Holding the rocks

Sunrise Service
Easter meditation by Carrie
23 March 2008

Rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, smooth rocks for skipping, sharp rocks for cutting, you can even have pet rocks. I think of the rocks I’ve experienced in my life.

In college I studied in India and after the semester of classes I went hiking in the foothills of the Himalayas. After a morning of slogging through forests and rivers in the rain, I had blistered feet and bloody legs from the leeches that attached themselves to me. That was the valley of the hike. Ahead of me stood a huge (at least it felt huge) five mile trek up a big rock of a mountain. That was one painful rock.

My favorite rock…rock that had transformed into concrete…the sidewalk at my home growing up. In the summer as a child after playing in the water of the hose I would lie in my bathing suit on the smooth warm pavement, letting the steamy warmth encircle me as I drifted off into a summertime dream.

I see rocks on the news, rocks thrown by young people, old people…rocks thrown when life becomes tragically occupied by fear, injustice…desperation.

Out of all my experiences with rocks, perhaps it is this type of rock that the women expected to encounter that morning, as they came with their spices, their broken hearts, their fear and desperation.

Perhaps we have similar stones standing between us and fullness of life. These stones are unique to each one of us, and unfortunately, most of them we can’t easily roll away with mere strength, or we can’t simply skip them across to the other side of the pond with a quick flick of the wrist. The stones of fear, pride, hate…you have your stone, I have mine.

Some stones MIGHT be opened by our own will. The women went intending to roll that stone away themselves to anoint Jesus’ lifeless body with the spices...yet they were together, not one person alone.

These stones will often need the help of others to be rolled away, like those two angels sitting at the entrance of the tomb.

And some stones…well some stones might simply wear down with time, being the welcome victim to the torrential downpours and blistering sun of time passing.

Before the women understood the full meaning that Jesus had been resurrected, they recognized that the stone had been rolled away. The stone that had stood between life and death, sorrow and joy. And surprisingly, it was in that empty space where the fullness of who Jesus had become was revealed. Jesus…the Christ.

Now, rolling away the stones isn’t easy and I don’t have any specific answers on how your stone can be moved. But we can learn from the women: we know there is a stone, we approach it together, and we bring with us what we believe we are to offer to the task.

And the women taught us something they weren’t aware of until they arrived at the terrifying, glorious sight.

When that stone is rolled away, prepare to be amazed, even perplexed, at how radically different what we find on the other side of that stone might be from the pain we had expected.