OTTERBURNE, MB – As I sit down to write this, I am looking out of an East-facing window that opens onto a very typical Manitoba landscape. You know how it looks: field upon field upon yet another field, lined with pine trees that drop their needles onto a cushion of white below which hides those needles until spring. Snow always melts eventually, despite what Manitoba winters lead you to believe, and in doing so reveals the things that were lost in it over the course of those 5 (or so) cold months. The sun climbs higher and touches every little Providence campus building that stands out against the vast white all around them. The world is quiet in Otterburne on these winter mornings.
I think everyone can appreciate a slow and silent morning when they can get one. In the reprieve of the noise and the hurrying out the door to get somewhere on time, mornings like these have a way of whispering the encouragement that everything really is going to be alright. For a moment the world, even if it is only your own, stands still long enough for you to catch your breath. I wonder what sort of whisperings the morning uttered on the day before a tomb was found empty with folded linen cloths in the place where a body should have been lying.
Surely not encouragements. The Friend, Teacher, Saviour, who healed and taught, who ate with others and wept with them too, had died. His body breaking, his sweat falling, his blood running out. The disciples scattered, hope run dry, the pieces of hearts that this Jesus had put back together laying at the foot of a cross on a hill, and seemingly no one in all of heaven or earth to stop even one moment of it. That Saturday held a quiet morning too, but not because of the assurance that everything will be alright. Instead, it was filled with the whispered uncertainties of the people who had put their hope in this Jesus who had, as it turned out, been a fraud the whole time.
Except, you know how this looks too: two women arrive at this tomb to attend to a body they would soon find out was not in its place. The annunciation that gave rise to the still-occurring ecclesial refrain that He is risen is uttered for the first time. Someone who is mistaken as a gardener says Mary’s name and the Voice comes out of the missing body that is not missing anymore. Two men whose hearts burned within them on the way to Emmaus break bread with this Risen One. Thomas dares not believe the good news. Jesus shows up and eats with his friends at last. Still-present wounds are felt by the fingers of the unbelieving man. Thomas believes.
Uncertainty and anguish melted in the light of this new morning, revealing the body of Christ, very much not dead; revealing and gluing back together pieces of the fragmented hope that Jesus picked back up when His disciples could not do it for themselves; revealing and touching every little life that could go on living just because He lives.
It seems as though this Sunday morning did not whisper so much as sing; the torn temple curtain harmonizing with Mary’s exclamation, I have seen the Lord; the dissonance of a rumour that the disciples stole Christ’s body with the risen Jesus making breakfast a day later for His friends on the beach; the rhythm of the threefold refrain yes, Lord; you know that I love you from the mouth of the disciple who thrice denied His Lord. In the wake of this body being raised to life, the characters in this story did not have a choice but to join creation’s choir and sing that He is risen indeed.
It is on these quiet, winter mornings in the prairies when I like to ponder how much this risen Person affects me. More than that, affects an entire institution like Providence; a school made of bricks laid by the hands of people who dared to believe that Christ was who He said He was. A community of people who walk these hallways every day because they are convinced that this Jesus truly is the Way and the Truth and the Life. Providence has long been an institution that has, as an echo of the angel who sat atop the rolled away stone, invited people to come and see the place where he lay, only to find no body there, and then to go on wondering where that might mean He is.
