“Lord, I seek mystery, not a mishmash of existential thoughts, symbols and trendy quips.  I cannot contain you, cannot begin to plumb the depths of your love, let alone the perplexing ways you work in the world. To one you heal, the other dies.  Mother’s cry, fathers fume at the injustice they see.  Where is a formula to crack the chemistry of your alchemy? When I try, I find it quicksand, the more I move to understand, the faster I sink.  Yet, moments of deft clarity overwhelm me when I least expect it.”

Hope shatters dismay when a child has been written off as gone, and scans detect brain waves.  When someone has chosen to self-destruct, and you reach through time to answer a prayer that raises their head over the siege wall to notice on the horizon a force coming at them at lightning speed, led by a Radiant Figure.  Salvation is not a vanquishing of the enemy, it’s a moment when that Radiant Figure sees you, and you he, and it brings sense to unreason, clarity to chaos, and a burning heart of love and gratitude where moments before only smoldering embers  were stirred with a spoon by the hand of a demon. 

Hope is born, not on the fanciful in-vogue words of a popular idea, but in the shadow of a grave when a heart notices that True light sits behind the stone, waiting for Another, whose whole being wants only to be reunited.  Resurrection is not a word to hold lightly.  It’s pure mystery.  It’s taking the spoon from the demon and igniting what used to be smoldering death.  It’s now being able to see the eyes of the captain of our soul and know that no matter how far he is away, or we from him, in the moment we turn, he is already clutching us as if he just found a lost treasured heirloom.  Yes, we are heirs, and in the looming darkness we call every day, he will not sit idly by for even a moment after we cry out in our lostness. 

         At the tomb on that morning, we gain lessons from Mary, the one who knew full well what demons look like, and what damage they cause. Follow her movements at the door of the damned: First, Mary weeps, the purest form of homage.  That brokenness creates a hunger to know, a curious look into mystery, that God often rewards.  He did so, as Mary peered into the cave and saw angels.  Because He is a mystery, the reward comes in the form of seeing the unseen, just as she did in that moment, only a moment away from reuniting with her Rabboni.  That seeing, creates a humbled repentant heart, as we read that Mary turned and saw a man standing by her.  Unless she turned, literally turning away from the miracle of angels, she would not have seen him.  Her humble request, “where did they take his body?” was evidence that her hunger to know had deepened beyond curiosity, and had gone into a willingness to act.  

When God enriches the seeds of faith that lie dormant, there’s no telling where He will send us, or what will bloom.  But one thing we do know, he will send us to proclaim the miracle of the resurrection, that Jesus is alive.  Jesus is not standing idly by.  Jesus knows and laments, and walks the lonely, sometimes desolate journeys with sovereign wisdom. 

 Our Rabboni lives!  He lives in our darkness, as well as in luminous everyday toil.  When we see Him like this, the way Mary did, we don’t try to explain it fully, we simply say thank you. Thank you for taking the spoon out of the demon’s hand and turning a pile of ashes into fire.