Easter Day April 12, 2009

Easter Day
April 12, 2009

Here we all are, this golden day, celebrating the most glorious of mysteries, Christ’s triumph over death.
It’s a day that’s hard to wrap our heads around. Do we believe in this amazing possibility? Is the resurrection story we just read, the lovely and tender account of Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden historical or symbolic or both? Does it matter? Where are we with our small and ordinary lives in this story?

In the middle of Holy Week, I had an Easter dream.
I was in a big dormitory-like building with some friends. They all had to go off to classes, and as they left the room, each of them put a hand on my head in blessing. Then two of my closest friends said to me, “Why don’t you come and sit in on our class?”
After they’d left, I thought, “why not?” and started off after them.
It was one of those big old buildings—you might remember one like it from high school or college or work—where indistinguishable corridors branch off one after the other. It felt like a maze.
To make it worse, I’d forgotten to ask where the class was meeting.
Finally I spotted a figure at the end of one of the corridors and I scurried toward it, hoping to ask directions. It was a man, a priest, dressed in black with a collar.
When I got close to him I asked what he was doing there, just standing by a window, at the end of a corridor.
He said, “I’m spending time with Jesus.” Whoops!—because I didn’t see any Jesus, real or a statue or a picture or anything.
Then as I came closer I saw that the corridor widened out there to form a tiny open room on the left. Ah hah, I thought, and turned to the wall opposite the priest. But there was nothing there.
Then something on my left caught my eye, on the third wall, opposite the window. There was a portrait of Jesus done in a pale silvery metal. Not a statue, a slightly raised metal sculpture.
The priest smiled and said to me, “He likes to look out of the window.”

“Christ likes to look out of the window.” That’s when I knew it was an Easter dream.
Because on Easter morning Jesus burst out of the tomb. Why?
Because the Christ in my dream can’t bear to be separated from what the world is doing.
Christ sees what is happening. Sees true love blossoming, and babies born. Sees the trials of illness and death.
Right now, sees the pain of people thrown out of work, people who have labored honorably all their lives long.
Sees people scrape to make their rents or mortgages each month.
Sees savings disappear.
Sees economic disaster threaten the poorest and most vulnerable around the world.
On Easter morning he could not bear to be separated from the facts of the world. Not even a cave carved in the rock and blocked in by a boulder was able to hold him in.

In my Easter dream Christ was not where I expected him to be.
I expected him to be centered in a place of honor on the middle wall. I expected him to be the center of attention.
When you walk into a church, your eyes are directed forward, usually toward a cross and the altar. It’s like walking into a throne room or the presidential office—even the furniture arrangement underlines the importance of the queen or the president. They are “front and center.”
. Imagine walking into a church and having to search for the cross or the altar. But in my Easter dream, Christ was off-set. He was ex-centric, which means literally “out of the center.”
That’s what threw Mary Magdalene, wasn’t it? If by some incredible chance Jesus’ prediction had come true and he had risen from the dead, well, Mary might have thought, wouldn’t he be glowing and glorious and center stage, held above the earth by bands of angels singing “Hosannah”?
But Jesus Christ had never taken the place of honor.
Ex-centric throughout his life, most of the time he took back roads, visited obscure villages, took as friends women and men who in everybody else’s eyes were weird, dirty or in bad trouble. Until the very end, he stayed away from Jerusalem, Israel’s absolute center of power.
Jesus was ex-centric even in the triumph of the Resurrection. He revealed himself first not to temple leaders, nor to Peter, the first of his followers, but to a woman, Mary Magdalene. In a place and time when women had little importance, the first word we hear the newly resurrected Christ say is “woman.”

In my Easter dream I first caught a glimpse of the image of Jesus out of the corner of my eye.
That’s how Mary first saw him, wasn’t it, a shadowy, out-of-focus figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye?
You may come to church each week or just for Christmas and Easter. No matter how often or how rarely you come, I hope you find Christ here.
Yet I suspect that most often you bump into him when you’re not all dressed up on Easter morning! I suspect that most of your close encounters with Christ happen outside of church. You catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye in unexpected acts of kindness that lighten your day. Or in gracious acts of self-sacrifice, large or small. Or in friends who know you all too well and help you be your best self. Or in the mysterious voice that whispers to you when you are strained beyond your power, “Yes, you can go on. Be at peace. I love you.”

Where does Easter glory go, when it’s no longer Easter Day?
It doesn’t go, that’s the mystery. Christ’s Easter glory stays right where it belongs, in the world Christ loves, and watches, and moment by moment saves. We may not see it straight on, but wait! keep looking out of the corner of your eyes for glimpses of our ex-centric Lord leading us down unexpected pathways to a new and resurrected life.