Matthew 27: 46-61
And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 47When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “This man is calling for Elijah.” 48At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink. 49But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” 50Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. 51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. 52The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. 53After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. 54Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” 55Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him. 56Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. 57When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. 58He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. 59So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth 60and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. 61Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.
The story of Jesus’ passion and death comes to us this year with a particular poignancy as we hold the memory of the death of innocent Jesus with the memory of the deaths of three innocent children and three innocent adults in Nashville, Tennessee. I do not want to labor the parallels between a silent politician who had the power to stop the death of innocent Jesus and the silent politicians of our day who failed our innocent children after Sandy Hook and continue to fail them today. The angels in heaven who lamented Jesus death, cry out to God for justice and we join our tears with the tears of parents, families and children who lost their innocence when their school was the site of yet another mass murder.
I would like to draw your attention to a small detail unique to the end of Matthew’s version of the Passion, the dead who are raised after Jesus dies on the cross. You might imagine that this scene could have come out of a zombie apocalypse movie with the undead walking the streets of Jerusalem. Jesus, who is strangely silent throughout his passion, prays a lament to God with those mournful words, My God, My God, why have your forsaken me? That prayer echoes though the hearts of so many of us when death takes away someone we love, when we are left alone and seemingly abandoned and God seems to have forgotten where we live and how deeply we need God’s comforting presence. As in so much of the Gospel, a profound and unimaginable reality lies beneath the surface of the Gospel story and when all seems darkness and loss, new hope dawns on the horizon.
For any Jew, death comes as the ultimate defilement. Death robs the person of that precious image of the living God. The corpse cannot be touched without the living person becoming ritually impure. In dying, Jesus becomes the defiled and impure one. He enters into ultimate isolation and abandonment.
He enters into that land of shadows not only as a human person. Jesus enters the valley of the shadow of death as the Son of God. God takes on this ultimate defilement, this ultimate loss and does the unimaginable. God robs death of its power.
This unspoken and hidden mystery, this overturning of the power of death, lies at the heart of this gospel. The dead are rising because death has lost its power. Even as the dead body of Jesus hangs on the cross, he has proven himself the victor over death. He has entered into battle with death and death has lost.
This deep paradox of our Christian faith, this mystery of the defeat of death by the dead Christ, undergirds our faith and sustains us with hope. Yes, innocent people may die at the hands of mad people. Yes, war may devastate countries and leave people wounded, homeless and uncertain of their future. Yes, our loved ones may die and we are left alone.
Under these horrific tragedies, our faith discovers unimagined hope. Underneath all this loss, Christ has conquered death. May our faith in the Crucified Christ, the conqueror of death, sustain us in our losses and carry us through to the dawning of Easter hope in our hearts.