OUT OF THE CAVE

Through his healing touch, comforting words, and heart-piercing stories, Jesus revealed God to people restless for transcendence. Teaching moments were reinforced by life example:

• He, who taught the greatness of servanthood, left the head of the table to take up the towel and basin.

• He, who taught his disciples to pray, withdrew to a mountainside, a garden, and quiet places to talk with the Father.

• He, who taught his followers to take up their cross, took up his on the Golgothan hill.

• He, who on another hill taught the crowd to love their enemies, pleaded for his, “Father, forgive them.”

From the cave to the cross, Jesus modeled his greatest commandment; “As I have loved you, so you must love.” (John 13:34-35) Enduring the panorama of our misery, Jesus experienced temptation, pain, and rejection beyond human comprehension, before laying down his life that we might enjoy eternal fellowship with him.

The Incarnate Word is evidence that God not only exists and loves us, but identifies with us. When asked, “When did we see you, Lord,” he will reply, “When I was hungry, naked, sick . . . ” Jesus is evidence that God identifies with cave-dwellers.

A cave also marks the other end of his life. It was the site of something so startling, it shook a group of seasoned soldiers to their core.

THE OTHER CAVE

After Jesus’ body was removed from the cross, Joseph of Arimathea laid it in a tomb cut out of rock. As an infant, Mary had swathed his wriggling body in strips of linen. Now Joseph wrapped his lifeless corpse in a cloth loaded with spices.

The next morning when the women visited the tomb, they found a highly-disciplined Roman detachment rattled to the point of paralysis. Maybe it was the earthquake, or the spectral figure that rolled back the stone sealing the entrance. Or maybe it was what Peter and John saw after they stooped to peer inside.

It has been oft-claimed that the resurrection of Jesus rests on the empty tomb; it does not. An empty tomb could be dismissed as the result of theft, or of returning to the wrong tomb. This tomb was not empty; it held something that established the resurrection beyond all rational argument.

On the slab were burial wrappings that no longer contained a body. The grave clothes were not littered about the tomb willy-nilly; they were altogether, in a piece, conformed in the shape of a human body, but collapsed, like a cocoon whose contents had vaporized and oozed out through its fibers.

To men who had not understood that their leader must die, much less rise from the dead, the sight of the crumpled “chrysalis” was a faith-galvanizing moment. It prompted reflection on all they had been taught, including the ultimate revelation of their Master,

“Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in the Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:19-20).