In the year 2013, I heard a song performed by the songwriter, Sara Bareilles, which captured my heart and spirit the very first time I heard it. The song is about the tremendous Calvary Cemetery in Queens and the connection that we have to all those who have gone before us. The songwriter is described in the song as sitting on a grave and feeling the vibrations of the heartbeats from the millions buried in the cemetery. The ‘echo’ of these heartbeats as she feels them and translates the experience into the song and music itself is offered to us as a symphony that invites us to embrace the lives that we have been given and to move with that life, i.e., to ‘run’ with our lives in a way that we could be ‘chasing the sun” (the song’s title).  CHASING THE SUN on YOUTUBE.

It may seem odd that the scriptures during the Christmas season move immediately from the infant in the manger to the first Christian martyr (December 26th Gospel), Stephen, and then today to the Easter story of the empty tomb (Jn 20:1a and 2-8). As the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, today’s Gospel features the disciple known as the ‘beloved,’ within the context of a ‘race’ between John and Peter to the tomb. Mary Magdalene has just gone to the tomb and seen that the stone that sealed the tomb had been moved revealing it to be empty. Her response was to run to tell the other disciples, who themselves – John and Peter – run to the tomb. It is interesting in the story that the point is made that John ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; however, he did not enter the tomb until Peter arrived as well. Although there is hermeneutical speculation regarding the significance of why the gospel writer tells us more than once in this story that John ‘beat’ Peter to the tomb, I am more struck by the image of ‘running.’

Being a runner myself, I enjoy the exercise because it provides a mode of oddly enough relaxing into the world in a way that both calms and invigorates me at the same time. I have had the experience while running marathons of being ‘transported’ into another realm wherein my mental and spiritual assumptions can seem to be transformed. In a sense there is a ‘release’ that seems to happen much like what has been referred to as contemplation by some. It is paradoxically both release and engagement in almost one singular movement. It is both exciting and soothing, exhilarating and tiring, surrender and fulfillment.

I wonder, first, how Mary Magdalene must have felt. She ran, not so much away from the tomb, but towards others who might be able to help her ‘figure out’ what has happened to Jesus, or as she puts it ‘where they put him.’ She relays this experience to John and Peter, who react in the same way by also running, this time toward the empty tomb. After they stagger their arrival there, they enter the tomb together. We hear that they see the burial cloths in peculiar detail as to their placement in the tomb, with the story finally coming to a close when John ‘saw and believed.’ Oddly enough, the very next line not included in today’s gospel I find significant:

“For they did not yet understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”

What did they ‘see’ and what did they ‘believe?’ The Gospel passage above tells us that they did not understand that ‘he had to rise from the dead.’

My own experience of Christmas and understanding of the Incarnation has grown over the years. From my earliest childhood experiences of Santa Claus and gift-receiving, I am now more aware of how the Incarnation, or God’s entrance into the world, has everything to do with engagement – constant engagement. It’s not just about Santa Claus and baby Jesus in the stable, but now it’s more about how I experience my own life, how others experience theirs, and how I become aware of the interaction between the two – how I interact with creation and in particular with other ‘creatures. It’s a ‘run’ through life or IN life that is not about speed at all.

This type of ‘running’ is one of urgency but not panic! The urgency has to do with how we allow ourselves to be transformed positively by others. This ‘positive’ transformation comes with the caveat that my or your – or both of our – understanding of ‘positive’ itself gets changed or transformed. It’s a new way of ‘seeing’ together. You could say that it took Mary, Peter, and John, and their combined experiences of ‘seeing’ the meaning in the empty tomb to ‘fill out’ more fully the whole picture. And then it goes on from there, as history shows.   It is seemingly through engagement with others that we ‘figure out’ where ‘they put’ Jesus or to put it another way, where we can discover the One risen from the dead among us! Is this another way of describing the Gospels?

John in his epistle (1 Jn 1:1-4) speaks of this communal engagement and how infectious it can be when we ‘run’ with it together:

“What was from the beginning, what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon
and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life — for the life was made visible.”

The life was made visible by our interaction with each other, our engagement with our lives. The grace of the Incarnation which exploded the universe ‘in the beginning’ and historically in our world through Jesus is the expression of a God whose very nature is self-giving love and engagement. And this engagement is divine and human. The responsibility lies upon us to engage God with each other. As John goes on to tell us…

“…we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us;
for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
We are writing this so that our joy may be complete.”

We are coming at it from all ‘sides’ now, running not from each other but toward and with each other as we seek out the Incarnation, the Christ resurrecting in our lives. And beautiful irony is that the very ‘seeking’ to ‘understand’ or ‘find’ the Christ in this communion of engagement IS Christ!

This is a way of ‘chasing the sun,’ as the song says, or perhaps more on point, running in Christ! It doesn’t matter who ‘arrives’ first, but it does matter that we run together and that when we encounter those ‘deaths’ that challenge and sadden and mystify us, it does matter that we intentionally choose to ‘go in’ to the ‘tomb’ together – to ‘see’ and ‘rise from the dead’ together. This is the mysterious divine engagement in the birth and resurrection of Christ that paradoxically can only be discovered by letting go of the ‘me’ (dying to the self, as the scriptures put it) and running through death together ‘so that our joy may be complete.’

Peace,

Thomas