ENTOMBED

"Jesus, lying in the borrowed tomb, was at peace – His suffering was over, His love was consummated, every hour of darkness moved closer to the light, closer to the morning of resurrection, closer to the time when He would rise from the dead to live forever.  

In every life of every Christian there are countless resurrections – just as there are always many times when every Christian is buried with Christ.

In the soul of the sinner Christ dies many deaths and knows the glory of many resurrections

In the souls that have served Him faithfully, too, there are long periods that seem like death, periods of dryness of spirit when all the spiritual things that once interested them have become insufferably tedious and boring, when it is very difficult, even sometimes impossible, to say a prayer; when the sweetness has gone out of the love of God, when the soul seems bound in the iron bondage of the winter of the spirit like the seed held in iron of the black frozen earth in the wintertime.

 These are the winters of the spirit indeed!  But just as Christ suffered everything that all those who were to follow Him would suffer, all those “other Christs” who have come after Him have suffered, and will suffer in a spiritual sense, everything that He suffered in His human life on Earth.

One of these things is lying in the tomb, bound and restricted in the burial bands.  There come times in every life when the soul seems to be shut down, frostbound in the hard, ironbound winter of the spirit; times when it seems to be impossible to pray, impossible even to want to pray; when there seems to be only cold and darkness numbing the mind.

These indeed are the times when Christ is growing towards His flowering, towards His spring breaking in the soul – towards His ever-recurring resurrection in the world, towards His glorious resurrection in the hearts of men.

Again and again He has referred to Himself and to His divine life in us as seed buried in the earth, and so it is.  There are times when we experience no sweetness, no consolation, no visible sign of the presence and the growth of Christ in us; these above all other times are those in which Christ does in fact grow to His flowering in us.

There seems to be nothing that we can do in these times to honor God, but by ourselves there is nothing that we can do at any time.  In Christ we can do just what He did, remain quietly in the tomb, rest, and be at peace, trusting God to awaken us in His own good time to a springtime of Christ, to a sudden quickening and flowering and new realization of Christ-life in us.

 There are many deaths before the death of the body.  There are many, many resurrections, before that last eternal resurrection that will reunite our bodies and souls forever, to live forever full lives of love and endless bliss that will never be interrupted again.

All those little deaths of the spirit show us the mystery of that last death and that endless rising from the dead.

Death is not something to fear.  Fear will be over and done with when it comes.  Then the possibility of sin will be over, the danger of ever again being parted from Christ will be over, the pains and the desolations of body and soul on Earth will be over… We have nothing to fear. Christ has died each of our deaths for us.  He will be with us all, saint and sinner alike, in our rising from the dead. 

It is to each one of us that He spoke on the night before He died, saying, “Peace is my bequest to you, and the peace which I give you is mine to give; I do not give peace as the world gives it.  Do not let your heart be distressed, or play the coward,” (John 14:27). (Caryll Houselander)

Art: Andrea Mantegna (d. 1506), The Lamentatiom over the Dead Christ", Italian