Dan and the boys have been in Michigan all week for Spring break. That means I have had the whole house to myself. I can have cinnamon rolls for dinner if I want. I can sleep in for as long as the dog will let me. I can play The Decemberists as loudly as I want at any time of day. I can listen to, and concentrate on, NPR’s All Things Considered, and my toilet’s splash zone has never been cleaner. There’s no arguing, there’s no bickering, no laundry, no legos strewn all over the living room floor. It has been amazing…ly lonely. I’m so glad that they’re coming home tomorrow, because I’m not so sure what I’d do with one more day all by myself in my big quiet house. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder. At least, when the things absent happen to be the most important things in your life.
When Dan’s grandfather Stew passed away after an amazingly full life and then a slow battle with Alzheimer’s, Dan’s grandma, Punky, who was Stew’s wife for almost seventy years, said, “It’s like I’ve gotten him back somehow. I feel closer to him now than right before he died.” Somehow, in Grandpa Stew’s death, she was able to find him again, and that’s pretty much the clearest definition or understanding we can get for resurrection, at least, on this side of our lifetimes.
So what a weird thing to experience - Stew is gone and yet he’s more here than ever.
My kids have been absent from my presence this whole week, and yet I’m probably thinking about them more with more presence and more patience and more affection than I did right before they left. Now that the house is quiet, I miss their squealing and pestering and arguing and laughing more than ever, and somehow, that makes them all so much more real for me.
Sometimes, the absence of a thing makes that thing present in a new or different or maybe even more obvious way. For instance, If we really want to see the stars, we have to go somewhere where there is absolutely no light at all. It’s in the darkness, in the absence of light, that we can see the heavens. That darkness is a little bit terrifying, but it’s necessary. We need the darkness, otherwise we can’t see.
What a weird, but extremely human, thing to experience - to encounter the risen Christ by looking at where he’s not, to gain a fuller understanding of who Jesus is by being told that he is not here.
This passage in Mark completely undoes everything I’ve been working towards with all of you through the last forty days of Lent. Every night I’ve been trying to show you how God is present in the pennies and the rocks and the pencils and the honey and the soap and the sand and salt of our everyday lives. “See!” I’ve been saying, “Jesus is here! Jesus has been here all along!”
And today we hear, “Jesus is not here. Look, this is where they laid him, and it’s empty now.”
Today we celebrate absence: Jesus is gone. And that’s a good thing.
Are you familiar with this concept in art called “negative space”? It’s this idea of the space between things. It’s in the empty or blank or “white” areas in a space that we can contrast with the main design or colors or shapes in a work of art. Sometimes we don’t even know what we’re looking at until we take this negative space into consideration. A classic example of this is Rubin’s vase. It is a picture of two silhouettes facing each other, but they’re painted entirely black. (Or white, or some other saturated single tone color). You can see the two faces quite clearly though. But if you look at the space between them, the white space that defines these two faces, you can also see something else appear, in this case, it’s a vase or a chalice. Ask two people what they see first and you might get two different answers. One person will insist that the picture shows two faces, while another person will claim that it’s a picture of a vase or a cup. So who is right and who is wrong? Well. The truth is that they’re both a little bit right and a little bit wrong. You need both the positive space and the negative space to make the picture depict anything at all. Without the white chalice, or, rather, without the absence of the chalice, you’d not be able to see the faces. Without the black faces, or rather, without the absence of the faces, we wouldn’t be able to see the presence of the chalice. The object being defined is only being defined or discerned or experienced because of what is not there. This is the beauty of black and white photography, right? You make a negative of the picture first so that the image can then be revealed. Or think about sculptures. We have to remove the stone in order to reveal the figure hidden beneath. We have to take something away in order for it to become something more. This is a vital concept in all of art. What is being revealed or experienced or shown to us because of the absence of something, or rather, because of the presence of what is not there?
This is the reality of our entire universe. By some oversimplified but believable calculations, it’s been determined that if we took all the matter in all of the universe and shoved it into a corner, it would take up 0.0000000000000000000042% of the “space” that is the universe. I don’t even know how to say that number. The universe is made up of mostly emptiness, nothingness, absence. The vast, miraculous, awe-inspiring presence of the universe is made out of nothing. Out of absence.
The white-robed young man says, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” Look at what’s not here. This tomb holds emptiness.
Or another example is with music, right, I think? Would we have music if there were no space between the sounds? We need the space between, places between the notes, the parts where the sound is not so that we can hear the music at all. There is no melody without the silence in between. There is no music without the absence of sound at varying lengths and repetitions throughout the composition. We need the emptiness in order to fully experience the presence.
“Don’t worry. You’re looking for Jesus. He’s not here. See, look where he’s not.”
Theologians have a name for this concept, too. They call it “apophatic theology.” This is also known as the “via negativa” in more philosophical circles. The only way we can know anything, according to these thinkers, is by experiencing some absence of it. It’s this idea that once you think you’ve got a hold of some idea, it slips out from between your fingers. As soon as you’ve got something that cannot be pinned down pinned down, then you’re no longer talking about that something anymore. Apophatic theology, therefore, attests that God is so great, so “other” than us, that the only way we can know anything about who God is is by making claims about who God is not. God is the absence of hate, for instance. Or God is not bound by time or space. Or, God is not “here.” Or God is not this or that. God is not…whatever. I mean, they have a point -- what can you say about which nothing can be said?
No wonder the Marys and Salome were so freaked out. God has suddenly changed the rules. They’ve got whiplash. For the last three years they’ve been following Jesus around and he has been telling them that God is in the here and the now, in their very presence, in the sheep and the seed and the salt and the flowers and the yeast and the broken people of this world. And now, they’re supposed to see him where he’s not. They’re supposed to find him in his absence.
But if we took all of those “God is not”s and painted a picture with them, we’d have some negative space, wouldn’t we? We’d have some places where the paint was not. And in that negative space, in that space between all those places that we’re sure God isn’t, we might find a little bit of God. We’d get some kind of image out of all that negative space. It’s a little bit mind bendy, I know, but just stick with me if you can. The angel, or the random guy in the white robe, whoever he is, tells these women that Jesus is not here. The angel tells them to look in the space where he was but isn’t any longer. He tells them to find hope in Christ’s absence. See the miracle in the nothingness. Because the absence means that he’s not in the tomb. He’s not here. He has been raised. He’s not where you expect him to be because he’s actually where you’d never believe in your wildest dreams he’d actually be - he’s out there. Something is emptied and filled inside of these women all at the same time, and it totally freaks them out. They, too, become dislocated - they have no grounding any longer because the ground beneath them can no longer be counted on. The sun no longer simply sets in the evening and rises in the morning. The rock they cannot move has already been moved. There’s an angel just hanging out in an empty tomb. The dead no longer stay dead. The absence of Jesus actually means the presence of Christ.
What if God is in those spaces? What if we encounter God in a new way in all those places we are sure God cannot be? God in the empty tomb? God in the sorrow? God in the pandemic? God, not in the “here” but in the “there”? God being present even in the spaces where God is absent? God returns to us when we open the tomb and expect to find Jesus but instead find…nothing. And that “nothing" is the good news.
There is no “proof.” There is no evidence. There’s only absence. All they get to confirm that Christ has risen is an empty tomb. And an announcement from an ethereal being. And more work to do. They’re told “do not be afraid,” they’re told to “look,” and then they’re told to “go.”
And this is the original ending of the Gospel. This is what the earliest Christians got: a whole lot of mystery and fear and nothing. Later, as they scrambled to make meaning, they added the rest of the verses, but first, there’s just chaos and confusion and nothing. I love this ending of Mark’s Gospel because it’s not about right belief or right action or concrete evidence of anything. All they have is the absence, the place where Jesus used to be but is no longer.
God is not here. God is on God’s way. God will meet you there.
God is not here. God is there. God has been in the empty spaces all along.
And.
God is still here. God is still present. The incarnation - the seeds and the pearls and the yeast and the humanity of Jesus - is still a place where we can experience God. Jesus is still Jesus. And God is still God. We can see both the faces and the vase. We can hear God in the silence and in the sound.
The resurrection is that “moment” or that “space” where God is both here and there, God is both in and out, God is present wherever God is absent, which means that God is present, present, present, in everything and in every-not-thing. God is here in the now, and in the not yet. Like the psalmist says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I hide from your presence? If I go to heaven, you’re there. If I make my bed in hell, you’re there, too. If I say ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
God is in the inhale and the exhale. And God is in the space between the inhale and the exhale.
God is in the belief and the disbelief.
God is in the grief and worry and alarm and terror and amazement and fear and even disobedience of these women who run off without doing any of the things the angel instructs them to do. They run off and say nothing to anyone. Perhaps, rather than a deficit or a fault of these women, maybe it’s exactly the right response. They are filled with fear. Awe. Wonder. That Old Testament-y “fear of the Lord.” Amazement. The only response to that can be silence. The only response to that can be…nothing.
There’s art between the art.
There’s music in the pause.
There’s a whole universe in the emptiness of the universe.
Missing my family makes them present to me in a new way.
Grandpa Stew comes back to us, even after he has left.
God is present, even in the absence.
Do not be alarmed (even though of course you will be); you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. This tomb holds emptiness now.
Go. He is not here. He is there. You’ll see him when you get there.
Thanks be to God.
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