Joy Through the Tears of Grief
Acts 10:34-43 John 20:1-18
April 12, 2009 Easter Sunday
This morning is all about joy - bunnies and chicks representing fertility and the incredible urge for life to press on, eggs reminding us that there is possibility and potential within the smallest most unlikely space, sunrise shining out over a brand new day bringing light into a world where darkness so recently reigned. It is good to celebrate. It is good to sing and hear the special music. It is good to wear our Spring finery and bright smiles. And, it is good to remember the event we are celebrating, to draw ourselves back there and shadow Mary as she found her way to the burial site where she assumed Jesus lay.
John brings us right into Mary’s experience on that first Easter morning. Her grief is fresh and palpable. She probably spent a good bit of the night crying, if truth be told. In John’s account, Mary is by herself. She is not in the comforting circle of the other women as all of the other Gospel writers would have it. She is alone with her grief and her determination to go to the grave early that morning. When she sees that the grave is empty, Mary runs for help from the men, but they don’t stay all that long. They peek into the tomb and, satisfying themselves that Jesus is no longer there, they go home.
Mary isn’t ready to go home. She doesn’t want to go anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything to her that Jesus is not in the tomb, because she cannot imagine anything good right then. Grief surrounds her and colors everything she sees and thinks. She cannot move past it. When you are going through something as traumatic as the death of someone you love, it can be difficult to see beyond your grief. The whole world feels as though it has changed, and it can be strange to see signs that this is only true for you, that for most other people, the world is still going on as usual. “How can they continue on? How is it possible that no one else knows that nothing is the same anymore, that nothing will ever be the same again?” John O’Donohue in his blessing called For Grief puts it this way:
When you lose someone you love,
your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.
Mary is living inside of her grief that early Easter morning. She doesn’t know that it is Easter, after all. She is living inside of her grief, attempting to put one foot in front of the other, trying to force herself to go through the motions of whatever she thinks she should be doing. She doesn’t have a sense that everything is poised and ready to turn upside-down once again. She doesn’t know that just as her grief has taken her down into the depths of her soul during the past three days, now joy is edging its foot in the door, impossibly ready to gain a foothold on her heart.
Some folks I have spent time with have told me that grief can be like this. Even as they are mourning their losses, a lighter emotion can sneak up on them and surprise them with joy or laughter or an experience of their heart being strangely warmed by the remembrance of deep and abiding love shared. Grief has an acquaintance with joy that is surprising and often difficult to understand even when we find ourselves laughing through our tears. My sense of this is that when the heart is broken open, for whatever reason, it is open to all the range of emotions. If our hearts are touched by grief, then they are susceptible to joy and love just as much as they are to the sadness that first unlocked it. If love is what opens the heart, then we find ourselves laughing more readily and even crying more easily as well. When I was pregnant, and love was so powerfully present in my own experience, I found myself crying at the drop of a hat. Kleenex and cotton commercials had the power to make my tears flow at an alarming rate. I knew I had to leave the room during Hallmark commercials or I would miss the next 5 minutes of the Hall of Fame special thanks to my rampant emotions.
All of this open-hearted flowing of emotion is a good thing. It is a powerful aspect of being human, and yet we spend an awful lot of our energy attempting to cover it up. Have you ever apologized to someone for crying? Have you ever been embarrassed when you were too choked up to talk? Grief breaks our hearts open and renders us more available to experience our lives in all of their fullness. What might we miss if we don’t let our hearts break open now and then? In what ways might our lives be restricted if we refuse to grieve, refuse to love, refuse to respond authentically to whatever passes our way?
As Mary stood outside Jesus’ tomb, I wonder what was going through her mind. I imagine that she was trying to come to terms with the empty tomb in terms of her personal concerns and fears. She may have been going over in her mind the people who had motives for stealing Jesus’ body - both friends and foe. She may have been trying to figure out what she should do now - both immediately and in terms of the larger picture of her life. And she also just simply missed Jesus and wanted to regain some sense of connection with him, even the limited connection that a gravesite would offer; a place to come and sit and think and pray. What she received was so much more than she could have hoped for - Jesus alive and well, calling her by name.
Seeing him and hearing his voice were things Mary never expected when she wended her way to the garden that morning. It all happened so quickly and strangely, like some sort of dream. And yet, these things, seen through her tears of grief, gave her the strength to go on. They gave her the courage to seize her responsibility as a follower of Jesus and a carrier of his message of God’s love for all people. I believe that Mary’s grief, her tears, opened her heart in such a way that she was better able to carry on forever after in her life. There are scholars who say that Mary became quite a leader in the early church, even though our scriptures don’t talk about her after the resurrection. There is evidence that she lived her life in faithfulness to Jesus’ teachings, doing what she was able to bring more people into the fold.
This can happen for each of us, if we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable to God; if we are willing to open our hearts to all of the emotions associated with living and loving and yes, losing.
God of all that is, we thank you. Thank you for drawing us nearer to you. Thank you for aligning our hearts with your heart. Thank you for helping us to care, even when it is difficult. Thank you for helping us feel even when what we feel is grief. Break us open, God, so that your love can enter into our hearts and emanate from our lives in beautiful ways. In the name of Jesus, who did this so powerfully and selflessly we pray, Amen.