The Worst Thing is Not the Last Thing
The hope of Easter.
Early dawn, as the sun was rising on the first day of the week, it was then that the women came to the tomb. These faithful ones who remained with him to the end, through his suffering on the cross to the tomb, and who returned with spices when the day of Sabbath had passed.
In Eastern Orthodox traditions they are known as the Myrrhbearers, the ones to whom the good news of the resurrection is first revealed, and apostles to the apostles because it is they who bring the good news of the resurrection to Jesus’s disciples who have gone into hiding.
But they knew none of this when they set out that morning. Grief-stricken, devastated, unable to get back what it is they had lost, the life they had come to know in his presence, the hope that they’d allow themselves to feel. All of it. Just gone.
The one who had guided them, had taught them a new way to live, had taught them to care for others as he had cared for them, and so they did just that…for him, or for his body, there in the cold of the tomb.
But then they arrive and the stone is rolled away, his body is gone, and suddenly, out of nowhere, two men appear in their midst, named as angels in other accounts. Our translation saying their clothes were dazzling, but the greek text invoking clothes that flashed like lighting, it was sudden, it was bright, and the women hit the deck, they bow down to the ground in fear and wonder.
And the mysterious men speak: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”
When I hear this question, I hear amusement in their voices, as if it’s a riddle for them to solve.
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Why look for what’s done, what’s over, instead of what will be? God is doing a new thing.
Resurrection is not erasure of what has come before, but new life that has gone through and come out of the worst this world has to offer and proclaimed there is more life, more love, more light even beyond our very worst days. There is no evil, no hatred, no suffering so great that it cannot be overcome by this love.
Beloved spiritual writer, Frederick Buechner says that “Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.”1
I don’t know about you, but this is a word of hope I need right now. In the midst of all that is happening in the world around us, so much pain, so much injustice, so much fear about what might lie ahead…
Resurrection calls us back, again and again to remember that the worst thing is not the last thing.
Resurrection reminds us that no matter how powerful the forces of evil, love is still stronger. Resurrection reminds that even through betrayal and violence, humiliation and defeat, love cannot be overcome.
Theologian Shelly Rambo writes, “The good news is that love survives…love that cannot be extinguished even in the depths of hell.”2
It’s a love that endures. Love that has seen some things.
Love that orients us, love that abides with us through the depths of disorientation and suffering, love that reorients us to the new life that awaits on the other side of sorrow, changed, enlightened, wiser for what we have endured.
Having made our way through so much these last years, there is a temptation to “get things back to normal” or “the way things used to be”.
But the angel’s question echoes anew:
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Why are you clinging to what is old and familiar, when you could be stepping into the story of new life?
Because resurrection isn’t about going back to what was, it’s about transformation into something new.
It’s not that the way things were is necessarily bad. In the case we’re talking about, alive Jesus was a very good thing! But that ended. Betrayal happened, humiliation happened, abandonment, violence, suffering, agony happened.
Jesus was dead and in the grave, the reason those women brought spices to lessen the stench of death.
But then he rose.
And what I love about where Luke’s Gospel bring us here on the morning of Easter is that the Myrrhbearers, those faithful, courageous women, they don’t know what that means just yet.
But they run to tell the disciples the good news anyway.
They speak of new life, of more to the story than the present moment of suffering and sorrow in which the disciples are dwelling.
The disciples don’t want to hear about new life or next chapters, though. They’re too overcome with grief over all they have lost. They call the women’s report an “idle tale.”
On the one hand, I have compassion for them because they have suffered great loss these last few days, and they’re longing to reclaim the joy and wonder of being in Jesus’s company once more in the ways they had come to enjoy it.
And on the other hand I see the way that their attachment to what has been closes off their minds to the possibility of what could be.
But there’s hope for the disciples yet.
And we see this glimpse of hope in Peter, the one who has very recently―just a few days before―denied his teacher and closest friend. For him, the chance for a new beginning sounds like amazing news. He rushes to the tomb to see if it could possibly be true, willing it to be true. He sees the empty tomb and the linen wrappings and returns home full of wonder, and perhaps full of curiosity about what comes next.
And that wonder, that curiosity is a starting point for every new beginning, the opening up of our imaginations, the unleashing of creativity, the willingness to take the risk.
In a time such as this, where so much feels uncertain, where there’s sorrow and loss, suffering and fear, the story of Easter offers us hope in its unfinished possibility. In its unanswered questions, in its reminder not to seek the living among the dead.
Jesus will appear to his disciples in the 40 days to come and teaches them about a life of resurrection, not as a one-time thing, but what some writers have called “practicing resurrection”, a phrase I love because it acknowledges the need to practice. There will always be things that feel like the end of the story, deaths both literal and figurative throughout our lives. But practicing resurrection reminds us to hold that space for wonder, for possibility, for the ways in which change might take place.
We gather here this morning, not because we are people who have all the answers, who have life all figured out, but because we are people who believe in resurrection, people who need to believe in resurrection, who come here to remember that no matter the pain or the darkness or the sorrows we have known in our lives, no matter what others have done to us, no matter how we have failed, it’s not the end of the story.
When we speak of proclaiming resurrection in this world, this is the good news that we bring, and I promise you this world right now desperately needs to hear it.
Beginning again does not mean that we go back to how it was before, that hurts are simply erased, that there are no consequences, that everything is fine, no, like the resurrected Christ we will always bear the wounds of what has been.
But we carry all that has been with us as we look with hope for what could be, and we dream, with each other and with God about how we make it real. We remember that the worst thing is not the last thing. We practice resurrection. We begin again.
From Frederick Buechner’s 1965 novel, The Final Beast. Sharing the whole passage here, because it’s just beautiful.
“The worst thing isn't the last thing about the world. It's the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It's the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well.”
From Shelly Rambo’s article in The Christian Century, “The Hell of Holy Saturday”. Read the whole thing here: https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/guest-post/hell-holy-saturday