The Easter truth about ourselves is discovered at the tomb  by Joan Chittister

It’s at the tomb that we discover things about ourselves.

t’s at the tomb that we come to make sense of the questions that have dogged us down the weeks of Lent.  At the tomb they all come together in one great, blinding awareness.

The Easter truth is that however disturbing each of the questions may be in themselves, they are not actually separate questions at all with which we have been confronted these weeks.  They are all the same.  Each implies the other.  Each demands the other.

…  To love the unlovable recklessly, as does the Prodigal Parent in the face of two unlovable children, is to travel through life with new insight, with new people, in new ways.           

To beware the sins of religion while treasuring its holy-making ways is to cry out unceasingly, despite any so-called standards to the contrary, for those whose cries are yet unheard, as do the disciples on the road to Jerusalem.

Indeed, the answers to each separate question of Lent are all part of the answer to the basic issue of whether or not we intend to live life newly now or just go on doing more of the same-old same-old and call it “following Jesus.”  The answers are all part of rising from the tombs of impoverished devotions and dualisms that make ritual the measure of religion, human suffering acceptable and contemplation more a refuge than a response to the Christ whose crosses are everywhere still and whose tombs cry for emptying.

The resurrection to which Easter calls us — our own — requires that we prepare to find God where God is by opening ourselves to the world around us with a listening ear.  That means that we must be prepared to be surprised by God in strange places, in ways we never thought we’d see and through the words of those we never thought we’d hear.  We must allow others — even those whom we have till now refused to consider — to open our hearts to things we do not want to hear.  We must release the voice of God in everyone, everywhere.  It means putting down the social phobias that protect us from one another. 

It requires that we clean out of our vocabulary our contempt for “liberals,” our frustration for “radicals” and our disdain for “conservatives.”  It presumes that we will reach out to the other — to the gays and the immigrants and the blacks, to the strangers, the prisoners and the poor — in order to divine what visions to see with them, what cries to cry for them, what stones to move from the front of their graves.

That will, of course, involve listening to women for a change, seeing angels where strangers are, emptying tombs, contending with Pharisees and walking to Emmaus with strangers crying “Hosanna” all the way.

                        Rev Vladimir Korotkov