30

Behold, I Make All Things Nude.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

There is an ancient tradition of contemplating the beaten and then crucified body of Christ. And then to consider the apparent scarring even his resurrected body maintained. But there’s one detail about his body that may feel a little strange to meditate on.

Blood.

Nail-scarred hands.

Nail-scarred feet.

Spear-pierced side.

Thorn-stabbed head.

Completely naked.

When he died Jesus was wrapped up in grave clothes and placed in what turned out to be a borrowed tomb. The Gospel of John tells us it was a tomb in or adjacent to a garden. Jesus went into it wrapped up like a mummy and the door was sealed.

A seed planted in the ground.

The following Sunday morning Jesus wasn’t where they put him. The disciples went to confirm the rumor and were devastated to find that the body of their Lord, and the place they would have commemorated him, had been taken from them. Mary Magdalene hung back near the tomb as the men went away drawing up a silly fix to the problem as men are prone to do.

Suddenly Mary is speaking to a man she doesn’t immediately recognize. John helps us understand what she did with her lack of recognition; he said she assumed she was speaking to the gardener.

It would be a few beats until she realized she was speaking to the very much alive Jesus of Nazareth. She went from this conversation to tell the others this amazing news, becoming the world’s first Evangelist of the Resurrected One. Strange how the church has historically been so resistant about women preaching. They started it.

But the detail we often overlook as we talk about the empty tomb is that it wasn’t exactly empty. When the men looked inside, they found an important something. Grave clothes.

Clothes. Folded neatly.

Jesus, the consummate guest.

This unabashedly puts a nude Jesus in our heads if we pay attention. As one rarely paying full attention to anything, I didn’t see it until it was pointed out to me. Not even to John saying, “Mary thought she was speaking to the gardener,” which might have been a little on the nose.

A naked gardener is raised to life in a garden, at the end of John, a book that begins with the same three words as the opener in Genesis: “In the beginning.”

The Apostle Paul offers help:

“Christ has been raised from the dead, the first Yield of the larger harvest made of those who have ‘fallen asleep’. Just as death came long ago through a man, now resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. Just as in Adam all must surrender to death, so in Christ all will be made alive…So it is written: The first Adam became a living being, the last Adam: a life-giving spirit.”

The resurrection, as I hope has become clear, isn’t just an assurance of the continuation of life. In that the resurrection was like this, naked and vulnerable, harkening back to the original story of unobstructed connection in the Garden, we seem guided to learn to resurrect now. Like all Kingdom things, it’s wherever we are. Buried in the field. Lost in our own house. Not so much “there!” or “there!” but within us, waiting to be brought to life, uncovered and shameless.

Death belongs in the tomb wrapped up and unseen. Guarded. Love lifts it out, unveiled and unhidden, allowing us to live together at peace and at one.

What point is there to any of this if resurrection can only resuscitate corpses, but not resuscitate what’s already dead in me – dead between you and I – now? We’re going to miss the resurrection if we keep thinking of it as only getting to live forever. Easter then becomes a celebration about a life we can’t get to yet. A life we aren’t ready for anyway. First, we have to start getting what’s unknown, known. Start facing our fear of shedding fig leaves and grave clothes. Start thinking about being naked Earth dwellers who are unfit to float in robes forever. Christ, naked and unafraid, draws my self-protected anxiety out of my tomb and into the light. Where we all are being drawn. Back together, with nothing to hide.

“O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.”