O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This day 1980 years ago (i.e. 2013 - 33) was a quiet day in Jerusalem. After three years of challenge, change and upset most all believed the matter settled. Jesus had been put to death.
It had been an exciting week. The preceding Sunday, crowds in town for the Passover celebration had been treated to huge demonstrations of support and love for the teacher called Jesus. The intervening week had been punctuated with a near riot at the temple, plotting in the councils of the leaders, the usual controversial teaching, manifestations of the supernatural reported both by Jesus' followers as well as more that were reported in at least one contemporary history of the day. You didn't need network news to get you worked up about all that was going on.
All that had ended suddenly yesterday with the whisper, "It is finished." In that moment, things had for a bit, taken a bad turn. The sky turned black and there was extreme thunder and lightning. Some people (possibly shaken by the severe weather) reported people long dead showing up and talking about the death that had just happened on Golgotha. Even in the context of all that had happened the previous week, that had to be weird. Someone had even vandalized the temple, tearing a particularly heavy temple curtain multiple stories high in half.
Today was a pretty quiet day. There were a few followers of Jesus here and there, obviously shaken, running from their own shadows and rethinking their career choices. Most people concerned themselves with their usual Passover Sabbath observations. Jesus' followers would not even go to his tomb out of respect for the Sabbath. In any case, the body would keep until Sunday.
In what would later come to be seen as perhaps the single greatest miscalculation in the history of mankind, the current Roman Governor Pilate, ordered the tomb sealed with an official seal and a platoon of troops guard the body. This was a response to rumors that Jesus' followers would try to steal his body and make people think he'd risen from the dead. Of course later the guards went running around telling everyone that they fell asleep and when they work up the body was gone. Odd that was the best they could come up with since that particular story carried the death penalty.
I think there were other guards there too by the way. They however were actually in the tomb, with the body. There's a kind of picture of the guards I'm talking about. It looks like this:
In this picture, the guards are waiting to do the job of guarding Jesus' body. This is an approximation of the Ark of the Covenant. Inside is a sort of scrap book of the intersection between God and his nation Israel. For one thousand years, most people who knew about this box thought the angels were representations of guards guarding the stuff in the box. Actually, they were a picture of waiting. They were waiting for the completion, the filling of the space between. Notice, they wait on the outside where we all live...but their mission is somehow accomplished on the inside of the tomb, away from all eyes. Inside...outside...interesting.
Technically, these aren't angels at all. Whatever the resemblance, these aren't anything like TV angels. These are terrible and terrifying creatures, here rendered beautifully and simply. Suffice to say, you don't want to be on the wrong side of whatever they've been sent to do.
At some point in time before time, I think there was a combination of great sadness, wild anger and infinite determination on the face of God when he commanded these beings, explaining their mission. In that thoroughly intimidating conversation there was something like this: "And no one...no one...no one touches or even approaches my son's body. No one but me."
On the next day of course, everything would change. The resurrected Jesus would start appearing to a few people, then a few more and eventually to thousands. His followers who had scattered like a flock of birds from a pack of running dogs stopped running away. Instead, they followed him to messy deaths, forever putting to death the lie that they carried on as they did for wealth and power. As a result they spread the life of his truth in a way that changed eternity. (They were always part of the design exactly like the cherubim...but that's another story.)
Tomorrow's coming but on this day we remember the moment between then and now. On this day we remember the day the cherubim had been waiting for; the moment the space between was finally, forever and completely closed. This day is the day of the Father with his Son.
Each of us will watch and live out our own space between. This is completely true whether we follow Christ diligently, hold him at arm's length or are utterly oblivious to him. For those that follow Christ, we will slowly and surely come to see the space between filled with something quite complete, beautiful and resurrected that is completely us, completely other and completely new. Hallelujah. Tomorrow is almost here.
