Easter

Scripture Reading: Mark 16:1-4 RSV

“And they were saying to one another, ‘

Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?”

Mark 16:3

On the day my mother died, one month after my 10^th birthday, I was called out of school just before the last hour ended, and after being told the news, went and sat on the stoop outside our front door.  As the children came from school past the house, my best friend, Kenny Berquist saw me and came to learn the news.  Then he simply sat with me in silent support.

A year later we were wrestling in the front yard and he was winning and in frustration I started crying.  “Why are you doing that?” He asked and I blurted out “If your mother had died, you would cry too.”  Whereupon he looked me straight in the eye and said, “How long are you going to use that?”  In that moment, I realized that I had been stuck in my grief, entombed if you will, using it many times as an excuse for not accepting my circumstances and moving on.  But with his challenge he had rolled away the stone from my entombment.

It is easy when we experience death in its many forms, loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of a marriage, etc., to become entombed in our feelings, not allowing them to be a healing release to a new life.  Rather we grasp onto them with a firmness that allows us to get stuck in a moment of life and never experience our resurrection. 

In such moments, if we are fortunate, along comes someone who rolls the stone away for us and allows us to move forward, and emerge into the light once more.  Matthew, in the telling of this same moment of the EASTER story, says “an angel of the Lord” rolled the stone away. Matt. 28:2a.  For me Kenny was that angel and I am forever grateful.

As we celebrate the full meaning of the Resurrection, consider who in your life has rolled away a stone that kept you entrapped in the past?  And, perhaps, to whom have you been such an angel?