HOLY WEEK 2000 - HIS JOURNEY AND OURS
Preacher: Father Bill Edebohls SSC
EASTER DAY EVENSONG
I want to talk to you of grave clothes. Grave clothes separated by 2000 years of history and of mystery.
Some of you may recall Dorothy Sayers series of twelve plays entitled "The Man Born To Be King".
I want to take you to her description of the first Easter dawn from the perspective of the Temple guards who were stationed at the tomb of Jesus, charged with preventing his followers from stealing his body, and thus making out that he had risen from the dead.
The scene is the hastily assembled meeting of the Sanhedrin, the highest court of justice in Israel comprising 71 members presided over at the time by Caiaphas the high priest. He summoned the council to hear the report of those who were supposed to be guarding the tomb of Jesus.
The captain of the guard begins:
"We kept watch two by two. And towards first cockcrow, Joel and Saul were lying some thirty feet from the sepulchre, with a brazier of coals between them, because the night was chilly. Abner and I stood leaning on our spears on either side of the door.....
"The setting moon was over against us and we had also a flaming torch placed in a cresset on the ground about three paces distant.....
"I had just said to Abner that it was time to change the guard when we felt the earth move under us, and one of the sleeping men woke up and cried out. There came another tremor, and another, still more violent. I put my hand to the door to steady myself, and my arm tingled to the shoulder as happens sometimes when you touch iron in a thunderstorm. Then suddenly....
"We were flung apart with a great shock, so that we fell to the ground. And the flame of the torch streamed out flat, as though a wind had gone over it from the sepulchre. Joel can tell you the thing that happened next....
"I heard a pebble spin from the path, as if a foot had struck it; and something passed between me and the brazier, blotting out the light of the fire....
"It went very swiftly. But the shadow that followed it was the shadow of a man...
"I was startled sir, but not afraid...Then I heard a shout and saw Abner and the Captain lying on the ground, with Saul running towards them. So I ran too, and we lifted them up. They were not hurt, but their bodies were numb where the shock had struck them....
"We took up the torch, and examined the stone and the seals, but found everything secure. And while we looked and wondered - somebody laughed behind us!
"We turned about quickly, and saw a young man.... He was tall and fair, dressed in a short tunic belted about the waist....his skin and his garments were whiter than the moonlight, and his face beardless, very fresh and smiling. In all my life I never saw anything so terrible as that smiling face.
Q: "Why was it terrible?"
"I cannot tell, but we were as dead men for fear of it. It was not like that other.....The thing that passed us in the garden was human, but this was not.
Q: "Did the apparition speak?"
"No sir. It went forward and stood before the sepulchre. The moon was behind it, yet it cast no shadow on the face of the rock. Then, as though the great stone had weighed no more than a bubble, it rolled it back with one hand and sat upon it, smiling still. And the moonlight and the torchlight shone through the open door. And the tomb was empty..."
So there is an unguarded and open tomb when the women came to complete their task of attending to the Lord's body for proper burial. What's more, the tomb is open to draw attention to the fact that the body is no longer there. As the play sequence shows, it is a matter of advertising, not of escape.
For a body that would soon reveal itself by materialising and disappearing in a moment, and being visible in a locked room, and suddenly vanishing from another in the middle of a meal - for this kind of body a stone of several hundredweight does not have to be shifted to facilitate escape from a rock tomb.
We know that the position of the burial shroud and other cloths made it clear that the body had not been unwrapped. It was nothing like the case of Lazarus, who, having been commanded by Jesus to come out of his tomb restored to this life, had then to be released from his grave clothes to enable him to go freely. The body of Jesus was not restored or resuscitated like Lazarus. The linen shroud was only the first of many material things that would prove no obstacle to the body still recognisable as Jesus, yet somehow different. Yet the Lord invited his stunned followers to touch him and see that he had flesh and bones and was not a ghost.
When Peter and John ran to the tomb after hearing the story from Mary Magdalene, it was the sight of the grave clothes that helped the penny drop for John. If the body had been stolen, who in their right mind would stop to unwrap it? Not only were the grave clothes still there, they were not unravelled.
So, this mystery of the grave clothes. The body of Jesus was not restored or resuscitated like that of Lazarus whom our Lord called back to this life. The linen grave clothes were only the first of many material things that would prove no obstacle to the body still recognisable as Jesus, yet somehow radically different.
Let us also remember that it was the sight of the undisturbed grave clothes, rather than the recollection of Jesus' predictions that he would rise again, which first prompted John to bring himself to believe that the Lord had risen. The gospel account simply says that until this moment they had failed to understand the meaning of scripture, that he must rise from the dead."(S. John 20:9)
Obviously the scripture referred to is what we call the Old Testament, and out of scores of verses we could light upon, I want to take one from S. Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost, and look at it in terms of the mystery which confronted Peter and John as they gazed in wonder at the grave linen, which had not been unravelled.
Peter quoted Psalm 16, describing our Lord's experience:
"I have set God always before my face: for he is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall.
"Wherefore my heart was glad and my glory rejoiced: my flesh also shall rest in hope.
"For why? Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell: neither shalt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption."
Decomposition or corruption of a corpse sets in not later than forty-eight hours after death. If we allow that Jesus had to be buried between 3pm, the time of death, and 6pm, the start of the Sabbath, and that he was gone from the tomb and from the grave clothes before dawn on the third day, there is a time lapse of between 33 to 38 hours. The body would have begun to relax from the state of rigor mortis, but it had not yet begun to decompose.
"...neither shalt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption."
I dare say many of you will be familiar with the relic known as the Shroud of Turin. You will be aware that it bears the imprint of a man said to have been wrapped in it at death after having endured precisely the injuries suffered by our Lord as described in the gospel narratives.
Science claims to have had its say on the matter asserting that carbon dating discounts the possibility that it could be the burial shroud of Jesus. But there are more questions raised than answered by that position, and in any case, many scientists now disagree on the validity and methodology of the tests carried out.
I believe we have not heard the last about the Shroud of Turin, and in the meantime, we may well ask that if this be not the burial shroud of Jesus, the grave clothes, who else in all history had these particular injuries inflicted and remains unknown?
Yet as a burial shroud, it bears no signs that the body it covered had begun to decay. Post-mortem and forensic indications are quite definite; the man in the shroud was dead, but he was not in it long enough to show signs of decomposing.
And if he was removed from the shroud, why are there no indications of smudging or other disturbance of the well defined image which remains on the linen? Rather than any distortion of the image, it appears to have been seared on to the shroud with photographic precision - seared on to the shroud with atomic force as the body passed through the shroud - yes, passed through the shroud not removed or unwrapped from the shroud..
Photography may be nearer to the mark than we realise, for the word itself literally means 'light writing', and light itself is both waves and particles of energy. And from what we know of laser beam technology, the speed of a pulsed laser beam's reaction is so great that the fibres on a piece of cloth would not be burnt or singed by such a fleeting blast of heat and light.
Such laser use can produce 100 million degrees Celsius in laboratory conditions. That is the sort of energy we are talking about in considering the dematerialising of the body in the shroud. The body thus transformed, changed, is no longer subject to material restrictions. It is mystery whichever way you look at it.
Studies to do with the Shroud of Turin have opened the door to understanding what could have happened physically in achieving what S. Peter said of the Lord in the Pentecost sermon: "...God raised him to life, freeing him from the pangs of Hades, for it was impossible for him to be held in its power..." (Acts 2:24)
It takes S. Paul's great treatise on resurrection even further:
"Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed (transformed) in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, (the fastest thing he could think of, but dawdling in laser terms) at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." (transformed again) (I Corinthians 15:51-52.)
This is the significance of "Christ being the first fruits of them that sleep." What God has done in Jesus he will do for all his people. Christ is the pioneer, the pathfinder, the perfecter of our faith. He trusted in God and he did deliver him, through death, and beyond the reach of death, forever. This is the promise held out to all.
It is mind boggling; it is mystery; it is cause for wonder, contemplation, and thanksgiving. It has been well said that for those who believe in the resurrection, no proof is necessary, and for those who do not, no proof is enough.
But while the world puts faith and scientific method in opposite corners, the God who is responsible for both laughs softly in the wings.
Only a couple of months ago I was in Turin, kneeling before the shroud. It was like being present at Benediction kneeling before the blessed sacrament. Kneeling before a sacred presence. Here was mystery - mystery revealing and making present certain realities. The realities of God, the realities of the incarnate Christ. The realities of Christ's power over death.
As for the guards and the disciples staring at grave clothes on the first Easter Morn and for me, 2000 years later, on my knees before the shroud the truth was dawning and the mystery deepening. It is still mystery. The God who is explainable is not God. But the soul who ponders in the heart the mysteries of God, as Blessed Mary did, never goes unrewarded.
Live out the power and the joy of our Lord's resurrection because on it depends the very Faith we profess, and let us also be prepared to go back and examine the elementals of that Faith as recorded in the simple Gospel narratives. So we may wonder with even greater insight than the first disciples, the power and the mystery of the resurrection.
A resurrection that is both His and ours.
