Been thinking more about the film, The Book of Clarence, a film that has really been sticking with me this year, and which has a real, thematic interest in the resurrection.
The journey that the film goes on wonders about how it is that a conviction in the truth of the resurrection might reshape the questions Clarence faces in the film regarding the existence of God in the face of so much wrong in the world. If he begins with a very real articulation of the things he rejects- an idea formed from his experiences and observations about the world, in a very real way, this film wants to push further and ask how this fits with the idea of the Gospel that we find in Jesus. It is only in choosing to approach the things that his experiences and doubts have led him to reject, that his struggles are able to be reframed and challenged. It is within this tension that he finds a way forward back into the world with a fresh perspective on his struggles.
More importantly, the film explores how, and where, we might find the necessary hope to motivate us in the midst of our struggles, at least in ways that keep our questions and our problems from spiralling us into apathy. This brings to mind for me another film from 2024, One Life with Anthony Hopkins. In this film his character is forced to confront a powerful and operative tension, one that challenges his ability and even his desire/motivation to attend to the things that he sees as wrong, which for him is the Holocaust. There is a moment in the film where he wonders about whether the differences he is trying to make matter when it is nowhere near enough. It is a tension that comes with an impossible absence of resolve, one that genuinely challenges ones sense of hope.
I have been wondering today if this is not what the resurrection story is acrually interested in. Whatever our questions and struggles might be, they begin with our experiences of the darkness. For those in the Gospels, those struggles and questions ultimately echoe in the reality of an empty tomb. Those who are present do not know how to reconcile this darkness with the hope this proclaims and represents in the face of their quesions and struggles, and it leads to competing emotions. As my pastor noted this morning, in Mark it says they fled this space with a mix of trembling and astonishment. In Matthew it cites fear and great joy. In Luke we find unbelief and marvel.
What’s interesting is how, in all these cases, we as readers are presented with an invitation to simply come and see, an invitation that flows equally out to those who believed and those who didn’t, all sharing the same space together. It’s an invitation to bring our questions forward and to take a step in the direction of the thing that pushes back against, and even fuels the sentiments of our own doubts, struggles and resistance. What the Gospel writers all imagine is that it is only here in this space that our struggles and resistance can truly be challenged and reshaped into better questions.
And here is the kicker. In the Gospels, what they find at the empty tomb is an invitation to go back into the world from which our questions were birthed, not with certainty but with fresh conviction. It is, for the Gospel writers, an uncertain world and an uncertain conviction that comes with mixed and seemingly opposed emotions and sentiments that shapes the nature of their message, and yet the promise of the resurrection is that when we live this uncertainty in the light of Jesus, it gives us a new lens through which to see the world, and that by living and acting in this world we can find the transformation we so desperately seek. A transformation that begins with a transformed hope.
For Clarence, it just might be the willingness to go to that empty tomb, to look and see and confront it, that offers him a way forward. This is the same invitation given to the disciples. It is the same invitation given to us today.
The Stories of my Life 