After the silence of Holy Saturday, the silence of the tomb, comes …
the silence of …
the Resurrection.
No evangelist attempts to give an account of the Resurrection. There are no angelic choirs, no trumpet blasts, no voice from the clouds. There is quietness, and a new morning. Another day, a day tinged with sadness for those few people who knew Jesus and cared about him. A new day when they would pick up the pieces of a ruined life, a life which had promised so much, his life, their life. A life that was over.
The women were of course the first to start picking up the pieces, to do what needed to be done, to mend, to bind up, to reverence a broken body that had meant so much to them when full of life (Jn 20:1-9).
But there was no body.
That was where it started. There was no body.
What started? Who knew. There was no body. What had happened? What was going on?
Like so much in the life of Jesus, the Resurrection was not an event, a moment in time, an answer to a question that came like suddenly figuring out the answer in a quiz. The Resurrection was a process. The Resurrection was the gradual understanding that came over the disciples of what had happened, all of what had happened, all of their life since they had met Jesus in Galilee and started traveling with him, everything that had happened since Abraham and Moses and the prophets.
God had revealed Himself in the death of one man. This man who died but didn’t die told us everything about God. A God who created people out of love, who came and died to show us that there was nothing else, only love. The ripples of that silence, the ripples from that morning quiet, still tell us that God loves us and is with us always, in life and in death, from before the time we are born, to beyond the time when our bodies pass once more into the completeness of his creation.
The Resurrection started one quiet Sunday morning. It continues forever.