There’s a lot of running in St. John’s Resurrection account. It doesn’t say that Mary ran to the tomb, but it makes it clear that she was very much in a hurry to get there. She went the first chance she reasonably could after the end of the Sabbath—perhaps even so it might have seemed a strange hour for a small group of women to be wandering out of the city. When they find the stone rolled away, Mary runs back to the disciples. Peter and John then run to the tomb, each trying to outpace the other.
Why is everyone so rushed? Because love demands it. I don’t know about you, but I found myself especially moved this year by the parable of the two sons that we heard at Mass a few weeks ago. Of course it’s an old story, but one with an amazing capacity to hit us over and over again with different reminders of God’s love. And in that story, what happens when the prodigal son returns home? The father is unable to contain his joy, running out to meet him on the way.
There’s something to that here, though of course the disciples aren’t really sure if they should be joyful, panicked, or what. Either way, love runs. Patience is a virtue, but by that the moral tradition understands not just waiting in the abstract, but a properly ordered ability to endure obstacles. So we daren’t say that the disciples and Mary are impatient, properly speaking; they show an appropriate level of zeal for the situation at hand. The empty tomb is a serious matter requiring their full attention.
It is the most serious matter there is.
This cannot be overstated. If Easter is merely a celebration of spring, or bunnies, or new life in a general sense, or even the fond remembrance of one inspiring teacher, it is hardly worth a big fuss, hardly worth forming a new family and culture that would stare down even Roman emperors and produce a kind of martyrdom that made Greek philosophers blush with shame and confusion. But we believe that the empty tomb really does mean something, and that it changes everything. If the tomb really is empty, as the disciples found it, and Jesus has really risen from the dead, then we should run, not walk, toward this strange God-man who defied the powers of darkness and death. We should run, not walk, to meet him, because that is what love demands.
But why speak of this in terms of love? Tradition uses terms of conquest and battle, yet at the same time the conquest is always over the forces of evil, not over humanity. We could imagine a miracle so powerful that the whole world could see it, that it would be absolutely undeniable and conclusive. But the fact that this is not what we get should suggest something of its character. There were witnesses—several hundred witnesses, in fact—who met Jesus after he rose from the dead. Their testimony, along with that of the New Testament writings, is, to be frank, more thorough and reliable than that of pretty much any other event of that time period. So believing it is and always has been reasonable. But it is not certain, as it would be if it were immediately before our eyes. It does require faith.
I love how Peter Kreeft puts this: “He didn’t want to make us an offer we couldn’t refuse, because he’s the Son of God the Father, not the Godfather. He made us an offer we could refuse because that’s what love does. Love respects freedom. Love relies on faith and trust, not force. Not the force of seeing him and not physical force and not political force and not emotional force and not even logical force.”
The passion, death, and resurrection of the Son of God are acts of love. They are God’s free decision to rescue us from our own rebellion and alienation. We speak of the cross as a sacrifice and an offering, but to whom? St. Gregory Nazianzen insists that it would be absurd to imagine it as an offering or price paid to the devil, to the one holding us in bondage. But he argues that it is likewise unthinkable to imagine it as a price somehow demanded or required by God. It was neither required nor needed by God, but God accepted it so that humanity might be “restored to sanctity by means of the humanity assumed by God, so that, tyranny being overcome by a man’s strength, he might deliver us, and bring us back to himself by means of his Son” (On the Holy Pasch II). Human and divine freedom runs through the whole project: God freely became man so that man might freely return to God. Christ’s complete offering of himself on the cross, his willingness to suffer all the consequences of evil for the sake of love, leads to his resurrection and his elevation of man into communion with God.
God, in his freedom, made us. We, in our freedom, rejected him, which in another way meant rejecting the freedom that he gave us, the freedom to live in the joy and fellowship of our Creator. He, in his freedom, offered us a way out of the hell we made for ourselves by joining his nature with ours so that we could have the power to freely repent of our sin and turn to him in love. But there we have it again: a way. The way, in fact. But it is still a way that must be chosen. Love runs, it longs, it burns, it suffers, but it does not force its way.
This is part of why it is so hard, in this world—because it is full of risk. There are many counterfeit loves, but only one Love that, as Dante writes, “moves the sun and all the other stars.” The martyrs thought that it was worth dying for precisely because it was worth living for, and it is worth living for because Jesus has shown us, in his resurrection, not just that Love’s power, but its goodness.
Christ is risen! Let us believe, in faith, the testimony of the apostolic witness and, with Peter and John and Mary, run to meet the Lord who is always running to meet us.