4-19-19 - Those Cloths

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

If Jesus’ resurrection had happened in this age, Peter might have thought he’d been vaporized by alien death rays, with only the grave cloths left lying there in the tomb. The detail about the cloths is an odd one to include – in John’s gospel we’re even told they were neatly folded. Yet, were it not for those cloths, people might have thought Jesus’ body had been stolen.

But it’s unlikely that anyone would steal a corpse and leave the wrappings behind. Those cloths signaled they were no longer needed, for Jesus was alive. People needed to see that tomb empty and those grave cloths cast aside to know something big was up.

What are some of the “grave cloths” in our lives, things or habits or rituals that we once needed to mark – or obscure – a death, a loss, a goodbye? Are they still wrapping a memory? Are we hanging on to them? Why are they still hanging around our lives?

What would it mean to leave those wrappers, memories, lost hopes, perhaps even dead relationships behind? To leave them neatly folded, no longer required, for death has been swallowed up in life? That is the promise of Easter – that death no longer has the controlling vote in our lives. Death no longer has the last word. That goes for all the emotional and spiritual deaths we endure as well as the physical ones. Preparing ourselves to celebrate the mystery of Easter might include being willing to leave some old deaths behind, allow God to bring new life into those places in us.

But today it is still Good Friday. Today we mark Jesus’ death, after which his friends and followers wrapped his body in those cloths, having no time to properly wash and anoint him for burial. What a sight the women doubtless feared as they came along in the dark early Sunday morning, knowing they would need to wash off the dried blood, the mud and muck, that decay would have begun to set in. What they found was more frightening and more wonderful still – no body at all. Only the cloths, no longer needed.

Maybe we will find some of the griefs our old grave cloths were wrapping are healed now too, and we can leave them behind in tombs now emptied. Life has gotten out!

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