A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, April 4, 2021 Year B, Easter Day

Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Mark 16:1-8

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.”

That’s how the gospel of Mark describes the experience of the three women, Mary, Mary and Salome, who were the first witnesses of the resurrection.  Honestly, it’s a pretty far cry from the excitement and joy we might feel today, on this Easter Sunday two thousand years later, as we break open Easter eggs and sense the end of the Covid-19 pandemic just around the corner.  No, the women’s experience isn’t primarily one of excitement, if at all.  Rather, the description Mark provides sounds pretty traumatic: When they see a strange young man sitting in the open and empty tomb, first they are “alarmed.”  And when that man tells them of Jesus’s resurrection, the women are “seized” by “terror and amazement” and their panic sends them into flight. 

I think that the scene Mark describes is one of very real trauma for these women and it leads me to wonder if the resurrection was perhaps just as traumatic for Jesus’s disciples as was his crucifixion. 

In his seminal book, The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk argues that trauma literally re-forms us as human beings.  He shows that traumatic experiences significantly affect our brains and bodies in measurable physiological ways, sometimes permanently if the underlying cause is never addressed.  In other words, trauma changes us, inside and out.  After a traumatic experience we are different human beings.

And if – as I suspect was the case, given Mark’s gospel account of the first Easter – if the women’s experience of the resurrection is traumatic then it makes them different human beings, too.  Just think of it.  Their beloved friend and mentor has been crucified before their eyes.  They have spent two nights and the day in between trying to piece their lives back together after that awful event.  They are reeling still from the shock, grief and stress.  If measurements of that kind could have been taken in the first century, I bet their cortisol and serotonin levels were way off!  And while they’re still dealing with the fall-out of all of that, while they’re still negotiating this new emotional landscape where Jesus has been crucified and died, all of a sudden they are confronted with yet a whole new reality of the inconceivable: resurrection.  Is it any wonder that they are “seized” by terror?  Is it any wonder that they flee from the scene of that empty tomb?

For Mary, Mary and Salome, for all of Jesus’s disciples – then and now – the events of the past holy week – from Palm Sunday up through and including Easter Day – are deeply traumatic.  And I am convinced that such trauma changes us on the deepest levels; it changes who we are. 

But we don’t need a book to tell us that.  We know it already, don’t we?  Just think back over the past year, the trauma we’ve all experienced collectively across the globe and across our country.  The millions of people – somebody’s beloveds – who have suffered or died from Covid-19.  The loneliness, isolation and mental illness that have resulted from one lockdown after another.  The loss of jobs and security that has caused intense anxiety and uncertainty.  The political and social discord stemming from continued inequality and injustice in our communities.  The riot at the Capitol.  The natural disasters that have deeply affected our friends and family locally and beyond.  The recent mass shootings – again. 

And those are just the traumas we have all shared this year.  I wonder how many of us have experienced more personal tragic events on top of our collective distress? 

The experience of this year has changed us dramatically.  When we finally come out of it all on the other side, we will not be the same society we started as; we will not be the same individuals we had been.  Already we know that to be the case.  Already we know there is no going back.  There is only going forward into a “new normal,” a drastically changed social, political and emotional landscape that we’re just beginning to see, explore and learn to live within.

But this Easter Sunday reminds us that trauma isn’t always tragic.  Our world, our very beings can be rocked to their foundations by joy as surely as pain.  The shock of resurrection is no less surprising, no less unnerving, no less disrupting than the crucifixion last Friday was.  Perhaps, in some ways, it is even more so: death, at least, is something familiar to us; eternal life is something entirely new. 

So I wonder, if we let the shock of Easter wash over us, if we dwell here – yes even in the terror and amazement of those first moments outside the empty tomb – how will we be changed? 

It seems to me that the promise of the resurrection is that the tragedies of our lives don’t get the last word.  The pain and suffering of this existence – as real as they are, as profoundly as they shape us – they aren’t the only things that shape us.  They are not the only things that define who we are. 

In fact, quite the opposite is true.  Because of the resurrection, the pain of the cross – traumatic as it was and is still – the pain of the cross is redeemed and re-formed by the shocking joy of resurrection.  As changed as the women were by their witness to the crucifixion, the real change, the more powerful change, the eternal change was wrought in them by their witness to the resurrection, even as they fled from the knowledge.  The traumatic pain of the cross does not get the last word on who we are because the shocking grace of the empty tomb overpowers us. 

“And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”  That’s how Mark’s gospel ends.  Right there.  Right here, with us, in our very bodies, changed as they are by all we have seen.  Jesus sends himself out through the very same human beings who witnessed his death and his resurrection; Jesus sends himself out through us, his disciples.  In the joyful trauma of the empty tomb, the living Christ re-forms us into his emissaries, bearers of “the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”  And by the grace of God we are made a new creation, unlike anything we have ever been before.  Thanks be to God.  Alleluia!