A Tear in the Shroud of Death (Easter Sunday)

Readings, Isaiah 25:6-9 and Mark 16:1-8
Image, Marko Ivan Rupnik,  Resurrection of Christ (detail), 2006. Mosaic, St. Stanislaus College Chapel, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Isaiah captures the universal reality of death: the sheet spread-out over-all nations, the shroud cast over all peoples. It is often postulated that what separates the human from the non-human animal is awareness of the horizon of death, the many ways the mortal coil can be abruptly snaped. Of course, such knowledge is so terrifying that we develop a kind of muted acceptance of its inevitability. A lived ignorance, a quiet refusal to acknowledge that death is a heartbeat away… I mean, if we didn’t, how would we ever shop for groceries?
 
If there is anything then, that the God of salvation can promise and deliver, that would dramatically turn all things on their head, it is to swallow death and rob it of its sting. For death is the great universal, the shroud under which we all live, the sheet within which we are all wrapped. There are none who live beyond its reach. No wonder then, when they hear Jesus has left his tomb, the women ran off in terror and amazement, or as another translation renders it: they ran off “convulsed and out of their mind with shock.”
 
Because there is simply nothing to prepare them for the world-altering, reality-shaking, sense-denying proclamation that Christ has risen! Nothing to prepare them to neatly categorise this new piece of information as if it is just another thing that can happen. But then again, nothing can save us that is possible. In the beauty of an impossibility, Jesus is revealed as the one we didn’t even know how to wait for. Jesus was unable to be held in death’s garments; in the resurrection he tore through the sheet of death from the inside.
 
And like any sheet, or garment that gets a tear, or splits a seam… there’s no arresting that. Death never learnt its way around a needle and thread. The hole just grows, and the shroud unravels until what was enough for one, is now fit for all of humanity to pass through.
 
For Jesus’ triumph over death is not only his but ours, all of ours, the great our of humanity, the all-encompassing our of creation. God swallows up death forever, so that we might have life in Christ’s name. That is the promise: the voice that called Lazarus from his tomb, shall call to us all. All creation shall be restored in the power of his unquenchable life, let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. This is the good news of Easter day!
 
But what does this defeat of death mean after Easter, living as we do in a world still permeated with the reality of death?
 
In the first instance, we take issue with what impinges on life. Living beyond the threat of death’s sting, inspires contempt and opposition to all which deals in death today, all that frustrates the abundant life Christ came to share and secure. As those who follow after Christ in the power of the resurrection, we devote ourselves to stamp out spot fires of injustice, exploitation, and harm. Our actions will not bring these ills to nought, but neither shall they be in vain. For they are forestates of the day when the One we await sets all wrongs to right, restores all that was lost, and wipes all tears from our eyes.
 
In the second instance, although we and our beloved yet die, death, that moribund power of nothing, of absence, of abyss, holds no one in its power. Death as a malevolent force has no one in its grip and claims no one on its ledger. Instead, there is comfort in the mourning and hope in the grief, because death cannot separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord.
 
At and after Easter we are glad and rejoice for in life and death we are held in the everlasting arms of God, as God’s own beloved children. At and after Easter we are glad and rejoice as we are invited into a feast of rich food with Jesus our brother, who tore asunder the shroud of death so that we might share the resurrection and the life.