Shape and Substance No. 21
Easter morning, before dawn
John 20:1-18
When Night Is Over
An Easter Meditation
How do you know when the night is over and dawn is coming?
John begins his story of the resurrection with these words: “On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came, early, while it was still dark….”
The Magdalene comes in darkness, in the liminal moments between night and morning, between the old and the new, between Sabbath and the first day of the week. She approaches the tomb. She must choose her moment wisely, lest she violate Sabbath law by embalming the body too early, before the Sabbath is over. I wonder: does she breathe a small, silent prayer for sunrise, for the clarity of legal daylight?
How do you know when the night is over and the new day is dawning?
There is an old Jewish legend about a rabbi who asked his students this question: How do you know when the night of the Sabbath is over and the first day of the week has begun?
It is when you can distinguish between your house and the house of your neighbor, said one student.
No, said another, It is when you can distinguish in the field between a cow and a horse.
Not so, said a third. It is when you can distinguish between the colors of the flowers in the garden.
No, said the rabbi, you are all wrong. All your answers divide the one into the many. But the Holy One, blessed be he, is one, and out of the many makes one. When you can look into the face of the stranger and know that one to be your brother or your sister, when you look into the face of the enemy and see the face of the Holy One, then you will know that the night is over and the new day has begun.
John says that the day of resurrection begins in darkness. Night has fallen on the cross, now relieved of its mournful burden, and gloom has shrouded the whole of the day after—the second day, the day of death and darkness. And now, the Magdalene comes to the tomb to clean and spice the body, preparing the dead for death’s long dark journey. The sun has not risen, the day has not begun. There is no dawn in the east, no ray of light coursing like a mythic chariot across the sky. No trumpets sound, no timpani crash, no choirs sing hallelujahs. There is only darkness… and emptiness.
When she comes to the tomb, the Magdalene sees the stone rolled away, the tomb empty. John says, “She ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.’” Darkness, and emptiness.
Isaac Luria, the great 16th c. Jewish mystic, taught that creation begins in darkness and emptiness, with an act of divine self-evacuation. Before the beginning, there is only God, and God is Light Without End. But for anything that is not God to be, the Light must make a darkness. God must first make a space into which the not-God can come into being, a place for all that is created and material and enfleshed. And so, Luria taught, the first act of creation is not the divine breath exhaling the first command, Let there be light. It is rather God inhaling, gathering the divine light into God’s self, contracting, as it were, to make an empty place—a place of darkness—where God is not and all else can be. Tzimtzum, Luria called it, a Hebrew word that means “contraction,” a word that evokes a woman in labor, clenched muscles and sweat on the brow and wrenching pain in the belly—the prelude to birth. Tzimtzum isthe mother’s indrawn breath, held tight behind gritted teeth, as she pushes new life into the world. The first act of creation, said Luria, is not when God exhales the first command for light and land and love, but when God inhales into darkness and makes an empty place, where God gives birth to all that life comes to be. Tzimtzum is the womb of creation.
The Magdalene comes to the tomb, thinking it is the place of death and dying, the ending place, from which there is no new beginning. She comes to pay homage to the victory of death, the dark victory death always wins. She expects to find a place full of death.
But she finds instead the empty place, the place of nothing, the place where there is no longer death but where there is not yet life. It is the liminal space that is no longer darkness and not yet dawn, no longer despair and not yet hope. The empty tomb is where all that was has died and all that will be is has yet to come to birth. It is the habitation of the Possible. The empty tomb is the empty womb, where God contracts, and a new creation holds its breath, waiting for a world to be born.
She sees, but the Magdalene does not understand. Neither does Simon Peter understand, nor the unnamed beloved. They see the grave clothes, the head wrappings—they even “believe,” as John says—but they do not understand the meaning of this moment. I suppose the same is true for us, standing here in this liminal darkness, having wept the bitter tears of death only to see the place of death emptied of its power. We see. We believe, in whatever ways we can. But believing does not always make room for understanding.
The Magdalene does not understand, maybe does not even believe, but she stays, standing there in the doorway of emptiness, weeping, peering into the darkness of a now-dead past, unable to conceive of the future about to be born. And then, says John, she sees…
…The gardener, or the one who, in the dim light of the not-yet-dawn seems to be the gardener. He is a stranger. She sees him and begs his help, one stranger reaching out to another in the dark night of the soul, yearning for connection, for relationship, for hope. And out of the darkness he speaks to her, exhaling her name: Mary. Hearing the sound of her name, breathed in love, the sound that has made her hold her breath from dusty days on Galilean roads to the death-scarred agony of the place of the skull… hearing that sound she understands: God has exhaled. God has given birth to a new creation. “Rabbouni!” she cries, and the stranger is stranger no more. She looks into his face and sees there the very face of God. Night is over, and dawn has come.
Here is a poem by Mary Karr, entitled “Descending Theology: The Resurrection”:
From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.
—Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome, Harper Collins, 2006.
It’s your limbs he comes to fill. It’s your birth swept out of the dark womb of death and awash in the shattering amniotic fluid of new life. It’s your life he comes to fill, delivered new-born and squalling into a brand-new world. It’s your baptism, remembered, well-watered, renewed, “rivering every way.” This is the birthday of the new creation. Christ is risen, and we will see his face in the gardeners of the morning. God has exhaled. The night is over. Look, the dawn is coming.
Shape and Substance 