Here Is What I Know: Easter Sunday

I volunteered for the tomb watch. Barros thought I was mad. Maybe I was. I couldn’t have told him why – I just needed to be somewhere quiet, somewhere away from the noise of the city processing itself back to normal. The others were already making jokes again. I couldn’t. Not yet.

So it was just me and the dark and the sealed stone and somewhere behind it, him.

I went through it all again. His face. Not the face of a man without fear – I’ve seen that, and it’s a cold thing, an empty thing. This was different. This was a man who had met his fear somewhere private and come through it to the other side. The way he fell and the way he was lifted. The sky. The ground moving. I’m a practical man. I’ve always been a practical man. I know what I saw and I know how to file a report. But the report I would have to file about yesterday I couldn’t write without sounding like a man who’d lost his mind.

And then.

I don’t know how to describe this even now. There was light – not like torchlight, not like dawn, something that came from inside the stone itself. And a sound that wasn’t sound. And then the stone moved and the tomb was empty and I was on the ground without knowing how I got there.

And then it was just morning again. Birds. Actual birds this time, making actual noise.

Barros was already talking, already building the story we’d be ordered to tell – the disciples came in the night, they stole the body, we were asleep. I let him talk. I didn’t argue. What would I have said? I saw what I saw and I don’t have words for it and I’m not sure – I’m still not sure – whether I saw it or whether something in me needed so badly to see it that I dreamed it in the dark.

But here is what I know. I know his face. That’s what I’m left with. I know his face and I have decided whose face I am going to follow.

I am going to live as if it was true. That’s all I have. That’s all anyone has, I think. You see something that breaks the edges of what you thought was possible, and then the next morning comes, and you have to decide. Not once. Every morning after that, you have to decide.

I decide.

In a moment you will stand and renew the promises of your baptism.

Listen carefully this year. Let each word resound before the next one comes. You have said these words before – but this year, as you say them, hold one thing. Just one. One yes that is yours. One renunciation that costs you something real.

What is it that you are saying yes to this year?

The soldier didn’t have a theology. He had a face he couldn’t forget and a decision he made in the dark.

That’s where faith begins. It can begin there for you too.

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