The stone

Easter sunrise, Toronto 2025

He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.” Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”, and the last deception would be worse than the first.’ Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.(Matthew 27, 60-66)

All the gospels agree that after the crucifixion of Jesus, someone closed the tomb where His disciples had laid him with a large stone. Not all the gospels say who placed the stone or what reason they had, but all agree the women who went to anoint Jesus on the morning of the first day of the week worried about how they would move it.

The stone has always struck me as an apt metaphor for the futility, the folly of human concerns in the shadow of eternity and the face of the Almighty. If a neutron star could have been brought to the Earth, it would not have held that tomb closed. 

The central story of Christianity begins with an itinerant Rabbi, a homeless wanderer with a core of followers who attracted large crowds that came and went. He also attracted deep devotion and stirred up deep controversy, ending with his unjust execution by the Roman authorities. Our story speaks of suffering and death in a land under occupation by an oppressive and predatory empire. Our most important observance consists of ritual cannibalism:

Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, So to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, And to drink his Blood, That our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, And our souls washed through his most precious Blood, And that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us. (Book of Common Prayer, 1962 pg 83)

Yet we do not tell a story of defeat. Our story does not tell of a subversive executed by Empire, or a child sacrificed for success in one fleeting battle or one war, or a corn king whose blood is poured into the ground for a single good harvest. We tell a story transformed by the resurrection, and by the utterly radical meaning of that resurrection: that God loves. God loves enough to come and die for us. The unimaginable vastness of creation, the billions of billions of mighty suns; all are fired by a love beyond  our imagination. That love, so great, does not depend on our worthiness. If only one human spirit in all of space and time had ever existed, ever fallen into evil, the God we worship would have come to rescue that one.

He would have come, He did come to save me. He came to save you. He came for Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He came for Donald Trump.

Belief in the dignity of the human person does not depend on a specific religious tradition. Jewish tradition holds that all humans have inherent dignity because we are made in he image and likeness of God. Other traditions express the same notion in other ways.In these times of great trouble, widespread and official disrespect for the rule of law, it helps to remember the simple truth: people matter. We matter more than the shifting phantoms of state power, of national prestige, of wealth, of what Kipling's poem Recessional calls "valiant dust that builds on dust."

Soon enough the indifferent stream of time will carry away today's political obsessions. The unsustainable economies of our time will either collapse, find new ways to sustain themselves, or give way to things radically new. Only one question will remain: God loves you. According to the Christian story, He has shown how much. Other traditions can infer that love from the beauty of the universe and the web of life we are woven into. Do we love in return?