This year, Easter Sunday falls during the COVID-19
pandemic. A time when we are secluded in our homes and told to wrap our faces
in cloth if we dare to go out for groceries or supplies. Walk into the grocery
store, and you'll see people wandering quietly through the aisles with gloved
hands and masked faces. Get too close, and you'll register a wide-eyed look of
alarm on the face of that passer-by. We are in hiding from an invisible beast.
COVID-19 is a death threat that has already made good on
many lives. This brutal virus makes us feel that *we are locked up in a dark
tomb for an impossibly long duration*, as though the *darkness of "Good
Friday" might go on forever* with little hope in sight. And yet all around
us, we see signs of spring, signs of awakening, signs of hope, signs of
resurrection. We know life as we know it may be dampened down for now, covered
in what feels like "funeral clothing." And yet, spring blooms
eternal. All around us: Birds sing, the sun bursts out from the winter clouds,
trees bud, flowers unfurl, the ground thaws, and God unwraps an entirely new
landscape of color and life. But for now, we wait.
I wonder what it must have felt like for Jesus those
"three days" in the tomb, knowing resurrection was imminent, yet
waiting for dawn to come on that magnificent morning when the stone was rolled
away, and the sun streamed through, when an "angel of the Lord"
removed the funerary cloth from Jesus' face, and the Holy Spirit breathed again
the holy breath of life into His stricken body and made it rise like Ezekiel's
bones from the valley of the shadow of death. Three days of darkness. Then, new
and restored life. Not the same life. But a restored, resurrected life.
Today, as we celebrate Easter morning, resurrection means so
much more to us than it did before. For we have been living in darkness,
confined to a kind of tomblike existence. *Life as we have known it has
stopped.*
*We don't go out to work.*
*We don't go out to play.*
*We hide our faces;*
*we guard our lungs.*
*We walk zombie-like through our homes and streets,*
frightened, and covered in our own kind of "funerary" cloths, so that
the cold breath of death might pass us by, that invisible breath-stealing beast
that threatens us and keeps us locked away, for a time.
*But only for a time.*
Life in waiting is merely that, a time of waiting. And yet a
time of expectation. For we know that no matter what, *that beast has no power
over us.* God's resurrection breath will raise us up. *A new day will dawn,
soon.* Very soon....
