Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

There’s something so anticlimactically quotidian about the aftermath of the crucifixion, a narration of which is appointed for our Office Gospel today. The text is straightforward. Our Lord is dead. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, the mother of James and John, and many other women were there, bearing witness. Joseph gets permission to bury Jesus; he subsequently buries him. The women are there, too, bearing witness. The authorities decide to seal the tomb against rumors that Jesus said death could not hold him.

I’m drawn to the role of the women in this reading: their presence, their silent witness. Was it really so silent, that witness? Likely not: it was likely full of weeping and lamentation, of cries and shouts, of anger and grief. But I don’t think their relative silence in this passage is meant to elide over the wrenching tumult of their mourning. Rather, I think their narrative silence here is meant to deepen the mourning into heartbreak—our heartbreak—and to lend an incommensurable eeriness to the growing apprehension of just what it means for Jesus to be dead, for the world to have changed in some incomprehensibly profound way. In this narrative silence, the events following the crucifixion unfold as events after trauma often do: with a kind of distantly mechanical ineluctability, the grief of the moment rendered inarticulate and wordless before the totalizing reality of a catastrophe that cannot be grasped or adequately expressed, but remains unavoidably present and all-consuming. And yet, the world still goes on. Here we are, the women might say to themselves, going on. There is Joseph, going on. There is Pilate, going on. Maurice Blanchot in his book The Writing of the Disaster puts it this way: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”

No one in our narrative could guess at the reality of redemption that Jesus was, even then, working out in his harrowing of hell: the despoiling of death of all its captives, trophies and triumphs, and the overthrow of sin’s dominion that would reach its glorious culmination in the Resurrection. How could they imagine such unimaginable glories in the midst of their tremendous grief? What they do, though, what the women do, is witness. They bear witness to the reality of the trauma, they bear witness to the reality of their grief (their own and each other’s), they bear witness to the world’s apparently heedless indifference, to which indifference they stand as a profound countersign.

And in doing so, in being present to their grief, to each other, to the events of the crucifixion and their aftermath, in loving each other in and through their very present grief, they’re being prepared, enabled and empowered (whether they know it or not), to bear witness to something else: when the brilliant dawnlight of Easter breaks, they’re being prepared to see it in its awesome and magnificent fullness. They’re being prepared to be the first witnesses and evangelists of a real and abiding Joy.

Beloved, let me be clear: it isn’t that the women’s grief prepares them or proves salutary…it’s their insistence on not avoiding it, of bearing witness to it, that will open them to the possibility that grief will never have the last word. Our instinct is often to avoid or compartmentalize mourning, to get through it as quickly as possible. But what if bearing witness to it, bearing witness to the grief and mourning of others, is part of what enables us to bear witness to more than grief…to an in-breaking reality of real Joy, of real Love, of real and life-giving Community that stands as a countersign to death and sin and indifference?

How might we be called to bear witness today?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+