Risen

KING JAMES VERSION

And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen (ἠγέρθη · ēgerthē), as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.

MATTHEW 28 : 6

The women came to the tomb before the sun was up, and they came carrying spices.

In those days spices were what you bring to prepare a body. You bring them when the worst has already happened and there is nothing left to do but tend what remains of someone you loved. The women were not walking toward a miracle. They were walking toward a corpse, in the dark, to do the last sad kindness there is to do for the dead. They had watched him die. They knew what was behind the stone.

What was behind the stone was an angel, and a word.

He is not here: for he is risen.

Read it in English and the line seems to be about something Jesus did. He is risen. He got up. As though, after three days, he gathered what was left of himself and stood, the way a strong man finally throws off a long sleep and rises on his own.

That is not quite what the Greek says. The word the angel used is ēgerthē, and it is not the kind of word you do to yourself. It is the kind of word that is done to you. He was raised. Somebody raised him.

The English makes it sound like Jesus acted alone. The Greek will not. It uses a passive, the kind that leaves the doer unspoken on purpose, because everyone reading knew the One who does the raising. He was raised. And the rest of the New Testament says it plainly: God raised him from the dead.

That is a larger thing than it first sounds, and a stranger one. It would be easy to picture two figures here, a strong Father and a weak Son, one reaching down to rescue the other. But that is not who lay in the tomb. The Son who had died was not a lesser God. He was God, as fully as the Father is God. So the hand that reached into the grave was not a stranger's, and not a greater power saving a smaller one. It was God reaching for God. Father, Son, and Spirit are one, and the raising was their one act. The wonder of the passive is not that Jesus was too weak to rise. It is that God himself had gone down into death, and that God will not stay in a grave.

On the cross he had said the work was finished. The empty tomb is God's amen to it.

There is something gentler in the word too.

The plain verb underneath it, egeirō, was an everyday word for waking somebody in the morning. Get up. It is what Jesus himself said to a little girl who had died, with his hand on hers. Talitha cumi. Get up, child. He said it the way you would say it to a daughter you were waking for school. To us, death is the last enemy, fierce and undefeated. To the God who made the morning, it is small. Not a power he must struggle against. A sleep he leans down and ends.

The women came braced for the worst. The way you brace at a graveside. The way you brace when you have prayed for a thing so long that you have quietly stopped expecting it. They came to tend a death, and they were the first to learn the death had been undone. Not by them, and not by any power they could have carried in a jar. By God, who would not accept it.

You can come to him the same way. Braced. Carrying your spices, ready to tend whatever has died in you. The marriage. The hope. The person you used to be. The raising was never going to be your work. There is a hand that reaches into graves, and it has already reached into the deepest one there is, on a morning like this one, and it did not come back empty.

He is not here. He was raised, with the same word a father uses to wake a sleeping child at dawn.

MEDITATE ON THIS

He is not here. The One who lay in that grave was God himself, and God will not stay in a grave. That same hand reaches still, into whatever has died in you.

A PRAYER

Father, I have worn myself out trying to raise things in my life that were already dead, as if the work were mine to do. I confess I keep forgetting that the grave was never mine to open. Reach into the cold places in me. Speak over them the word You spoke over Your Son that morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

— Mark