EMPTY TOMBS



I Corinthians 15:19-26
John 20:1-18

 A young woman looks at the box.  It was a strange gift for when she received it, she was told she could never, ever open it.  Yet she had to look, she had to see for herself.  In the old Greek myth, when Pandora opened the box, she loosed upon the world a pestilence of suffer, sorrow and evil.  She slammed the lid of the box back down as soon as she could.  Taking a quick peek, she found it was not empty.

Mary Magdalene, Peter and John had to look, to see for themselves, but what did they find on that first Easter morning?  Would they find what Pandora found?

I think that the last thing Mary Magdalene, Peter and John expected to find that morning was a risen Christ.

Mary had been among the women who watched from the foot of the cross.  The smell of death, blood and fear hung in the air as she, Jesus' mother and aunt, looked up into a face so bruised and beaten it was almost unrecognizable.  She saw his death, and with a broken heart, a heart now emptied of hope, she had accompanied his body to its final resting place.
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Now, on the third day, she came before dawn to complete the preparations of Jesus' body for burial.  and she had come to finish the ritual of preparing the his body for burial.

Finding the stone sealing the tomb had been rolled away, they could think of nothing else -- they, the Jewish religious leaders and the Roman soldiers, had taken Jesus' body away.  Peter and John, who later followed her back to the empty tomb, came to the same conclusion.  Their hope had died with Jesus.

It's hard to be hopeful when your common sense tells you that there is no hope.  It's difficult to see the future when the present as fallen apart, when sorrow and pain blind us to any other alternative than our worst case scenario, when our loss cannot see the possibility of gain.

No wonder they couldn't see beyond the evidence of their own eyes, couldn't full comprehend what Jesus  had been telling them that in order to deliver humanity from suffering and death, Christ would have to suffer and die for us.  By dying and being raised from the dead, Christ showed us that, through him, we could look forward to eternal life with the confident hope of the resurrection.

Hope.  Hope remained in Pandora's box.  And hope was released from a sealed tomb to transform people's lives.  It is a hope that cannot be extinguished by the darkness of this world or even by death itself.  It is hope that is as eternal and steadfast as God.

John 10:10 tells us that the purpose Christ's life, death and resurrection was that we may have life and have it abundantly.  To me that means that through Jesus Christ we have the promise of eternal life  and our lives are filled with empty tombs where God as brought hope, new life and transformation out of our pain, our loss and all circumstances of our lives, where God has made the impossible possible.

In the old Greek myth of Pandora's box, hope was remained in the box.  In the truth of the Easter story, God released hope into the world from an empty tomb.







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