Still, the following Sunday we can count on seeing people walking into worship just in time for the final hymn. No doubt we all have our own tales to tell. We all know the sinking feeling that comes in discovering it’s too late.
The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns tells of an experience he had while editing footage for his PBS series on the Civil War. He and his crew were finishing the soundtrack for the documentary when they came to the moment of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. “We had laid down the narration and the music and the sound of the play at Ford’s Theater,” reports Burns, “but we hadn’t laid down the sound of the bullets. The mixer was running toward this inevitable murder, when suddenly, the editor and my assistant and I all said ‘STOP!’ And for a moment we froze the assassination. We didn’t kill the President. We stood there with tears flowing down our cheeks and stopped to consider the momentary power that we had. And then we moved on, backed up, laid down the shot, and finished the film. But I will never forget as long as I live the time when we, for a moment, saved Abraham Lincoln.[1]
That “momentary power” to which Burns refers is a fantasy. Life doesn’t have any buttons labeled STOP or REWIND. None of us is exempt from the sinking feeling that comes with the painful realization that sometimes it’s too late.
Easter starts with that feeling. When someone is heading toward a tomb, they know it’s too late. On that first Easter morning a tomb was Mary Magdalene’s destination, and she knew it was too late to do anything but grieve. To her credit she had not moved on as if nothing had happened. She had not papered over her loss with aphorisms about “the good dying young” or “God needing one more angel in heaven.” Though her heart was aching, she had not prematurely sutured it up. No one is ever ready to encounter Easter until they have spent time agonizing over a premature ending marked with the words, “Too late.”
But those words are not the final ones. That is the resurrection message. Does death have power? Of course it does. Does it have ultimate power? Easter triumphantly declares that it does not.
In John’s account of the resurrection the risen Lord tells Mary not to try holding onto him. The words seem a bit harsh. One might have preferred a long, tearful reunion with lots of hugs. Most of us would have preferred it if Mary had been sent off in search of the others so that they could all go home and pretend none of this had ever happened. Instead, Jesus tells Mary, “Do not hold on to me.”
The sociologist Robert Bellah tells of the time he lost someone he loved. “The deepest truth I have discovered,” he writes, “is that if one accepts the loss, if one gives up clinging to what is irretrievably gone, then the nothing which is left is not barren but enormously fruitful. Everything that one has lost comes flooding back again out of the darkness, one’s relation to it is now—free and unclinging.”[2]
That first Easter Mary tried to cling to a Jesus from the past, and her first outburst of joy came from mistakenly thinking the impossible had happened: history had been reversed. It had not. What had happened were crucifixion, death and burial—things irrevocable. Easter starts with this harsh honesty about the irrevocable side of life. But Easter does not end there, for the irrevocable is not irredeemable. With God there is a “too late” that is not too late.
When our children were little they would vacillate between independence and clinginess. They would be doing fine on their own, then suddenly a wave of worry would overwhelm them. Suddenly a two year old was welded to my leg. It can be difficult to make your way through the grocery store like that. It can be difficult for Christ to take us into the future if all we do is cling. The future is where the risen Christ is headed, for the Christian faith is less about looking back to a great teacher and example than it is about moving forward and trying to keep up with its risen Lord.
Easter is the day we use a lot of “re” words, words that begin with the Latin prefix for “again.” Christ is re-surrected, his life and ministry are re-deemed, our trust in God is re-stored. In response there is one more “re” word—the ultimate, sum it all up, never give in to the past, move with the triumphant risen Christ into the future–word. The word is RE-JOICE!
JIM BAKER is pastor of Westminster Church in Charlottesville, Va.
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