Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
The Sunday of the Resurrection, April 20, 2025
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It’s a startling question. After all, they watched while he was tortured. They heard him cry out with his last breath. They placed his limpid body in that gash in the rock. The earth itself twisted in sympathy with his wounds.
They are not yet ready to let go. Who would be? So they come to the tomb at the quietest moment of the day, that soft time when the gauze between this world and the next is thinnest. They know he’s dead, but maybe they can glimpse the shadow of their friend and teacher moving in the distance.
Which one of us would not do the same? Which one of us hasn’t caught ourselves, in an unguarded moment, thinking “I can’t wait to tell her about this!” only to remember that our mother, or friend, or teacher is dead?
Only to have the grief cut, like a hot knife, once more. It takes a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for the soul to accept what the mind knows—that he is gone.
How absurd this needling question! Why do you look for the living among the dead? For anyone who has lost someone dear to them knows that the dead are never really dead at all. Their shades rise like mist over the river of our lives.
Maybe the soul is wiser than the mind. Maybe the stubborn clinging to the life of those we love is the soul’s proclamation of the resurrection. Maybe the soul knows what the messengers proclaim—he is not here! He is risen as he said, and he has gone before you on the way. He is not among the dead, because in Christ there are no dead. In Christ all are alive, all is life.
The empty tomb has become the womb from which new life—the life of the Crucified and Risen One—flows into the world. Tomb and womb are one, and death itself is a birthing and an unbinding.
We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. We will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in memory. Even if Kilmar Garcia makes it back from El Salvador, there are many thousands who will not.
What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper and as the light seems further away than ever?
Like us, Jesus’ disciples knew something of the grinding violence of empire. In the face of that juggernaut, God offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of her faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now. Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness.
In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem:
Some of you I will hollow out.I will make you a cave.I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.You will be a bowl.You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.I will do this for the space that you will be.I will do this because you must be large.A passage.People will find their way through you.
God does not save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. Instead, God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.
And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of the innocents of Gaza. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.
Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life. Bow down to the mystery, my brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings. Bow down in your sorrow. Bow down in your longing for a new world. Bow down in your joy and your fear and your amazement at this new thing God is doing. Bow your head to the ground, stretch out your arms in freedom and surrender. Press your heart to the ground and feel the earth rise up to meet the pounding rhythm in your chest.
In Christ there is no death—there is only the life of God poured, for a moment, into these miraculous bodies of ours and then returning at last to its source. Nothing is ever really lost. All is bound up in the love of the God who loves us into life. When they have vanished from this earth, the maples will pepper the heavens of God’s memory. The polar bear’s cry will thread the song of God’s love. The hearts of this world’s innocent dead will beat forever in the sacred heart of Jesus, joined in the great work of love and redemption that will far outlast our brief lives.
In the midst of death we are in life. Always, always new and deeper life. This is the promise of Jesus’ resurrection. We must mourn our dead and then let them go, knowing that they are now closer to us than our own breath. For the Living One has gone before us to light the way to God’s new creation, to the ever-deeper life breaking out in the midst of death and destruction like the stars in the night sky.
No matter the state of the world or our own lives, Jesus Christ is indeed risen today and every day, bringing to birth God’s great work of love. We are that work. And the work
goes ever on.
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