First Breath After Dying
John 20:1-18
Gospel Reading for Easter Sunday (Year A)
The tomb is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Sealed on Friday, the grave was the lifeless void that first day, so also the second, and so it began on the third. It would persist undefeated. The cold midnight hush would envelope that space until the world caved in.
Yet something stirred. The flutter of a heartbeat; nearly imperceptible. The silence reasserts its dominion for a time before another pulse briefly flickers to life. This is how it begins: a tug of war between life and death. If what the writer of the epistle says is true and to God a day is as a thousand years then decades elapsed between those first new heartbeats.
A thin line of musty air is drawn in and barely inflates the lungs. A breath more shallow than the damp dust from the first drop of rain touching the ground. The sound is a nearly inaudible hiss. A space of silence. Then another wisp of air is drawn in and then another. For some time he hangs there a breath towards the living and a silence towards the dead.
Time passes and then there is a small movement. A finger twitches. If you could see, you would think your mind was playing tricks on them. Yet the heart grows stronger. It trickles and then pumps life through the body. The breaths grow steadily deeper. All seems silent but there is something stirring.
The silence is pierced with a gasp of air. Like a diver rising from unfathomable depths he desperately yanks oxygen into his lungs. His eyes shoot open to utter darkness. He is bound; suffocatingly wrapped in burial cloth. Like an escape artist, he works to free himself from the garment of his death. The process is slow work—tediously slow—but even tedium feels like an adventure when one can breathe after dying.
He finally unravels the cloth and frees himself. All is dark save a faint crack of light across the tomb. He rises and walks. He places a hand on the cold stone that was meant to seal him away forever. He takes a moment to look around the tomb. It is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Then in an a moment all of that is turned upside down and the whole world with it.
I have always assumed that the resurrection happened in a flash. That there was death and then suddenly life. An explosion of light flung away the stone and the blazing glory of God changed the world in a moment. Yet I found myself wondering what if what happened that morning was more of a slow burn.
If we who follow Jesus are resurrected with Christ then there is something to be said for a resurrection that does not burst forth in a blink of an eye. The newness of life that was spoken to me when I was raised out of baptismal waters seems to flicker back and forth between the already and not yet. I acutely feel the great spaces between those new heartbeats. I pulse to life and then feel these gaps in which it seems like I am dead where I stand.
I feel it in the way the earth seems to lunge between the life that is God’s dream for creation and its self-destruction. Maybe we are all in that tomb—silent, cold, and dark—with a spark of divine life animating us glacially. If Christ knows all that we know then maybe he knows the often painfully slow resurrection that we experience before it takes ahold in its fullness.
Perhaps it all happened at once and life was restored to Jesus like a bolt of lightning. But as I sit on Holy Saturday knowing that we all will be celebrating Easter sealed up in our homes feeling both alive and maybe a little dead at the same time, it brings me some comfort that maybe the resurrection took a little bit of time.
