It was a dark, wet and lonely night. The taillights winked at us from the creek bottom deep in the canyon as we wound our way along the road above. There was no road down there. It didn't look good. I was terrified, but as we eventually drove our pickup truck along the Salmo-Creston highway to a point directly above those little twinkling lights, I knew I was going to have to go down there and look. I stopped, got out of the pickup and weakly asked Linda to pray. I could see the skid marks on the pavement. I gingerly clawed my way down the deep canyon. The trail of destruction left by whatever had gone over the edge was awful. I could see the red taillights and eventually I was able to scale the cliff down to what was left of a pickup truck. The body of a teenage girl lay in the shallow water of the creek, some of her clothes and both of her shoes torn off from impact. A teenage boy was holding another male teenager beside the truck. The boy was dead in the arms of his weeping brother, who had a broken hip. The two dead bodies in the beam of my flashlight unnerved me, but oddly they did not freak me out. In fact, they seemed to capture my attention. Eventually the weeping and groaning of the lone survivor shocked me into action. I found some articles of clothing, covered the bodies as best I could, especially their faces, and went to work trying to help the survivor. Thank God an ambulance arrived sometime after that to take charge.
It was the end of my first summer as a student minister in the Nelson-Slocan area of British Columbia. I had become a Christian and was baptized a couple of years before. This was followed by a nasty bout with cancer, which together with my newfound faith in Christ, had forced me to the point of dealing with my own death. It was other people's deaths that scared me. I had spent the whole summer living in dread of a call from the hospital or funeral home. I had escaped death all summer. And then this.
That tragedy was 25 years ago. The bodies of that teenage brother and sister are burned into my memory. Since then I have had to deal with several other bodies. It is always an unnerving experience but when actually faced, seldom terrifying. What makes it unnerving for me is the absolute finality of death. At the point of death there is nothing else you can do about life. You can only grieve. But somehow I naturally understand and accept that. It is the resurrection from death that scares me. And that begs a question.
How do we understand the resurrection of Jesus? At Easter it has been a tradition for Christian preachers to wax metaphorical about the resurrection of Jesus. I've done it too. Dead-looking seeds falling to the earth only to rise to new life in spring; ugly dead-looking bulbs springing to new life in a beautiful Easter lily; crusty brown and dead looking cocoons bringing forth beautiful and lively butterflies. But you know what? As I recall the two teenage bodies in that creek 25 years ago, these metaphors are not just weak, they are completely inappropriate. They don't treat death seriously enough. And if they don't treat death seriously enough, they will totally miss the point of the resurrection.
This Easter I have been trying to stand with the three women at the empty tomb in Mark's Gospel. They are totally weary with grief, and so am I. And so we should be. Death is something horribly final and unsettling in its power over life. But at least you can count on it. Grief is something I can understand, even embrace.
Then suddenly the women scramble away from the empty grave: terrified, amazed and afraid at the possibility of resurrection. I am running right with them too, horrified, shocked. No metaphor, parable or allegory can begin to covey what we feel. William Willimon put it well in A Voice in the Wilderness: Clear Preaching in a Complicated World: "Easter is not about the return of the robin in spring or blooming crocuses or butterflies coming out of their cocoons or any of that pagan drivel. It's about a body that somehow got loose. The Gospel accounts strain to describe what happened, but don't make any mistake about it, they're trying to describe something unearthly: death working backward. So I can't talk about the eternal rebirth of hope or Jesus living on in our hearts. We're talking about a dead Jew, crucified, who came back to harass us. And it scares the heck out of us!"
And you know what terrifies me the most? If I accept the resurrection of Jesus to be true and if I give my life over to follow him as Lord, all my definitions and reference points about life, especially death, have been ripped up. That absolutely freaks me out. And this Jesus, risen from the grave to harass me, is demanding that I live life with a completely different set of parameters, definitions and reference points. It is no longer life and death as I have it all figured out. Nothing can be the same anymore if I am to believe in and follow the Risen One. I have to reevaluate everything I have ever held to be true in life, including death. No wonder the Gospels describe the resurrection of Jesus in terrifying, earth-shaking terms and Paul speaks about it in terms of a personal new creation.
In practical terms, what this means to me is living a life full of risk, where death, and for that matter, nothing else in life, has any power over me. In practical terms, it means living out the teachings of the Risen One as literal and non-negotiable parameters for my life. Loving my enemies, praying for those who hate me, not resisting an evil doer, surrendering my possessions to those who would take them, going the second mile for one who would force me to go the first and all that other stuff in Matthew 5-7 that put the claim of holiness on my life — these can be ignored only by one who has not had life turned upside down by the Risen One. The Gospels were written and have to be read and lived in the light of the terrifying reality that Jesus is risen, He is risen indeed.
