A Room With a View

Today we remember the waiting of the truly dead Jesus. The waiting for the spark of new life to be delivered at some point before the tomorrow’s dawn.  I am imagining the moment right after Jesus arose, still in the tomb, and the first ray of light breaks through the just-beginning-to-roll-away stone. Perhaps this is what the view from this borrowed room gave Jesus upon waking from the one night he was dead and waiting for the light. Perhaps this was his thought about the blessed duty which awaited him:

“The birds are singing their feathers off,

the grass is on its way to being

greener, so green it’s almost blinding,

and the sun has lit the top of the hill

in front of the hill where the sun is rising.

You see, I live in an underworld,

It’s beautiful and strange…

One of my duties is to speak

of joy-in the face of everything

against it. I’m speaking of it now.” (Excerpt from Sunrise in the Underworld by Maurice Manning, Christian Century, January 6, 2016)

God, bless the rest of the saints whose graves Jesus sanctified with his death; give certain hope to the living that all of your saints, even I, will one day receive that spark of new life right before the dawn, when, as we awaken to the sound of the trumpet, we shall hear such birds and see such grass and hear such joy from His still speaking voice. Amen.