Easter reflection (4.07)
This is the last day in Lent. In today’s Lectio Divina reading (Matt. 27:62-66), the chief priests and Pilate are concerned about the disciples stealing Jesus’ buried body away. (Those who don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus have a tough time getting around the reality that his opponents knew all the arguments before current naysayers do.) They are plotting and scheming as to what to do about the dead body in the tomb. Have they no shame? Dancing around the grave as if the body will stay buried. It’s ironic that the declaration of Jesus’ resurrection is made defensively, in the mouths of his enemies, “that deceiver said, ‘. . . I will rise again.’” And so as they dance around the grave behind Jesus’ back so to speak, who gets to dance in the end?
Perhaps you have not yet been buried in body but yet there are those who dance around your grave and scheme behind your back? Maybe there’s a death you experience even now from those who hurt you? The confidence of being buried is that you will get up, you will endure, you will make it, you will not be held imprisoned by pain forever. They threw ALL they could at Jesus without restraint, and yet even death could not hold him back. Death, and the experience of death along the way, if you believe that the same God who raised Jesus from the grave, will not hold you in the end. You will make it.