The Terror of the Empty Tomb
Following Jesus in Faith and Fear
About the author: Rev. Micah Cronin (M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary) is an Episcopal priest of the Diocese of New Jersey. He is the Associate Rector at St. George's By the River in Rumson, New Jersey.
The day after the 2024 federal elections, my bishop called me. She was interested to know how I was doing following the election of a man who ran a campaign based in part on the fear and hatred of trans people, who has made attempts to restrict our access to healthcare, who is at the moment successfully restricting our travel, and who has made potential allies afraid to defend us. I appreciated her call. I told her, among other things, that I felt somewhat alienated from my fellow Christians, knowing that many of them, including those in the Episcopal Church, voted in such a way as to cause harm to many communities of people, mine included.
Was the Church in America finally experiencing God’s judgment because we have sacrificed Jesus on the altars of capitalism, racism, and now fascism? I wondered. Could the decline of the Church be related to this? And if so, perhaps that was the just consequence.
And then, the real feeling. “I feel like we are sheep without a shepherd,” I told my bishop. My bishop would not get on board with that level of despair—I cannot remember her exact words. Still, it was something along the lines of how God’s judgment cannot be equated with God’s abandonment, if only because God’s judgment includes the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Fair enough. Perhaps, by a miracle of God’s grace, we are not sheep without a shepherd. As the disaster of this federal administration continues to unfold, it seems that at least some of those Christians who are refusing to put their hope in anything but Jesus are experiencing the terror of the empty tomb. While the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John highlight encounters with Jesus in his corporeal body, the resurrection of Jesus as rendered in Mark’s Gospel is shot through with this terror. While longer endings were added later, in which the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples, the Gospel of Mark originally ended with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body. Once there, they encountered an angel who instructed them to tell the other disciples that Jesus had been raised, was not there, and was going ahead of them to Galilee: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk. 16:8, NRSV).
The resurrection is often preached with notes of assurance, consolation, and maybe a subconscious desire to quickly move on from the trauma of the crucifixion. I recall preaching Mark’s Gospel when it appeared in the lectionary last Easter. I took the liberty of lengthening it to include the later, longer endings. I did not want the women’s fear to be the last words of scripture that hundreds of people packed into the nave would hear that day. It is out of concern that those who only attend church on Easter and Christmas hear the full message of the gospel, of course. And maybe because I did not want to confront the fact that I share the same fear as those women.
In The Faith of the Church, Karl Barth considers a common mistake Christians make when proclaiming the resurrection.1 This mistake is to render the resurrection into a mythical abstraction, which illustrates generally accessible principles. “Christ’s resurrection does not follow his death as morning follows evening, as spring follows winter, and as good days come again after bad days. It is not a consequence independent of the active will of God.”2 Jesus’ resurrection is not a metaphor for the processes of life, nor a force of history, nor a fable delineating the concepts of spirit, life, or victory.3 Barth puts it this way: Jesus’ “history”, that is, his life, death, and resurrection, is so out of step with the rest of human history (and human myths), that to accept it as history is to take it as the only history which will matter in the end.4 Further, all else that we call history is, in a sense, a myth, for Jesus’s resurrection “embodies, sums up, locates, and fulfills our own history.”5
The terror I feel alongside Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome is rooted in the judgment laid down by Jesus’s resurrection. The myths of human history—for instance, that Caesars, colonists, and oligarchs truly do hold the power of gods, yet also that human struggle can produce an arc of progress traceable throughout history and is capable of overcoming the sin and death we unleash upon the world. Or the myth that God is within my grasp and is quite like me, sometimes juxtaposed with the myth that our world is entirely separate from God to the point of utter disenchantment, and thus there is no Holy Spirit active in the world. God cannot have walked among us in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, and humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. The empty tomb, as much as it is my hope, is also a sign of the utter defeat of my sin, my death, and the myths that I cling to even unto death.
Jesus’ history now being the history which “embodies, sums up, locates, and fulfills” our own also means that “we are within his history…we are the members of his body.”6 In the Gospel of Mark, the tomb is empty because Jesus had been raised and was moving ahead of the disciples into Galilee, where the angel promised they would find him. Which is to say, they were being called back to the place where their whole adventure with Jesus began, now with the full knowledge that the way of Jesus may lead them to the ordeal of the cross, quite literally for many.
I am baptized. I receive the Eucharist regularly. I am, along with every Christian, a member of Jesus’ body. At the heart of it, the terror I feel goes hand in hand with my hope in Jesus’s full, corporeal, present life here and now and the gift of his Holy Spirit. If that hope is true, that means that yes, the horrors of this world, its Caesars, its billionaires, its hatred and violence, have no power over the eternal life of Jesus rendered for me that is available to me even this very hour. But it also means that Jesus may take me by the hand and lead me through these horrors to the other side, so that others may see and benefit from my witness to his eternal life, which is also offered to them.
The basic act of faith for me, and I might venture to say for every Christian in these times, is to follow Jesus anyway as he walks ahead of us, trusting that Jesus, who has borne sin, death, and judgment, will bring us safely into life.
Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church: A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed According to Calvin’s Catechism, trans. Gabriel Vahanian (Wipf & Stock, 2006).
Barth, The Faith of the Church, 100.
Barth, The Faith of the Church, 100.
Barth, The Faith of the Church, 99–100.
Barth, The Faith of the Church, 102.
Barth, The Faith of the Church, 104.