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Mary Magdalene stands weeping, yearning, longing for her Lord and friend
outside the tomb; Peter and John run in and rush away and yet wonder.
Do you know what it is to yearn? I don’t mean just to want things,
even a lot. Yearning isn’t what you do for a new computer game or
a good holiday or even a gin and tonic after a hard day – that’s
what you want. Yearning is to ache with longing: the feeling you can end
up with at the end of a good film, wishing that the world was different;
or the moments after you say goodbye to someone you love who you won’t
see for a long time; or the feeling of things undone or unfulfilled or
unrequited that haunts your days. To yearn is to hope that life will be
other than it is.
It is the Day of Resurrection – and what can we say? How can we
express the inexpressible? Not in words, but in music and silence; in
pictures and half-broken suggestions; not by explanation so that we
can understand, but in mystery that is beyond us. And here’s a suggestion
of a mystery. The Resurrection is not a fact or a system, a religious
box to be ticked. Resurrection is where human yearning and divine longing
meet in one person, in an explosion of wonder that makes the world new.
On the side of a hill grows a flower: beautiful, perfect, bending slightly
in the wind. No one sees it, nothing appreciates it except the odd passing
insect for whom it provides a quick bit of nectar. and in a few days
it will be gone. In a hotel a couple celebrate with their community 50
years of faithful love, of giving and begetting, nurture and sacrifice.
and in a few months one of them will be gone. In a house a baby cries:
beautiful, loved by her parents. She will love and touch many people
and their lives. and in a few years, she will be gone. On a hill men
labour and build for 1000 years: a cathedral comes into being, created
and tended with care, beautiful and rich and full of life. and
in a few millennia it will crumble into dust. The world on which we stand
was born from the ashes of stars over 4 billion years ago. Beautiful,
green and blue, full of life of incredible variety. and in a few billion
years, swallowed up by the sun on which it depends, it will be gone.
and so we could continue. Beauty which perishes, love which means so
much and yet is lost, things which we can never say, grief at the final
goodbyes and at the world’s changes. What and who make your heart
ache? even if that ache of longing, of yearning, is buried under the layers
of ordinary life with which we defend our vulnera¬bility so dearly?
What desires and yearnings lurk within that one day may erupt into a
mid- or late-life crisis? How can our longings can be satisfied: so that
we can love, build, grow? Will beauty and love endure?
Lots of people say they won’t. But we human beings are made to be
optimistic, even in Yorkshire. When we’re on holiday we go down to
the beach, and there on the beach we play. and one of the things we
do is to build with sand: boats and sandcastles, ramparts and dams,
civil engineering in miniature. At the end of the day we go home, and
the sea comes in and washes it all away and it looks as if we had
never been.
Why do we continue to build sandcastles? Why is it that we build grand
designs, and conservatories, and cathedrals? Because we long for permanence,
meaning, beauty that lasts. We build as best we can the illusion of a
stable and settled existence, maybe with sandcastles, maybe with solid
houses and insurance policies, investing we hope in good and loving
relationships with those around us Yet we know, if we can face it, that
it will all fall away, be we rich or poor or young or old. However well
we build, tower or temple falls to dust, and we have to say goodbye
to everything and everyone.
If we yearn for these things – doesn’t God? If we want the world’s
beauty and goodness, hope and love to be eternal: isn’t that
God’s desire too? The cross and resurrection isn’t a quick
or even a slow fix by God to sort out a particular problem. God doesn’t
build a permanent concrete dam around our beach to keep the sandcastles
up for ever. God has greater yearnings than that.
The Resurrection is a mystery. It is a cry of yearning from the heart
of God, a yearning for his Son and his world so strong that it makes
the world anew. It is the sign of the new reality, in which all that is
good and beautiful and true will not be lost: in which our yearnings
for those we love and for the world we’re part of, our griefs and
sorrows and loss, are caught up in the yearning of God for companionship
and richness and love which does indeed endure for ever.
Mary and Peter, James and John, didn’t expect or recognize or
understand what had happened that first Easter morning. What changed them
was the meeting of their yearning for Christ with the yearning of Christ
for them; it was joy and wonder, the promise of love and friendship
and beauty which would endure, that changed them and the world, and
is offered to us today so we too may be changed.
For the tomb of Christ is where our longing and the longing of God meet,
where God’s yearning is strong enough to break the power of death
and bring a new body into being. Not a fact, but a mystery; not a piece
in a theological jigsaw puzzle, but the source of life and hope, of
poetry and love, the guarantee of beauty in the world in the face of
evil and death. Music, silence, pictures, half-understood desires -
these are God’s gift to draw us to himself. The Resurrection is our
guarantee that death will have no dominion; that in God, nothing and
no one will be lost, forgot¬ten or unmourned; nothing and no one
is not longed-for by the power of the yearning love of God.
As an Italian Christian put it nearly 600 years ago: ‘And so the
yearning strong, with which the soul will long, shall far outpass the
power of human telling; for none can guess its grace, till Love create
a place wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.’
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