He Is Not Here: He Is Risen

Mark.16[1] And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.[2] And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.[3] And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?[4] And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.[5] And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.[6] And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

The struggle over Terri Schiavo has become entwined with our Easter thoughts this year. The doctors say she is no longer there, though her body lives on.

When my mom died in 1992, I got to the hospital after she passed away, but I wanted to see her. They were preparing her body to be taken away, my brother-in-law said, and he suggested it might be disturbing to me to see her like that, but I went back to her room, and when I saw her body, I was surprised that, more than shock or horror, I felt great relief, even joy. She was no longer contained in her body. She wasn't there. She had risen.

I saw it again when my dad died a year later. It struck me that the tradition of the wake, which some folks today think macabre, actually helps people see that the person who has died is no longer trapped in that body.

A big lesson of Easter is that, after death, the body is a tomb that cannot hold us. That's not just a nice idea that we wish was true. It is a fact that people have experienced for as long as we have been human. We see plainly that the body is not the person.

Medicine has gotten so good that we now must make the awful decision to pull the plug from a mechanically functioning body when we see that the person has risen, and is no longer there.