Day 4060 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Mark 16:6 NIV

Mercy accomplished

You know, I doubt there’s ever been a time in the entirety of human history in which a handful of folks were that excited to see a whole bunch of nothing. Rather most often in life we’ve learned to seek the filling of everything in what’s become a mindset sat upon this endless assumption of such lies as extravagance and luxury and comfort and complacency being the goal as we hold fast to this idea that contentment is only gained when we’ve nothing else to crave of all we’ve come to want.

Indeed, wanting more and more has long become our only estimation as to the very meaning of our being.

And so for those few followers of His to have raced to the place where He’d been laid probably somewhat halfway assuming that they knew what they were to be finding, feeling, and that this feeling of their faith fighting to find what logic said they had no business believing they might, it really must have been an impossible delight to see the light that poured from that place in which He WAS laid but even more that He wasn’t laying there anymore.

Because rarely in life does something work out so perfectly right that it accomplishes so much meaning and majesty that it leaves this majestic novelty that rings still just as loudly throughout the decades, centuries through which man has lived on this side of that sight of what remains still today a tomb so barren, so empty, probably still shocked that it was robbed by the One who was placed dead into it.

All because He had become the very fullness of what all He told us He was and planned to do.

But still, can you imagine running toward and peeking into what was a tomb meant to house the dead only to find a few pieces of cloth and some stranger waiting there to tell us that He who we’d been looking for truly wasn’t where we expected Him to be?

I mean, in antiquity the idea of burial brought with it a period of mourning for those departed. It was something decidedly different from our modern practices of basically chucking a body in the ground and going to the store to get our grocery shopping done because we’ve always so much to do. No, back then people mourned those that they’ve lived to lose. ‘Twas a solemn undertaking undertaken across the span of anywhere from a week to, for Jacob at least, 70 days!

That’s two months of remembering, reflecting, rejoicing, reminiscing this friend or family member recently removed from our ability to walk with them, talk with them, laugh with them, live with them.

It was a big deal!

Folks spent time with offerings and fragrances meant to celebrate the life that had been lost, as well as hopefully quench some of the stench involved in the natural processes of this experience so that others could come and too pay their respects without hopefully losing their lunch.

But it was an undertaking to be sure. And so just a couple of days in those who knew Him best were probably expecting to continue ahead in this time of mourning for however long the relationship warranted. They went to the tomb that morning, this Easter morning expecting to find the body of He who’d died so recently that expecting anything other than a motionless corpse to be there was probably considered almost shameful.

That’s the thing about His having said that He came to do a new thing!

It’s that all new things bring with them either the overriding, the overturning, the rewriting or simply the utter undoing of all the old things which were done in its place prior. Newness has always this sense of interest, of intrigue, of investigation needed unto this insinuation that something novel and untried, unknown, perhaps even (as this case shows) unexpected and in every way even utterly unnatural.

And so those who knew Christ best had probably at best but only half an ability to imagine their reaching the place where He’d been laid and finding anything other than the stone still in place and the body then right where it had been lain.

But isn’t that the joy of belief? That it sometimes, not often, but sometimes proves bigger than anything we ever expected to see, to hear, to learn, to know? Indeed, belief is this bridge that helps us go unto this hope that grows into this outcome that we know we have no business being able to understand, to comprehend, to ever thereafter feel free to expect having been validated now in our daring audacity to do as few care to and expect the impossible.

For mostly we live on this saddened side of the probable in which we expected to be ever limited to that which is possible as is proven day in and day out.

Indeed, life here has long since remained so routined that we never expect to see anything so novel or new as even a new color of car. Truly, driving down the road with my family yesterday and all we could see was just this sea of black, white and gray. We’ve in every possible way become a people willfully embracing the common stealing of life’s vibrancy and rarity and the God-given beauty beheld inside all the things beside our lives that we’re again too busy to even look for anymore.

Forget stopping to smell the roses, we’ve got planes to catch that take us to places we have to be in which we plan on sitting in meetings for hours on end.

The roses can smell themselves, we’re in a hurry!

So hurried in fact that we never seemed worried in life. Not that we don’t worry because we do, but it’s often only that we’ve something we stand to lose or miss or miss out on should we not keep in step with those running so fast always right back to the same old places and same old faces seen in the same fallen estimations of every such familiarity being the only things necessary in life.

Truly, we’re a people who will rinse and repeat our every yesterday all because we seem to assume still this sense of safety inside our doing of nothing but what’s been tried and proven true enough to amount in us an assurance that our continuing to do the same things over and over will achieve for us the same results that we’ve finally agreed to settle for.

Yes, we’ve become so broken in terms of belief and that in better that we don’t dare imagine it anymore.

In fact, if Jesus were to have died today, we’d have gathered together to place Him that grave, shed a tear or two, told a few stories, and then left right back into our old lives and probably never visited His resting place again.

Because we live as if what’s best is to walk away from death.

And sure, in many ways I do agree. After all, regardless of where someone may or may not have gone depending upon your own personal convictions and what all they’ve you convinced of, the fact is that once the soul has left the body, they’re not there anymore. So why keep going back to visit someone who has passed onto whatever comes after this all?

But I think the real issue is that death is still held as such a fear by so many down here that we just can’t wait to get away from it. We loathe such reminders of our own mortality and how we’re truly running out of time ourselves. We want nothing to do with it as rather we feel better when we’re still focused on our routines and their expectations of new things being always unneeded.

Is that really the case?

Truly, this is something that I’ve been wrestling with for days, months in some ways. Is everything new truly everything dangerous? Is the thought to break out of our patterns really so treacherous that we shouldn’t ever think of it? Might we be right to be this worried all the time about losing whatever it is that we think we’ve gained in what remains a life we’ve left to lose?

Will anyone even be there to send us off onto the rest of wherever this journey goes had our lives gone so dry as to live as if we’ve not the time to even talk to anybody?

Friends, I think we’ve so misunderstood life that it’s impossible for us to not misunderstand mercy and what it means and what more it took for us to have even the opportunity to imagine what all it might!

Why?

Because such is what we’ve lost in life. The ability to imagine. The audacity to dream. The bold concept of a belief that’s willing to wake up early on a Sunday and beat feet to a grave site expecting with every bone in our body to find nothing but an empty hole that was meant to hold they who we know we’d just seen laid inside. We’ve misplaced all these things and all their like because they just don’t fit our way of life spent so busy, so distracted, so afraid of everything taking from us anything that we can’t imagine living without.

But friends, is this really a life we’re living if within it there’s not the presence of hope? Is life truly life if it’s lived without the daring to imagine the impossible being probable? Are we really living at all whenever all we do is run from the wall that is the end of this part of the ride?

We think we have so much so understood that all we stand upon anymore is just this bland estimation that we stand to lose everything just as soon as we ourselves are lowered in a hole that we know nobody will visit all that much.

All because we either believe that the best of life is only found here where we’re all currently living one, that nothing happens to us when we die, or that, when we do, well, we’re all going to lose in one way or another and that because we’re again either leaving our best life behind or because we’d lived it only to find that we know so little of hope and nothing much anymore of mercy that we’re definitely not in any hurry to meet this God who did what we still allow ourselves to consider as being entirely impossible.

No, I think most of us still imagine Jesus best in the grave as that’s the place where all dead bodies go. And our having not seen anyone come back out of one has stolen away our hope of His having actually done so because, well, what we see defines what we know and all we haven’t seen is then the sea of all we don’t.

Trust me, I’m from Missouri, the “Show Me” state.

Been here all my life and I still don’t know what that means nor why we’re so proud of it that we’ve emblazoned it upon every state-based identifier we have.

Anyway, getting back.

The point is that we’ve learned to expect certain outcomes in life as they’re the ones which have proven themselves time and again. But friends, there’s this rapidly growing list of things that we don’t see all that much. Granted, empty tombs remains right at the top of that list of truly rare sights! But what else do we rarely see anymore in life? Kindness? Compassion? Humility? Honesty? Happiness? Hope?

Mercy?

Forgiveness?

Grace given in place of grace gave?

All these things are alien in this place. They almost don’t exist. They’re both Bigfoot and ET, neither of which speak English. They’re just foreign, and sadly fading at that.

But friends, the further we go into this way of life we know wherein all these things fade and feel often forgotten, I fear we’re losing more than we could ever imagine.

Why?

Because these are good things. Joy is a good thing. Hope is a good thing. Love is a good thing. Mercy is a good thing. And yet we live in a world in which all these things are themselves dying and yet nobody’s crying. Nobody’s mourning. It seems that most days none even realize they’re missing as instead we’re just too busy anymore to race back to the last place we saw them expecting to find them just waiting for us to choose to care enough to wonder what happened to them that caused us to lose them, misplace them, forget them.

For if there’s one thing we do well in this life, it’s moving on.

Not toward anything new nor then everything better.

No, we just rush back to our normal lives and pay absolutely no mind to what all we probably don’t notice is missing from them.

But friends, our having lived this long without such things as hope and joy and mercy and the increasingly rare ability to believe, to imagine, to dream for something bigger and better than we’ve any right or reason to fathom, it’s killing us quicker than we could ever understand.

Because in all honesty, what is there to live for if this world is truly all we seek for?

What’s the point in any of this if it’s all just going to go the way in which we’ve come to know?

What meaning might there be in our living to see everything we know and everyone we love just leave, and that either before we do or whenever we have?

Indeed, this world has convinced us that it’s best to live for what we’re promised to leave behind.

We all know we’re going to die and yet we live as if our best life is what we’re supposed to find on this side of that grave.

Friends, it shouldn’t be this way!

Our greatest expectations in life shouldn’t exist inside only our crumbled assumptions as to what little matters and how it’s always proven in something material. We’re truly trading our zeal for forever for a little more of whatever we can find on this side of eternity’s dividing line.

All because we’ve all seemingly lost our ability to believe that the grave can be so emptied as a few still contend it was back then.

No, most here are still stuck living as if all that life can be is all that they can see. And again, none of us saw Jesus walk out of that tomb.

This is why this whole idea that seeing is believing has become the widespread betrayal of belief that it’s always been. It’s because it keeps us from the childlike faith to which we’re called in which we again reach for the stars and actually live as if we really expect that we can touch them. That kind of life in which we trust that our bikes can truly fly just because we taped cardboard wings to the side of the seat. That mind that dares to imagine that Heaven isn’t just some fairy tale hope held by those so disillusioned with life that they spend their time thinking about a place that’s simply too good to exist.

Indeed, we’ve all agreed to exist inside a world that continues to suggest that there are things that are too good to be true, all because the world around us is worse than we can imagine and we’ve just grown too afraid, too ashamed, too arrogant to admit we’ve had a hand in it.

Truly, we don’t even believe in forgiveness anymore because it’s one more thing that lies cold and dying on the floor of a world flooded with all these reasons that it still uses to remain always convinced that Jesus doesn’t exist.

As if something better can come from that belief!

No, I’m personally sick of living for what I can see. I’m tired of trying for things only won in vanity. I hate this life of aesthetics and the investment of so much time and effort into achieving some ideal inspired in us by the world around us.

I want to believe again.

I want to dream again.

I just want to be a kid who laughs when the world suggests that Jesus didn’t live, didn’t die, didn’t rise on this third day to from inside that grave lead the way to what is the very sum of every bigger, better, brighter day that we all know we all hope for. I’m tired of willfully contradicting that hope.

Because it’s easy to see what this world holds, and well, it’s honestly nothing I care to have anymore.

I want what isn’t here. I want the love, the joy, the hope, the mercy, the audacity to imagine that Christ did die so that I could have them.

I want Heaven!

And thankfully we can believe that we do really have it because that grave is empty and the story of how it got that way has never changed.

And it will never change.

I just pray then that we can because going any further in life missing that fervor of hope so daring to hope that it runs to the tomb and expects it to be vacant is something that I just don’t think we can do without anymore.

No, we’re losing too much of everything still to come so long as we refuse to believe in something so better.

Friends, I don’t know what all you’ve heard nor thus been told. I don’t know the particular lies you’ve been sold nor the ones you’ve bought nor then which you’ve believed in bulk. But I do know that this world is not meant to hold our hope. It’s not meant to define our faith. It cannot contain our life.

Unless we let it.

The entire story of Easter is told in a Savior who came from Heaven to walk amongst we heathen in order to save us from our still clearly lost ways. On Friday He died as He was given over to be crucified, both unto the cheers of the crowd that didn’t like what He had to say nor for some reason what all He’d done but also to atone for the very sins that every such disbelief truly was/is. He was placed in a tomb that had a stone rolled in place to seal the same.

And, well, that’s where, if the world is right, the story should have ended.

But it didn’t.

Rather that stone was rolled away and on the third day He left that grave to go on ahead to make ready a place for all those few who do have the audacity to believe He did.

That place is called Heaven and it’s nothing that this world’s so sadly become.

A fact proven in that the only way for our to get there is to follow behind He who is the Christ that chose the tomb as what He turned into a turnstile meant to turn this life on its head and lead us through death into life.

As opposed to the other way around which most here still believe in.

Friends, we’re free to believe whatever we want. And yeah, I too have believed as the world does, that death is the nothing but the end of life.

It’s just that I eventually came to find that there’s no hope found in that idea.

And so when I heard this story of a God who came in glory to turn mine upside down, well, it did sound too good to be true.

But that only made me wonder why it is that we’ve become so unwilling, so unable to believe in something simply because it’s considered too good.

Isn’t that the kind of thing we should believe in?

Thankfully I do now. I choose to believe in only better, but the truth is that better is something we can’t believe in so long as this world remains the backdrop. Because, well, this world isn’t getting better and we can see that all the time.

That’s why I’ll spend the rest of my time trusting in the emptiness of a grave as opposed to the fullness of this place.

Because Jesus came to leave this place behind for the promise of our all moving on to something this world simply cannot compete with.

And that grave is empty my friends! Which means both that He’s not dead anymore and too that He then knows how to ensure that we won’t be one day either.

And that, to me, that just seems better than any other story I’ve ever heard.

Because it’s one filled with mercy thanks to a tomb left empty.

Happy Resurrection Sunday!

#LeaveNoSoulUntold