Dear Friends in Christ,

Sitting in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is an awesome thing. It’s a sometimes dizzying, sometimes frustrating, sometimes overwhelming experience. It feels, to many, a heavy place. It is a place of thick pillars, large stones, and tall thick doors. It is a place that feels immense.

Immense and yet intimate all the same.

One night, when I was able to stay overnight with a few others in the church, I sat on the steps in front of the tomb. I watched a boy zipping in and out of the tomb as his mother swept the floors. So many who come there come once. It’s the trip of a lifetime for many—a thing they save and plan for years and years.

When they come they bring sacks of prayer beads, shawls, icons and more that they lay on the tomb. They lay them there so they can bring something of this immense place back to those they love. These long lines of pilgrims come to venerate this place and to sit just for a moment in the midst of the weight of two millennia, under the watchful eye of a cosmos, hurried along by docents and those next in line.

Those folks come on the trip of a lifetime. Here was this boy, though, holding a tiny red matchbox car. He was zipping it around the floor in front of the tomb. No one paid him any mind and he paid no mind to anyone.

I watched him go in but because of the small doors and arches I couldn’t see him once he went in. I forgot about him as I prayed compline—and tried to find something between the awe of the pilgrims and the sense the boy had of being at home.

I got up and headed into the tomb. When I got inside I saw that the boy hadn’t left at all. He was there, driving his little red matchbox car on top of the tomb of Christ. At the center of the Christian story. At the fixed place around which creation spun faster and faster until the veil was torn in two. There where death was conquered.

There was that boy zipping the car back and forth on the tomb.

I couldn’t decide if I was horrified, amused, scandalized, or what. Of course, as a parent, I know that kids will find the most scandalous thing they can do in any given situation so I wasn’t annoyed or mad.

But there he was. Zipping car. Childish energy. Impatient to go yet happy to stay.

There he was. Content to wait at the foot of the cross, in the heart of it all, at the center of Christianity.

I have come to love that moment. It’s a little rude. It’s a little scandalous. It’s a little indecorous.

But what a gift it would be if we were so at ease with the immensity of what unfolds today. It’s shocking, of course. It’s immense and intimate all at once. We can’t imagine being there at the foot of the cross. We can’t take in what happened because we know what pain is. We know what loss is. We know all too well what is happening to Jesus.

As I have sat in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the spot where Christ was crucified, I have both wept and been numb. I’ve been bored and I’ve been overwhelmed. I’ve been captivated and I’ve been ready to go.

At some point, in some way, as shocking as it all is, we find ourselves in a place like that boy. We know we’re in a place that is special but we know we have to somehow make what happened then merge with what is happening now. For that boy, it was in zipping his car around. He was happy to play. That’s what kids do in that holy place.

The encounter with Jesus in that moment was so natural that there was no false hesitance or feigned coyness. He went in there and lived his kid life right there at the tomb of Christ.

Our relationship to what happens today, what we hear today, should always be shocking. It should always surprise us.

Yet, it should also become so near to our heart, that both what happens today and what is yet to come are the sites where we live our lives. Here, in the shadow of the cross, our whole lives unfold. We don’t come to the cross on a once in a lifetime journey. We come here, to this familiar place, to live life in its shadows.

In going to the cross Jesus is not out to say, “Look at me, look how unique my death will be, look how amazing this is.”

He’s going to the cross because that’s where we’ve all been. We’ve stood at it before. We’ve watched agonizing last breaths. We’ve cried at suffering we can’t fix. We’ve lost those who were our whole life. We wondered if God will take this cup, this suffering, from us.

Christ doesn’t go to the cross in some unique, special way. He enters the everyday experience of you and me and every person who has breathed, loved, and lost.

He enters the human experience that we might see a way to enter the divine.

In the meantime though, as we try to figure out what it means to strive for holiness, we can take comfort in the fact that the boy at the tomb probably had it right. When he left, after racing his car around for a while, he kissed the tomb and ran off.

His reflex was to offer love. To say thank you. Then to go about living—doing the things kids do.

As shocking as today is it would be even more a pity if we just let it be a thing that simply shocks us, like some horror film we re-watch once a year. Let’s let this be something more than shocking—something by which we come to know the Christ who longs to know us.

The immensity of what happens today is held in tension with the intimacy of the whole thing. The God who came to us as an infant in a barn leaves us today stripped, mocked, and rendered seemingly harmless.

This is precisely though where God meets us. In our stripped down, easy to mock, powerless moments and lives. God says, I will not meet you in majesty, I will meet you where you thought yourself alone. Where you mistook yourself as frail. Where you mistakenly believed your life breaking.

There Christ will meet us. It’s a shocking thing really. But it is also a thing which should be a daily comfort. It’s a reality, a place we can dwell, because Christ does not leave us comfortless.

I suppose what we might do today is do as that boy did—kiss the tomb and run off ready to live. We come to meet God face to face. To thank God in Christ by daring to look upon his wounds. To adore Christ who was broken and tempted as we are.

Christ came to redeem and restore the human condition. He came to meet us where we are and to welcome us to him.

What a gift it is. What a thing to behold. What a reality to inhabit.

We are here, at the tomb, at the heart of it all. Christ is meeting us where we are with all that life has given us to carry—crosses and toy cars and all. While we may find ourselves paralyzed by what we hear today we may also find ourselves coming to grips with the timeless expanse of this whole intimate story. We may come to realize that it is happening all around us all the time. As the world turns the cross stands fixed.

We may come here dragging bags of trinkets, loaded with luggage on this once in a lifetime encounter. But I think most of us know we will be back. We will come to the foot of the cross again. It may be our own we see being lifted up. It may be a cross we have drug into place. But meeting us pain for pain, love for love, loss for loss is Christ.

That’s the shocking reality of this. Christ did it once. He would do it again. For each and every one of us, this immense and intimate thing has happened. There, here, then, and now, at the tomb we come with whatever we have to meet the one who comes to use stripped of nothing but majesty and crowned with nothing but the world’s grief, and pierced by our human sin.

We may come, as innocent as that boy, and there we will find Christ ready to meet us in innocence. More likely though we will come bearing so much that he has carried. We will come fearing so much that he has faced.

We will come and then realize that we can come back, we can lay down so much of what has been a cross of our own making, and let knowing Christ be our own invitation to stay a while. Let ourselves realize that our thirst is his. Our sorrow is his. Our ache and lament are his.

He meets us when we know, when we’re sure it is finished, and he holds his arms wide drawing us to himself—in an embrace as wide as all of it and all of us—he draws us to himself and whispers of the end of the story.

His tomb will become a place we can dwell a while. We can come to it knowing it’s a place we’ve been before. But it is not a place we will be trapped. It’s is not a place where we see no light. It is not a place where we fear—for Christ has gone before.

So we come today, to the cross and to the tomb, as a people who may, like that boy, find our rest in the shadows, give a kiss to show our love, and run off to live our lives knowing that we will be back. We will return. Not because of how unusual this all is but because Christ came to meet us in the place where we all fear to tread—in the valley of the shadow.

We may find ourselves mortified or bored, unmoved or paralyzed with grief. Wherever we find ourselves, Christ is there to meet us. May we have the courage to return to him, to spend time with him in the shadows of the day, so we may find ourselves unafraid to run out to live and to return again and again to his inexhaustible love.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert