Mark 15:43-16:8 2024/05/19
Christ is risen!
What the Lord’s female disciples, who hurried to the tomb of Lord Jesus with funeral spices, found was a empty tomb. There, in place of Jesus, was an angel clothed in pure white. The angel said. “Jesus is risen, and he is not here.”
For us, just like the female disciples, the place that used to be a tomb becomes the place where we hear the proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection. The place that was a tomb, where we were imprisoned by the fear of death, losing light, deprived of hope, considering our life a meaningless, heavy labor until death, living a life akin to death—this “graveyard” of our daily life, “this world,” has been transformed into a place where we hear the proclamation of the Lord’s resurrection and live that resurrection.
The same monotonous life as before, the ordinary daily life with family and friends, the same workplace and school, the familiar scenery, the familiar landscape… nothing has changed, neither the boredom nor the hardships one has to endure there. True.
Yet everything has changed.
Everything that seemed to remain unchanged has been transformed into a place where we can know, appreciate, and praise the resurrected life of Christ as our own resurrection, and a place where we can live that resurrected life and pass it on to others. All the realities of life that each of us inevitably interact with have been transformed into a place of communion with God, who is welcoming us back to that life through Christ, or in other words, a place of worship.
Jesus said this to the Samaritan woman who asked for “water that we can drink and never thirst.” “Woman, believe me, for the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem” (John 4:21).
These words mean that every place of life where people only live as if they had died, will changed to a place where the Lord’s resurrection and the abundant grace become visible, if we really want.
Worship, which had been confined to a specific sacred place and a specific sacred time, was liberated and spread to the entire world, and the old “religion” was finally overcome, and “life” appeared in its place. The old “religion” that stands between man and God, crushing and corrupting man with its commandments, was overcome, and every place of life, everything in life, has become a place of communion with God, and the reality of that communion. A life that can change has appeared.
Let us recall what the angel added to the female disciples:
“(The risen) Jesus will go before you to Galilee. …You will be able to meet (the Lord) there.”
Galilee was the place where the disciples lived their daily lives before they began to follow the Lord from city to city. The disciples returned there and began fishing again. There, they met the resurrected Lord. We too will return to our busy offices, factories with whirring machines, rushing school bags to our children and sending them off in a hurry, washing and cleaning, shopping and cooking… And in this “our Galilee,” the risen Lord awaits us.