“He is not here. For he has been raised just as he said.” (Mt 28.6)
Endings are never nice.” The line is spoken by a character in Caim Potok’s book, “The GIft of Asher Lev.” Young Asher, an aspiring artist, has returned home from Paris, where things didn’t go as he had hoped. His dad says to him, “Paris was that bad?” “Paris was a disaster,” Asher answers. “I am truly sorry, Asher,” the dad says.
“The thing is,” Asher says, “I’m not sure I know what to do now. That’s the thing. I don’t know where I’m going.” His dad offers no comment. So Asher says, “It’s nice to be able to retire. Comforting.” “You think so?” his dad said. “Isn’t it?” Asher asks. “No,” he said. “Endings are never nice.”
We tend to agree with Mr. Lev. Endings are never nice. The small boy who realizes the end of summer has come, his days of fun in the sun, coming to an end. He asks his dad, “Can’t I have just one more day of summer?” Endings are never nice.
The college student has prepared years for her graduation, studying long hours, enduring countless exams, and now she walks off campus the last time, nervous, not sure she is ready to be an adult in the real world. Endings are never nice.
The husband, grown tired of the fights in the late hours of the night with his wife of ten years, wakes up one morning, meets her in the kitchen, and, as he pours a cup of coffee, says to her, “I don’t think this is working. It’s time for us to end it.” Endings are never nice.
The woman who has worked this job for the last nine months, struggling to make ends meet, two small children at home, is called into her supervisor’s office at the end of the shift, told not to return the next day, her work no longer needed because the company is downsizing. Endings are never nice.
The old man lays in his hospital bed, a place he has become too familiar with on and off during the last months, his doctor stepping into the room, his words even more serious than his face. “I’m sorry, but we’ve done everything we can. I think you need to prepare for the end.” Endings are never nice.
That lesson was brought home to the Galilean Teacher, who found himself the target of both the Roman politicians and the religious leaders of Jerusalem, who subjected him to a sham trial with false testimony and false witnesses, ending in his gruesome crucifixion outside the city gates. Endings are never nice.
His followers, a dozen or so who had dropped their nets and had dropped their last dime into believing he was the real thing, hid themselves in a rat-hole room on a side street in the poor part of old Jerusalem, hoping things would blow over, thinking maybe they could sneak out of the city under cover of night, calling an end to this Don Quixote dream of the last shall be first. Endings are never nice.
In the movie “The Devil’s Own,” the lead character, an arms buyer from Northern Ireland, comes to America, where, hiding his identity, he befriends a New York City cop. At one point, as the two are talking about the troubles back in Ireland, the young Irishman tells the New York cop, “Don’t look for happy endings. It’s not an American story. It’s an Irish story.”
Not only an Irish story, truth be told, it’s something the people of Palestine would have understood easily, caught in centuries of conflict and crossfire, like a baby rabbit in a bear trap, surrounded as they were by super powers, resistance and refusal futile, their last hope a Messiah sent by the Most High God to save them from oppression and annihilation, some putting their hope in this Man of Galilee, who promised them the Reign of God, not the Reign of Rome, but their hopes ending in a bloody execution, the man no Messiah, just another pipedream. It was the same old Hebrew story, where endings are never nice.
And yet, somehow, something different happened with this story, this time someone rewrote the ending, with the dead man not staying dead, but walking away from his tomb, finding his followers, forgiving them for their fickle faith, and informing them to go to the far corners of the world, telling his story,a story with a happy ending, which they did do, with a newfound confidence and and constancy and clarity, and, because of that story, nothing in the world has ever been the same again.
When the Man of Galilee was raised from the dead, by the Most High God, the expected ending upended, people began to see, for the first time in their lives, that it is possible that endings–sometimes– surprisingly are nice, when the end suddenly is a beginning, and where a dead end shockingly is a restart.
The Easter story, where the ending comes, not when the stone is rolled in front of the tomb, as we should expect, but when the stone is rolled away from the tomb, as nobody in their right mind should expect, gives us a well-founded hope that those endings that come into our life, unscripted and unwanted and unwarranted, don’t have to be the last word.
That cause for hope, as retold to us today, promises us that, all evidence to the contrary, God has the last word, not the powers of this world, and his last word is always life, not death. He is not a God of nasty endings, but the God of new beginnings.
The baseball great Yogi Berra once said, “The game isn’t over till it’s over,” restating in his own way the Easter message, with Good Friday just a cliffhanger, with Easter Sunday showing us it’s not over until God says it’s over. A pity that Pilate missed the early news that morning, a shame the soldiers overslept that morning, a shock the Sanhedrin experienced that morning, when everybody figured out the big story of the week didn’t end in the graveyard like they thought. God had more to say.
And so, in those times when we think we’ve come to the end of the rope or we believe we’ve come to the end of the road, we may want to remember that God has a habit of opening closed doors and of opening bursting through roadblocks. It’s like one of those movies where the action ends, everything goes dark, and we think, “I don’t like this ending,” and, a few moments later, the screen comes back on, the action continues, and there’s a turnaround. We find it wasn’t the end of the movie, as we thought at first, but just a pause, with the real ending still to come.
And while the pause between the moment when we think life has come to an end for us and when we see life hasn’t ended, while that wait is uncomfortable, even frightening, we remind ourselves that God is using that moment, however long, to bring life from death, a sunrise after the sunset. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” as the mystic Julian of Norwich was told by Jesus in a vision.
For believers in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, a world never famous for happy endings is now the Easter world always famous for happy endings. As the writer Richard Bach once wrote, “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” That is the Easter story in its shortest form, a story that doesn’t end until the caterpillar becomes a beautiful butterfly, because that is how God wants the story to end.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 