“On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.” (Luke 24:1)
As was the case with Christian celebrations around the world, my church spent this past Sunday in the resurrection narrative. Being in the Gospel of Luke (each year we read through one of the Gospels, beginning in Advent), my pastor touched on an important aspect of Luke’s literary movement- missing from some translations (but included in many) is the word “but.” Why is this important? Because it sets the aims of chapter 24 as a direct response to the crucifixion narrative of chapter 23. There Jesus is killed, buried, leading to the crisis- the need to honor the day or preparation and the encroaching sabbath. Some translations include the word “but” in verse 56, to read “But, on the sabbath, they rested according to the commandment,” a move that shifts the tension towards the question of whether they would honor the sabbath or break it. The “but” at the beginning of Luke 24 lends a slightly different inference to the text. Wheras the assumed obedience to the sabbath in chapter 23 leaves the death as both the necessary conclusion and question of the story (as in, where do we go from here except back into necessary creation cycle of waiting for God to act), Luke 24 turns the page, exclaiming, “But, on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb…” Here the resolve of the tension is placed on the preparation, not the sabbath obedience.
The story continues. And in this light brings about not an end, but a new beginning. In theological terms, this reflects the resurrection as the mark of the beginning of the new creation story, a story that begins with the proclamation “they did not find the body.”
To which we come to perhaps the Gospel’s most poignant words, spoken to the perplexed and terrified woman standing on the precipice of this sudden turn of plot- “why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Is there any more poignant and striking descriptive of hope? The narrative feels like its reshaping the untold and unspoken expectations of the women, quietly taking what feels like resolve and illuminating something that they already know to be true, something the text says they then “remembered.” Why do they go to the grave the next day? Because they believe God has acted in Jesus. They are being drawn towards something that has been buried in the shadows with their grief, hidden in the reality that pervades their experience before the “but” turns the narrative in the direction of their desires, their longings, their intuitive conviction regarding the true story.
This is an invitation handed to all us on Easter morning. Where the reality of Sin and Death shapes our perspective in the present, the narrative movement to which we belong reminds us of the greater story to which the movement of creation belongs. As it says in Psalm 19,
“The heavens are telling the glory of God… in the heavens he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. It’s rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them, and nothing is hid from its heat.”
This is the “speech” of the heavens going out to the end of the world- Christ is risen. The Kingdom has come, on earth as it is in heaven. The sun arises on this Monday for the beginning of a new creation, bringing with it the promise that in Christ all things are being made new. As Elizabeth Caldwell helps remind us in her book Pause: Spending Lent With the Psalms, where we see the Law (the need to be obedient to the Sabbath), the Torah proclaims “a template for exodus living.” By which she means, quoting scholar Mark Stranger, “a pattern of life” in which God’s free and faithful people are invited to live within the covenant promise. This is how God is known in creation, through participation in the world, the sort of participation that draws creation into a different narrative, one that creation itself remembers and longs for even in its groaning. This, then, is where Christ and Law intersect, with participation in Christ drawing the world into the narrative of new creation.
Easter is not an end, anymore than the death of Jesus in Luke 23 is an end. There is a “but,” and that but continues into the new creation story that extends Easter into the cycle that follows. “On the first day of the week…” we awaken to a new resurrected reality.
The Stories of my Life 