Blogging Towards Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025
“God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of our humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”
– Nadia Bolz Weber
The women go to the tomb in the pre-dawn darkness as the Sabbath concludes, to express all of their love, hope and gratitude for their teacher, Jesus. They come to the tomb wrapped up in a story that they believed was ending. Embalming and caring for his cadaver was the ultimate epilogue. They come looking for hope and courage among the dead. But the tomb is empty, not just because death couldn’t hold him, but because death is not the end of the story. In finding the tomb empty, they hear a new word – andinvitation to remember the words of Jesus.
We hear the word remember and think of ‘old times’, maybe ‘better times’ that we recall to mind often through rose-colored glasses longing to relive or fix the past. In Hebrew the word for remember is זָכַר or zakar. But the definition goes deeper, for it also means ‘to bring someone to mind— and then act on that person’s behalf.’ Zakar, then, is as much direct action as it is a mental exercise.
Remembering the words of Jesus then is not just being mindful of what he said, but living into the vision he cast, embodying the word that he spoke, doing the word that he modeled. Jesus had told them several times that he would be put to death by those who opposed his message, and that death wouldn’t be the end of the story. Jesus had spoken to them over and over of a new way of being, of living together, where the first and last and the last first, where the meek – the humble who put all their trust in God – they inherit the earth. A kingdom in which the broken, poor, forgotten, and marginalized are not only healed – but seen and active in God’s making all things new. It’s a remembering that Jesus spoke or and showed a different way of living. Where we often “dig our own graves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.” Today, we gather not just to celebrate a resurrection, but to be resurrected, to be new in a world desperately needing the messy love that life and death have wrought.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION & EXAMEN:
• What word, phrase or image grabs you in these readings?
• How word(s) of Jesus shape your life and ethics?
• How do you need to be resurrected in this season?
• What invitation do you hear the Spirit of God speaking to you – or to us, as a church – to act, speak, be, or change, through this word of scripture
CAPC Oakland 