How Can this be?

This is my favorite day of holy week ... Holy Saturday: the day of the tomb .... I think of the apostles and those who loved Jesus and how this day was one of utter exhaustion and despair ... 'how can this be?' must have gone through their minds over and over. Suddenly nothing made sense: the miracles, the teaching, the dusty miles of following; of believing in the hope and promise, of leaving what had been secure lives to become a disciple. How can this be? The man I loved and believed to be the King - the Son - is dead! How can this be?
Often I think the words 'how can this be?' are an utterance of faith even though they ring of confusion - of not knowing. But in fact this day of holy week - this day of the tomb - is the day that while even now as we think we know the end of the story - the Resurrection - the tomb reminds us that exactly how it was that God worked is in reality still a mystery.
Truthfully we don't know what happened in the tomb.
According to the gospel story Jesus was brutally killed and then compassionately tended to and placed in the cave carved in the hillside while quite dead. According to the story, the women who were also among his followers - and it was the women with the courage to stay at the foot of the cross; to clean and anoint his body - headed for the rock cave of his tomb to do another anointing and found the cave empty according to one gospel - an angel on the slab in another. And we know that the body was not simply stolen for later in the gospels we are told that Jesus appeared to many people. Anyway you look at the stories, if you pay attention what becomes obvious is that the plot of the story did not go as expected. Which is why I love this day of mystery reminding me that new life bursts forth in unexpected ways, taking on unexpected shapes and that God is not especially interested in predictable scripts for living.

For me, it is this that is the glory of Easter - that we don't know what happened in that tomb. That the words of despair: 'how can this be' apply equally well to the resurrection.

In our humanness we want so badly to believe that we can know .... that we know what we should or should not do ... that we know what can and cannot be ... that we know what is possible and what is not possible ... that if I apply the correct formula of beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad then I can live securely knowing ________ {fill in the blank}. Today however as I contemplate the tomb, I am confronted with God's reality that neither security nor knowing is the purpose of life. The purpose of life is nobility.

It's easy to confuse nobility with rule-following for being a good rule-follower can seem noble. On the news the other evening I saw picketers who were secure in their belief that they know what is right and wrong and so they carried signs saying "God hates you"because the person in question lived in a way that confronted their security about how life is to be lived. That's the danger of believing we know for knowing makes it easy to not only judge but to condemn. I suspect that it never occurred to the Christians with the signs on the news the other night that in fact, in their little drama they were playing the same part of the play as Pilate and not Jesus, for it was Pilate who knew Jesus was a blasphemer and so condemned him to death. Jesus on the other hand simply told us to love "I give you but one command, love one another as I have loved you." Loving with compassion and often a big dose of 'how can this be?' is noble ... condemning is simply self-righteous and nasty.
I have spent the past six months exploring that one command Jessus with my 5th and 6th grade Sunday school class and if you read the gospels looking at the actions of Jesus {the word as refers to manner or action} as I have loved means with respect, kindness, compassion, tolerance of those who are different, patience, generosity, graciousness and nobility of character. Those qualities describe the how or the 'as', with which Jesus responded to people.
The wonderful 10 and 11 year old children in my class especially love the concept of nobility and perhaps that is because they have not yet discovered how difficult nobility of character is. Jesus knew how difficult nobility is though for he not only did he tell us that 'nobility' is precisely what is expected of us: kindness, compassion, generosity, patience, tolerance, graciousness ... it was living with nobility of character that led to his condemnation and death.
Oh - maybe that's why we are so much more comfortable 'knowing' and judging and ignoring the heart of Jesus' ministry ... nobility may be deadly. Personally, I've discovered a big dose of 'how can this be?' is helpful when I would rather be self-righteous than noble.