A Second Look

The sun was just touching the tops of the trees on the western horizon when I backed the tractor in the shelter and sat for a moment in the stillness.  As I looked into the not so blazing sun, I saw several columns of swirling tornadoes made of small flying bugs.  Hundreds of them.  As they swirled between me and the setting sun, I dismounted and walked close enough to stick my arm into their midst.  And, then, as I walked around so that the sun was to my back, they disappeared.  But, when I went back to the place of facing the sun, they once again appeared.      

There is so much out there not seen.  It has always been that way, but I have not been paying enough attention to see.  Watching this evening show, I could not help but wonder how many blessings of the Creator I had failed to see and know.  Too many I am sure.  Actually, if there is only one missed blessing, it is one too many.  Like this blessing only seen in this day's fading sun, there have been so many blessings of holy presence swirling around me that I have missed simply because I failed to look with eyes given to me, but seldom used.   

Had Mary Magdalene not lingered a few extra moments that Resurrection Morning, she would have missed the greatest of imaginable blessings.  Her first look supposed the One seen to be the gardener.  It was in a morning stilled by holy presence that she saw Him and heard her name in the mist.  Because of that second look, her story has never been the same.  It is no different with us as we pause to look once again only to see the Holy in what had been seen first as invisible.  

The Second Look

The One everyone came to see that first Sunday after the cross of Good Friday was nowhere to  be found.  Certainly, He was not where He was supposed to be.  He was not lying silently and still in the darkness of the tomb.  Peter and John could not find Him when they arrived.  Mary Magdalene made one trip and then another and all she had to show for her morning exertion was her heavy tears.  On the second trip she saw two angels in the tomb which should have been a clue that something extraordinary was afoot, but she was too blinded by her tears and her grief to see.     

It might also be said she was even more blinded by her expectations.  The body she expected to find was nowhere to be found and if she remembered Jesus saying anything about being raised from the dead, it was surely outside her consciousness that early morning.  We know about expectations.  There are times and places we expect Jesus to be present and when He seems like One who is nowhere to be found, we find our own eyes shut to some moment of outside the box revealing.  

As He came to Mary in that early morning hour, so does He often come to us with our name on His heart as it is spoken by the Spirit to the deep place of abiding presence within us.  From the language of the story, it appears that it was only at the second look after hearing her name that she knew Who was with her.  We sometimes forget how persistent Jesus can be in making Himself known to us.  It is not His absence that keeps us from seeing, but eyes that are closed to everything but what we expect to see.  

"Now You See Him...."

While the story of the empty tomb is reported in each of the four gospels, there are some notable differences in what happened after the resurrection of Jesus.  Matthew and Mark have a post resurrection view that can best be described as "Now you see Him, now you don't"   On the other hand, Luke and John have a different view of what happened after the emptiness of the tomb was discovered which can be described as "Now you see Him, now you don't, and there He is again."  With the first two gospel writers, the story mostly ends with the resurrection, but such is not the case with Luke and John.     

The "Now you see Him, now you don't, and there He is again"  writers include wonderful stories that we know as the Emmaus Road, the locked room break-ins, and breakfast on the beach.  In these stories the resurrected Jesus seems to move from the visible, to the invisible, and back to the visible realm again.  If it is true that there is a thin veil between here and there, then Jesus knew exactly where and how to be gone; yet, still be among those who in the beginning were not even looking for Him.    

What is so appealing about these "Now you see Him, now you don't, and there He is again"  stories is the way we are given assurance that the One who has risen has not simply left the tomb to disappear from our midst.  He is in the heavenly realm, but still He chooses to linger here sometimes slipping through the veil between here and there to make Himself powerfully known once again.   

Seeing the Unseen

Some look and see only emptiness while others look and see things unseen and invisible.  On that resurrection morning long ago Peter and John raced each other to the tomb to see an unthinkable thing that Mary Magdalene had said to be true.  "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb..."  (John 20:2) she told them.  When they breathlessly arrived, they saw only signs that a dead body had been placed in the darkness of the tomb, but nothing more.      

After they left the tomb for home, Mary "bent over to look into the tomb..."  (John 20:11)  What she saw were two angels.  If the angels had been there when Peter and John looked, they were there in the invisible realm.  But, what they did not see, Mary saw.  Perhaps, they revealed themselves to Mary, or maybe she had a heart that enabled her to see what mere eyes could not see.     

Angels show up often in the pages of the Holy Word.  Likely enough, we each have our favorite angel story.  Of course, few of us talk about angel stories that point to some moment of personal encounter with  these divine servants of the Almighty. (Hebrews 1:14)  We can only wonder why these holy servants have remained in the invisible realm instead of revealing themselves in such a way as to be seen.  Perhaps, it speaks of our inability to see what is not seen, or maybe, like Peter and John we arrive in the present with our own expectations of what there is to see and then hurry back to whatever it is we know as our comfort zone.  

Easter Eve

Heavy hanging hours, 

  minutes barely moving,

    tossing and turning, 

      a deep darkness

and suffocating dread.

 

Alone and waiting,

   crying and weeping,

     gripped by grief,

       brokenhearted, 

and mostly hopeless.

Dreading sunrise,

   the task at the tomb,

     unable to imagine,

       the impossible, 

an empty tomb.  

Gongs and Cymbals

Something surprising showed up today.  A business had a sign on the window which read, "Closed for Good Friday."  It took me on a trip down memory lane when many businesses closed on Good Friday.  It was, of course, a different era.  It was a time when the church and its ministries had a more central role in the community than in our current day.  We are certainly at a different place now as it has been business as usual in most places on Good Friday and when Easter Sunday comes, it will hardly be noticed in the places where commerce is done.     

While no one is out there advocating for a return to those days of old when store closings were normal every Sunday, it did encourage some to be more faithful about worship while it infuriated others to have to abide by a law based on a religious observance.  Actually, what the law has to say about Sunday life ought not really have any bearing on what Christian believers do with keeping Sabbath.  What we do in response to God is more a matter of the heart than adherence to a rule or law.    

Long years ago I remember a District Superintendent who had gathered all the preachers under his supervision together to encourage them in some program of the larger church.  The name of the program is long forgotten, but not the conversation which was heard in the room.  One of the preachers said, "Brother Carruth, just tell us to do it and we will do it," to which the Superintendent said, "If that is the only reason for doing it, then don't bother."   We can do all the right looking things for God, but for all the wrong reasons and when such happens, our life ends up looking like a "noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.'  (I Corinthians 13:1)

The Great Escape

On the way to the coffee pot just after seven o'clock, I heard a strange bovine sound outside the door.  When I opened the front door, three cows that belonged inside the fenced pasture were walking around the truck at the front door.  Suddenly the morning was filled with getting the escapees back in the pasture, getting out the chainsaw to cut up the partially rotted tree that had fallen over the fence, digging some post holes, and repairing the fence.  Just after noon I made it back to the house thinking about all the plans I had made for the day.     

The Word has a word for such plans as it says, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there doing business and making money.'  Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring."  (James 4:13-14)   All of us are prone to make plans and some of them come to fruition, but it is also true that every day has within it the potential to play havoc with our best made plans.  When life seems to make mincemeat out of our plans, we tend to fret, get upset, and go into some kind of inner tantrum.     

It does not usually occur to us to consider that God might be in the mayhem.  When we pray we ask God to lead us and to protect us, but we do not always think that the mayhem might be a part of His response to our petitions.  Perhaps, God had me in the pasture this morning to keep from some other thing which would have proven to be more troubling than getting cows back in a pasture.  Who knows and who can understand the ways of a God who cares for us and is always working to bring good into our life even though unexpected difficulty is all around us?