The twists in our tragic stories
Text: Matt 28:1-10
Good preaching attempts to hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The word of God must address our lives as they are lived in the world around us. And yet as I prepare to preach and look at the news, it seems there is one tragedy after another capturing the front page and all the pages in between. There are natural disasters close to home or around the world, and human-made catastrophes bringing pain and suffering to people everywhere. In the natural give and take of the human condition, sometimes we simply can’t help but hurt one another. Tragedy upon tragedy, as regular as the rising and setting of the sun.
But sometimes we come across a tragedy that has a twist at the end, something we didn’t expect. Recently I read the story of a group that was touring Iceland, looking at volcanoes and other geologic structures, enjoying themselves immensely. When they got back on the bus after a stop, a woman in the tour group was missing. They checked the immediate area, then moved farther out around where they had been. They could not find her. A frantic search began. Day turned into night, and still no sign. One day turned into several. They called in search-and-rescue teams and coast guard helicopters. It was summer in Iceland, but still – it’s Iceland, not a place you want to be lost overnight.
This was a tragic story in the making. The people in the tour group felt so bad about it that many of them joined in the search process. The rest of the tour was cancelled. The search continued, but no trace of her was found. Several days into the search a woman, who was part of the tour group, stopped for a moment in the middle of her searching and thought, “You know, the description of the person – Asian woman, dark clothing, speaks English really well – that sounds a lot like me!” So she went to the police and said, “You know, I think everyone is looking for me.”
She was right! She had gone into the bathroom and changed her clothes, and for some reason the tour group hadn’t recognized her. They spent all this time looking for her, and there she was, part of the search party! A tragic story, with a twist. The paper reported that, despite the panic and heartache, it ended up being a great trip for this woman because she had gone to Iceland to “find herself.”
Why is it that when we hear a story like this we laugh? Or, at the very least, we exhale. Phew! I don’t think it’s because of what happened, as comical as it turned out, but rather because of what didn’t happen. A tragedy was averted. Certain death – this woman was lost forever – turned into life, right in front of them. I imagine some of them were frustrated, but I’m sure some of them laughed as well. We laugh at that. We exhale. We’re relieved, because we know that life doesn’t guarantee that kind of an ending.
I think most of us, most of the time, feel that life is pretty good and fairly predictable. On an average day we get up, think about the day, and get ready. We start our work and make plans for the weekend. We might spend a leisurely Saturday afternoon with our family; we might decide it’s a nice day for a ferry trip. We might be working toward some kind of goal, like running a marathon, and we do it and life is great, and we’re in control. And then the phone rings, and you hear that your mother is critically ill, or you’re sitting across from the doctor in a routine appointment and you discover that you are critically ill. Or you decide to get on that ferry boat to a pretty little island and calamity strikes, and it begins to sink. Or you wake up one morning and you’re sitting across from a divorce lawyer with no idea how you got there. Or you make it a goal to run the Boston Marathon, and then two bombs go off by the finish line. Life can twist out of shape in a heartbeat.
We are offered very few certainties except this: There’s a tragic part of life that we cannot avoid. We live, we breathe, we love, and, at some point, we don’t. At some point, no search party will be needed, no rescue mission required; it’s over and done, there is no turning back.
When I was training for the ministry, I spent time as a chaplain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. During one of my nights on call the pager went off. A 15-year-old had been shot. He was rushed to the hospital, but he did not survive. The family had been notified. They were at the hospital and wanted to see his body. They asked if I, as the chaplain, would facilitate that process. So I prepared the room, brought the young man’s body out from the morgue into the viewing room, and let the family in. A moment like that will change your life. It changed my life. It certainly changed that family’s life. This was their cousin, their brother, their son, and he was not going home with them. I remember the mother slowly coming to terms with her loss. She couldn’t stay in the room, but she couldn’t stay away either. She left and came back several times, until she found the courage to face the truth that he was gone. And then she went home.
There are a lot of answers out there, a lot of options for us to make sense of the world. I think any answer that attempts to give us purpose, meaning or direction has to be able to speak some word of hope to that mother as she stumbles home from the hospital. If it can’t do that, it’s not honest. It’s trying to circumvent tragedy and bypass mystery. I think that Easter passes this test, because it not only deals with tragedy, it is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy with an unexpected twist, one powerful enough to transform all our tragedies into comedy.
I imagine that as the women went to the tomb on that sad and lonely morning, they were a lot like the mother of that 15-year-old boy. They were going to see Jesus’s body, to face his absence. Time and again Jesus had predicted his death, but it had fallen upon deaf ears; no one seemed to hear that part of his message. Perhaps their hopes were so high they could not hear it. He was going to turn this mad world around, redeem their broken nation and transform the sadness of their own lives as well. They were going to have a front-row seat, but they found themselves watching his crucifixion instead.
When they saw his body slumping against those rough wooden beams, it was clear that no search party was necessary, no rescue mission required. The Romans were good at many things, but they were exceptional at crucifixion. There was no doubt that when they took his body down from the cross, Jesus was as dead as their hopes and dreams. I imagine a searing darkness moving across their hearts. I imagine they were like the mother of a student on the ferry boat in South Korea that sunk last April. As she stood on the shore, scanning the unforgiving sea, she said, “There is no tomorrow for this; my heart is turning to ashes.”
In the ashes of that first Easter morning an angel brought a message to the women. When I think about this, I imagine the angel speaking very slowly and clearly. If you’ve ever spoken to someone who’s in a state of shock, you have to do that. So I imagine the angel speaking this way: “He – is – not – here. He is risen, just as he said. Remember? Come see the place where he lay…” And then the angel says something that always makes me laugh: “Now, I have told you.” His mission is done. It’s as if to say, “You’ve heard me, right? Because I’m going to have to go back and report, and they’re going to ask me, ‘Did you tell them this and this and this?’ Now I have told you.” But there’s another reason the angel says this to the women. “Now I have told you, because now this message is yours. Now you become the witnesses.” And that’s worth another laugh. I think God is smiling at this moment, because in that culture, women were not always considered credible witnesses. Sometimes their testimony wasn’t even accepted in court. Here in the most life-changing moment in the history of the world, God entrusted this story to these women. The morning began in tragedy, but now everything is twisting and turning upside down and inside out, and all of heaven is laughing.
This is not just an empty joke, however. The women were now at peace in a world that would continue to deal out tragedy. In the emptiness of the tomb God showed them that tragedy, inevitable as it is, does not get the last word. So they went and shared this new word that was changing the bitter taste of tragedy to honey on their lips even as they spoke it.
In the crucified-yet-living body of Jesus, life triumphs over death, good conquers evil, and tragedy twists into comedy. That is the story the women told on that dark
Easter morning. That is the story we tell in our own dark days, watching for the twists and turns that bring forth laughter from the very heart of God.