Mary Magdalene was in such grief; John tells us she went to the tomb while it was still dark. She went looking for her beloved Jesus, only to find the tomb had been opened. The massive stone that was to have sealed it, had been rolled away. So she went straight away to Peter, and the mysterious disciple that John often refers to as “the one whom Jesus loved.” Mary told them what she had seen, and they took off, in what must have seemed like a foot-race to the tomb, basically leaving Mary in the dust. The guys went into the tomb—first, the so-called beloved and then Peter, and when they saw the burial linens and no Jesus, they went on home. Why? What did they do at their homes? Did they eat? Did they go say kaddish, the ritual prayer for the dead? It was still the festival of the Passover, so who knows how they kept that covenantal obligation to remember how God delivered their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. But Mary stayed. She stood weeping outside of the tomb, in despair because she thought someone had come in and taken the body of Jesus. Finally, she got up the courage to look inside. First she saw angels, and then she saw Jesus. But she did not recognize him until he called her name. He warned her not to try to hold onto him, because he was going to another dimension of life with his creator father. And then, he commissioned her to go and proclaim his resurrection to the others. She did not argue with him, she did what he asked, and that’s why Mary, of all the disciples became the first to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ: hope rising from despair.

The most important message of that time, and perhaps of ours, was that if you go looking for it, hope will find you. If you give up and go home too soon, you might miss the incredible message: hope rises inexplicably from despair, even from death.

If there is any meaning in the senseless death of a man who sought to do good by healing the sick and teaching people to love as God loves, then it is that there is nothing that God cannot redeem, because in a universe of endless possibilities hope has to be among them. We teach our children that Jesus died to save us from sin. Shouldn’t we teach them that Jesus LIVED to save us from sin? After all, sin is separation from God, and Jesus surely taught the people how to get close to God! Jesus’ life taught us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. His death taught us that there is no way we can destroy God. If you are a fan of physics (and you must have known as I was going to work science into this one way or another), it’s kind of like the first law of thermodynamics: “divine energy can neither be created nor destroyed…” The resurrection teaches us we can move from a focus on the death of Jesus  and the despair over the loss of the young teacher into the hope that the life of Jesus literally embodied! Not only is love stronger than death, but so also is hope.

That is why this day matters. The living God redeems everything created, every living thing, every rock and every drop of water by resurrecting all of it anew, and the process continues even after 13.8 billion years. There is no force of nature more mysterious and more hopeful than resurrection, and without death we cannot know that. That doesn’t mean that we have to like death or that we can’t grieve when those we love depart, but it does mean that throughout the universe all things are made new and if we don’t believe the physics that tells us that is true, then believe the story of Mary Magdalene, who went looking for Jesus, and found him, not dead, but very much alive.

We are all made of stardust and we have been marked as Christ’s own forever, even before baptism, because the God of hope breathed life into us. The tomb will always be empty because Jesus still lives, and it cannot contain him. If you cannot find him, don’t give up and go home like Peter and that other guy. Look again, Like Mary, and be found, like hope, rising from despair.