, romance, food, parenting, finance, politics, efficiency, and nowadays, we can add hygiene to that list. Can’t we? And that’s not even all of them! Is it? I’m sure you could easily add to this list.
Like the women’s that first Easter, our rituals are all about trying to manage the rough edges of life. We may not anoint dead bodies anymore. But we’re busy anointing nearly every other aspect of our lives. If we have anxiety about something, it’s not long before rituals pops up promising to help.
The thing, though, is they don’t help. Or if they do, they don’t help for long. After all, isn’t it exhausting? All these rituals? From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, our lives are consumed with them.
Those things we think we need to do to make our lives more suitable: Keeping up with the Jones, climbing the corporate ladder, staying healthy, looking good, padding the bank account. These are all little rituals we try and anoint our lives with. But really, all they’re doing is bringing us closer to the grave…
The women brought spices to anoint Jesus’ corpse. But we bring a whole host of this and that to anoint nearly every other aspect of our lives. All in an attempt to make life more suitable. And when you look at it that way, you have to wonder whose rituals are really more strange.
So let me ask you a question this Easter: What ritual in your own life is doing more harm than good? What ritual, if the story was told about your coming to Jesus this Easter, would make readers think, “hmmm, that’s odd”?
If you’re having trouble. And you likely are because what we tend to do with our rituals is enshrine them. Make them more rituals. Make them necessities. So, if you’re having trouble figuring out what your strange ritual is, just look at your life and where it is you’re most tired. That’s right, tired. Where is it in your life that you think if you don’t do this or that, everything will fall apart? Because it’s those places where we think everything hangs on our efforts, that we’re most ritualistic. And therefore, most worn out.
Is it your career? Your campaign to be the perfect mother or father? Is it your exercise regiment? Your dearly held political beliefs? Is it your spending plan? Your romantic life?
For the women, it was everything Jesus’ corpse meant. They weren’t just going to the tomb to prepare a body for burial. They were going to the tomb to bury all their hopes for the future they had planned.
And that’s not all that hard to relate to, is it? You know what it’s like to watch your preferred future go down the drain. You know it’s like to try and anoint your life now that it’s not going to look the way you hoped.
As the women learned that first Easter Sunday, though, when you’re down to nothing, God is up to something! Or to put it another way, God’s office is at the end of your rope!
While we may know what it’s like to try and anoint our dashed hopes, there’s no way you can anoint what happens next! When the women get to the tomb, they realize someone’s already been there. The heavy stone they were going to have to move so they could get in the tomb had been already rolled away!
We don’t put away our rituals easily, though. Do we? And neither did the women. Perhaps they thought they could help whoever it was who had beaten them to the punch. Or maybe they were just curious. Either way, they slunk into the tomb to see what was going on.
For as shocking as the rolled away stone was, what they saw next was even more incredible! Not only was there not anyone in the tomb, nothing was in there at all! Nobody was in the tomb! Not even Jesus’ body! The tomb was totally empty!
Making everything the women came to the tomb to do that morning perfectly unnecessary! And, all your little rituals, too!
Our rituals, like the women’s, are about trying manage our life, engineer our future, forestall our death, and even secure our salvation. Today, though, Jesus just comes along and doubles down on the proclamation he made from the cross, “it is finished.”
In Jesus all those parts of life you were trying to anoint because you intuited they were above your pay grade, life, death, and salvation, are already in hand! In Jesus’ pierced hands! And now, you are free! No longer doomed to trying to manage your own life. But now, free! Free to live as a child of God!
Those rituals were never really working for you anyway, and now are laid to rest in Jesus’ tomb! Now they’ve been hollowed out in his great resurrection! Today Jesus saddles up next to you and your tomb of all those ways you’ve been trying to manage your own fate, and it is a tomb by the way, and rolls that stone out of the way! What’s more, he even comes and takes that early corpse all those rituals were making out of you, and raises it to new life in him!
New life that is lived, not by efforts or rituals, or anything like that. But rather, new life that is lived by faith!
In Jesus, all those parts of your life that are unmanageable are held securely in Jesus’ pierced hands! In Jesus, that part of your past you think has sealed your fate has already been rolled away! In Jesus, whatever dead end you’ve been trying to anoint has been raised to new life!
In Jesus’ empty tomb, you get a glimpse of what God has in store for you! And it’s not another ritual! No, it’s life! Life where all those empty old rituals are put away forever because Jesus has retired those grave clothes once and for all!
In Jesus, you have life, and true life, too! Life, not as one more thing to manage, anoint, or fix. But life as a gift from the very hand of God! Life to be received! Enjoyed, even! And might I daresay, lived! Lived as a child of God!
In Jesus, you are really, actually free! No longer does the future depend on your past or your resolve to bring about a better one! For Jesus has already taken care of all that! And now he comes to you and hands over to you new life! New life where the stone has been rolled away, the empty rituals relinquished, the graves cast off, and the future opened as wide as an empty tomb!
Go! You are alive in Christ! And truly alive, too! And you don’t need a ritual for that.
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