Biography
Frank T. Griswold III is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and is a well-known retreat leader. He recently completed a four-year internship in Ignatian spirituality, after which he led a thirty-day retreat according to the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Bishop Griswold is a graduate of Harvard University, Oxford and General Theological Seminary [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"We Are an Easter People" 
Some time ago, I came across a Greek icon of the resurrection. Icons are a kind of visual scripture; they don't seek to be historically accurate, but rather seek to depict the inner meaning, the inner significance, of an event or a reality common to our Christian life and experience. The icon of the resurrection shows the Risen Christ standing on the doors of Hell which have been battered down under his feet. On either side are the tombs of the representatives of a fallen humanity: Adam and Eve. He extends His arms and grasps Adam and Eve by the wrists and appears to be yanking them, pulling them, out of death into the reality of His own risen life. The icon reminds me that resurrection is forceful, insistent, accosting. Resurrection is something that involves not only Christ but involves us as well. It happened to Christ, it happens to us. It isn't enough to contemplate it or sing about it or mass lilies around a church and say, "That's the resurrection." We have to enter into it, we have to become, as Augustine said, "an Easter people."

In Matthew 28:1-12 we find two desolate and grief stricken women making their way to the tomb. The various rituals of burial have been accomplished, they've attended the body, they've wrapped it, it has been put in the tomb and the tomb sealed, there's nothing more for them to do. And yet, led on by love, they go to the tomb at the break of day simply to be there. Simply to share their sorrow and to be in the silence together. But what greets them? Not solitude, not silence but an earthquake and a lightning-faced angel who rolls away the stone.
They teeter on the edge, unprepared for what they didn't expect and cannot comprehend. The soldiers who were watching the tomb tremble with fear and so do the women. So it is that the angel speaks to them and says to them, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified, He is not here for He has risen as He said." And then to the declaration the angel adds a command. He says, "Come, see the place where He lay."

The women, who up to now have been spectators observing all this, suddenly are obliged, by virtue of the angel's command, to become participants - to enter into an event which is already unfolding, which is already underway. Suddenly, as they move forward to the entrance of the tomb, they realize that the stone was rolled away not in order to let Jesus out, because Jesus was already gone before the angel arrived, but rather the stone has been rolled away so that they can enter into the place of darkness and death, defeat and failure, weakness and vulnerability; so that they can enter into the symbol of our ultimate poverty - the place of our burial; so that they can enter into the truth that in the end we can possess nothing - our life is not our own.

They enter into the tomb not simply to verify the message of the angel - that He is not there - but they enter in, I think, in the words of St. Paul, "to become one with Christ in a death like His." As they enter in the consolation they came for is more profoundly shattered. Being close to the body of the Master they loved so deeply is not going to be possible. The body is already gone. Entering into the tomb, the two Marys enter, as it were, into the darkness of God. They enter symbolically into their own death and burial. "You have died," the tomb seems to say, echoing the words of Paul, "and your life now lies hidden with Christ in God." Beyond expectation, beyond comprehension, beyond any experience that might help them explain what has happened, there they are in that place of darkness and death.

Out of that experience, they go forth, again at the bidding of the angel. They go forth in fear and joy, in confusion and a state of deep, intuitive knowing. And it is as they go forth, and only then, that they are met by the risen Christ. As they fling themselves at His feet His risen life becomes their risen life as well. They fall, as it were, head-long into that expansion of reality, that expansion of being and becoming which we call, without fully understanding it, resurrection. "If we die with Him, we shall live with Him," Paul tells us in II Timothy. If we endure, if we go with Him into the tomb, as it were, we shall reign with Him.

The experience of the risen Lord is then the core and center of their own being. The two Marys experience a profound shift, a drastic change, deep within them as they pass from death into life. Jesus at this point is no longer the external object of their devotion and allegiance, but rather the deep and all-pervading truth of their very existence. What they then take back to the disciples is not just the message of the angel, but rather they take back to the disciples the lived truth of their own resurrection.

Yes, fear is still present. What is happening is beyond them, it is too much for them to assimilate. Yet their fear is transfigured and illumined by joy. Joy, which in scripture is not just enthusiasm, but a deep, solid and tenacious interior knowing. The joy of a personal appropriation of the resurrection.

This same passage of interior transformation, the same passage from death to life, leaves the Apostle Paul to cry out in Galatians, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Paul's entry into the resurrection, like that of the two Marys, also required an entering of a tomb - an entering in upon the experience of his own poverty and powerlessness. You remember the story of his conversion. Paul, passing on the road to Damascus, armed with letters from the High Priest so that he might persecute more followers of the way when he gets there. Paul, driven and compulsive, far exceeding his contemporaries in obedience to the tradition of his ancestors. Paul, probably trying to offset, by an intense devotion, a deep interior sense of shame - a shame he describes in II Corinthians as "a thorn in the flesh" that simply will not go away.

There on the road to Damascus, Paul is suddenly riven to the ground by the risen Christ who calls to him and says, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus." And Saul replies and Jesus continues and says, "You will be told, once you have been led into the city, what you must do. Rise and go forth." And so Paul stumbles to his feet, blinded, no longer in control, dependent on the one who leads him, and goes to the city and there he resides for three days wondering when the risen Christ will speak again. In those three days, Paul goes through a deep interior death. His old life is over, the old pattern is shattered, the piety he so carefully sought to construct is in pieces around him. And there he waits.

At the end of three days, a disciple, Ananias by name, comes at the bidding of the risen Christ and lays hands upon him and accompanies this human touch with the words, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you has sent me that you might regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." Paul rises, is baptized, scales fall from his eyes, he sees again and he experiences, truly, the movement from death to life. It is out of that kind of experience that he cries, throughout his letters, about dying and rising in union with Christ. He shouts, "If anyone is in Christ there is a new act of creation. The old order is gone, finished, done and a new order has already begun." Such words are not high-flung prose. They are sober commentary upon his own profound experience of resurrection.

The experience of resurrection, passing from death to life, though it is highly personal, is never just for us alone. It is always something to be shared, something to be given over, something to be broken open and fed to others so that it might bring life to them. Joy by its very nature must be given away. So it is that the two Marys - and I'm sure they didn't even need the prompting of the angel - rushed back to the disciples. So it is that Paul, after his conversion, becomes the missionary preacher par excellence.

Resurrection also - and this is important for us to be aware of - is a continuing reality, not just a moment or an isolated experience, but rather an ongoing dynamic of dying and rising, losing and finding, surrendering and being blessed, giving over and then being richly given to. Death and resurrection is the fundamental law of our human existence, mediated to us by the very circumstances of our life.

This became very clear to me as Pastor of a church in Philadelphia, where I found again and again that the Lord teaches us deeply through the very people whom we think we have been sent to serve. A young woman in the congregation had a drastic cancer surgery in the course of which everything was removed from her that might be removed and still let her live. She emerged from that surgery feeling very much shattered and broken. Yet sometime after that experience she had a dream in which she saw herself in an enclosed space. She could look up and see the sky, but she could not see in front or around her. Suddenly the walls of this box fell down and she looked forward and saw brilliant grass and trees and bright flowers. She knew intuitively that she was alive and well, possessed of a wellness that she had never known before. Out of that dream she called her brothers and sisters and invited them to come and be with her. Of course, because of what she had lived through, they couldn't resist her invitation. They came. She said, "We must talk about our mother who died when we were all quite young, our mother who was an alcoholic, our mother who died because she was smoking in bed." Various children had never spoken openly about this terrible wound, this terrible burden that all of them had carried through the years. Listening to their mother's sister, the whole story was told of a fragile and frightened young widow and how she couldn't cope and how things were too much for her and how her life fell apart. Out of that experience that family came together in a new way, those children understood and forgave their mother and in so doing were bound together in a new way. Thus it was that their sister's experience of dying and rising became a profound blessing for them all.

Looking at the pattern of my own life, I can see many dyings and risings accompanied by that same juxtaposition of fear and joy. The same questioning of what is it going to cost? Where will it take me? I don't understand it. At the same time, a growing sense of freedom and intimacy with the risen Christ. Resurrection, therefore, happens to us as it happened to the two Marys. Sometimes we have to be like Adam and Eve, yanked and pulled out of the old, into the new. Sometimes it happens with a subtle and wry humor that catches us quite by surprise. We never know quite when it's going to happen, quite when it's going to overtake us, whether it's going to be violent or subtle. Yet, it is the law of our existence.

Let us therefore pray on this Easter day that we may have the courage to yield ourselves to the full force of Christ's resurrection in our lives, allow ourselves to be conformed to the pattern of His death in order to know the power of His resurrection and thereby enter into the fullness of joy. A joy which renders us women and men of hope and healing and blessing to others.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, Risen and Living One, our Life, our Truth and our Joy. Live out in us, and all that we have yet to become, and in our communities of faith the full mystery of your dying and your rising. Stretch and transform us by the power of your deathless love and make us living signs and symbols of your New Creation. Amen.