“Wit,” an Empty Tomb, and Resurrection

Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024 – Mark 16:1-8, Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24, 1 Cor 15:1-11

Many years ago, when I was living in Marietta, Georgia, I held season tickets to the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. I used to love going downtown for those Sunday matinees. There are two productions I saw there that stand out for me. One was a staging of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” with a mostly black cast and a gospel interpretation of the music. I loved it.

The other was a play called “Wit,” written by an Atlanta area kindergarten teacher named Margaret Edson. It was her very first play, and it won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was later turned into a teleplay starring Emma Thompson.

“Wit” is a story about Dr. Vivian Bearing, a university English professor, who is an expert on the sonnets of John Donne and especially his use of wit. The play centers on Vivian’s treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer and takes place during her final hours of life.

It’s mostly made up of flashbacks that reveal her to be someone who’d always been focused on the life of the intellect, with little concern for humanity, hers or anyone else’s. Vivian has lived her life alone, is unmarried and without children, seems to have no real faith and not even an emergency contact.

She’s treated at the end by a young oncology research fellow who had been her student and who remembers her as a very demanding professor. Over the course of her treatment, Vivian understands that her doctors are mostly interested in her as a research subject and comes to realize how much kindness means to her.

A particularly beautiful moment occurs when her own professor, in town to visit her grandson, comes to the hospital. After Vivian declines her offer to read some Donne poetry, Professor Ashford pulls out a gift for her grandson – a copy of the book The Runaway Bunny.

The runaway bunny tells his mother he’s running away, and no matter how many examples he gives her of how far he’ll go, mama says she’ll come and find him. Vivian, now close to death, understands this simple tale as an allegory of the soul’s running from an ever-pursuing God.

The play ended with Vivian’s expected death, and I started sobbing uncontrollably.

I was crying so much that I didn’t want them to bring up the lights. I was mortified that people would see me falling apart. Over the course of that play, Vivian had become very important to me.

Jesus had become very important to many men and women. They saw him as their Messiah. They thought he would save them, that he was the one who would bring an end to their suffering under the oppression of the Roman government and re-establish the kingdom of Israel.

If he was indeed the one who had revealed “the mystery hidden since the beginning of time,” then, as John Dominic Crossan said recently, it seems as if “the mystery hidden since the beginning of time is that when the Messiah comes the Empire will execute him, legally.” Because “when the Messiah came, the State executed him, legally.”

Theologian and pastor, Bruce Epperly, recently wrote about how often we skip right over the day in between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Of that day, Epperly writes,

Holy Saturday is the day of suspense and uncertainty, clouded over by tragedy and suffering. Nothing happens and nothing is expected. The future is in doubt and Jesus’ followers wonder if they will ever be able to hope again. That Saturday must have appeared to go on forever as grief, fatigue, fear, hopelessness, and shame filled their spirits. Is Jesus really dead? Has God’s vision of Shalom been defeated? Was his message true or just another pipe dream? And when they looked at their own lives, Jesus’ followers struggled with personal uncertainty. Would they ever celebrate again? Could they ever live with themselves after abandoning the One who loved them? Was their faith misplaced and misguided?”

By early Sunday morning, all the women in our gospel wanted to do was take the spices they had just bought the night before and anoint his body, so at least they would have fulfilled what was required according to their customs. Instead, every expectation they had was again overturned by an empty tomb and a young man in a white robe.

This is how the gospel of Mark ends. The women are terrified, and they’ve just been confronted by a mystery that leaves them speechless.

Clearly, the women eventually moved past their fear or else we wouldn’t have a gospel of Mark, or any other gospel. What these narratives tell us is that there is something so deeply true in what happened between that cross, that empty tomb, and those resurrection stories, something that took frightened and weeping people hiding in upper rooms and turned them into people whose lives had been completely changed. They became people willing, in some cases, to go to their own deaths rather than deny the power of this event.

We know that something amazing and significant happened there. But the truth is that we’ve been wrestling with how to understand these startling claims ever since.

Of course we have to begin with the obvious; that the human condition is painful. I would say that we are both in a condition of original sin and of original blessing, and that’s what tortures us. We’re blessed with the divine image of God and that leads us to carry deep guilt and shame when we harm others or ourselves. We regularly open up deep chasms of separation between us and other people. We do the very things we know we should not do, and so find it impossible to carry that divine image with integrity. We know something is wrong here and we don’t know how to fix it. That’s the truth.

Now I don’t know what physically or literally happened that caused those women to come upon an empty tomb. All I need to know is that somehow, someway, Jesus’ followers experienced him as alive in their midst, in a saving and restorative way, after he had been crucified by the Roman empire and the chief priests.

How do we understand that cross and that empty tomb?

Could it be that Jesus’ death on the cross was God’s ultimate act of solidarity and love? I believe the message of both incarnation and the crucifixion is that we worship a God who crawls right into the messiness of human life, holds everything the world would do to Jesus, and then crawls right up on that cross to be with us in our suffering. The crucifixion of Jesus is God’s ultimate act of solidarity with the human condition.

God is not off planet somewhere, judging us from afar, demanding Jesus’ blood. God is right here, in the middle of our bloody spectacles, showing us how much God loves us and desires union with us.

On that cross, God didn’t condemn our sin; God became our sin. This, as Greg Boyd writes, was God’s supreme act of revelation, showing us the depths of God’s love for us. God in Jesus was willing to lay down his life for that love. The death, the cross, reveals the Love.

We might say that God endures our very worst to give us God’s very best.

At the very end of the play “Wit,” the young oncologist ignores Vivian Bearing’s “do not resuscitate” order, and initiates a code blue, desperately trying to save the life of his beloved professor. He can’t imagine letting her go. But the courageous nurse who had been her faithful companion to the end demands that he look at her chart and stop. He finally stops wrestling with his powerlessness and lets her pass peacefully.

That’s when my tears began.

But the very last thing we saw on that stage was Vivian Bearing in death walking toward a spotlight surrounded by utter darkness at the side of the stage. Just before she leaves our sight, she drops her hospital gown. I’ve never seen anything quite as stunning as that woman’s releasing of her earthly garment and walking offstage in that blinding and transcendent light naked, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

It was the vision of that transcendence that started my weeping.

We may not be able to explain what happened in that empty tomb. We may not understand what happened there. But we can be moved and changed by the vision of the resurrected Jesus who drops his earthly garment and is raised by God as the Christ who can transform our lives.