I ran ten miles yesterday, not to get to an empty tomb, though after I was finished I went to bed early and slept like the dead. It’s because last week I decided to change my exercise routine and play less racquetball in favor of more running. The trouble was my routine had become routine and my body knew it by heart. Sometimes when you know something by heart it ceases to surprise or in my case stopped a point short of my optimum BMI. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” was the question the women were asked. A strange question given that they had come looking for the dead, prepared to do the proper thing the Passover had denied them the opportunity to perform and the living was the last thing they expected to find. But now no longer terrified reminded of Jesus’ words they rushed back to those whose hopes and dreams had died with the one they had left all to follow. Without the benefit of dazzling clothes the women’s tale seemed tall at best and according to Luke everyone but Peter was satisfied to continue believing once dead always dead. The story is familiar to those of us who make the church our home and can lose its ability to surprise and have its way with us. That is what it would do given the chance. There are those moments when with dazzling clarity the veil between the present and the future becomes transparent and one can hear the song of the infinite choir and taste the forever feast. In those moments we are transformed from those who expect the living and the dead to stay in their own rooms to those who see dead people living. Not in some ghostly apparition or chill in the room but in bread and wine shared in the present even as it remembers the past and anticipates the future. Joined to Christ in the meal of thanksgiving the women’s idle tale has its way with us and now expecting the unexpected we are united with the dead now living. So you and I, inhabiting bodies not yet worn out can, if only for a moment, imagine the joys that are for them routine.
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