You likely know the Easter story, even if you don’t claim it as your own:
An innocent man tortured, murdered, and buried in a tomb.
Three days of breathtaking grief.
Three days of hopeless silence.
Three days of painful waiting.
Then, in the pre-dawn hour, a group of mourning friends reach the tomb, and the stone covering it has been pushed to the side and the space emptied. They initially assume their friend’s body has been stolen by his executioners, but their despair soon becomes momentary disbelief, and then breathless exhilaration when they are given the news by two strangers—that their beloved friend is among the living. They rush to tell the world the unthinkable news: He is not dead, he has risen!
The resurrection story of Easter is one that some people of faith claim as literal and factual; the tangible proof of their tradition and the evidence that they are a people saved from the permanent constraints of death.
Others embrace it as a symbolic reminder of the things we overcome here: of life breaking through, of restoration happening, of figurative resurrection taking place, of glorious rebirth happening, of miracles in our midst.
Yet, here on the ground, whether we claim a religious worldview or not, we all face the stark reality that the people we lose don’t physically come back and greet us on the path of our grieving, that we aren’t given an Easter morning miracle of their rebirth, that people we love get sick and die and they stay dead.
Because of the coronavirus’ presence, this strange Easter Sunday is one marked by physical separation from people we love and from those we feel affinity with who are still alive. We are disconnected from family and friends and and faith communities.
Many of us will feel that geographic distance, and it will be a reminder of the ways in which we are also separated from those we grieve over. We will hold the bittersweetness of the victorious Jesus resurrection story, with our own grief stories perpetually stuck in Saturday night defeat and never to get the glorious surprise of Sunday morning.
For many, this Easter will be a magnifier of our losses, of our days of breathtaking grief, of hopeless silence, of painful waiting. It will underscore the loneliness we feel every day. Yes, we will eventually be released from this quarantine time of pause, to return to normalcy—but we’ll still be missing some in front of tombs with the stone firmly in place.
In days marked by so much death in the news, it can be an impossible task to find hope and to move forward. I’m not going to tell you to find it in some hope of heavenly reunion with your loved ones or the in the idea of eternity waiting for you—and I’m not going to give you empty platitudes about the metaphorical resurrections in your life, because that will not bring the people you love back to you. It won’t restitch those severed ties or revive their bodies.
I’ll only tell you that when you wake this Easter morning and you are feeling the emptiness of your loved one’s loss and the sting of the many current physical separations and you are grieving the resurrections that will not come, know that you share this place with a multitude of similarly stranded and waiting people who are mourning this Sunday morning.
