Fear + Joy [Joy - Week Four]

“So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” ~ Matthew 28:8

Afraid … yet filled with joy. That’s the JOY phrase I’d love us to focus on this Monday morning after Easter. 

Matthew tells us that the Marys came to the tomb of Jesus that 3rd day and, to their surprise, found an angel and an empty grave instead of their Lord.

Make no mistake, these were the same precious Marys who wept at the foot of his cross watching Christ crucified. With their own eyes, they saw their beloved Jesus die a brutal death. The next day they were the same Marys at the tomb when his broken body was wrapped and placed within. These women who loved Jesus with all their heart, were right there for all of it. Every body-wrenching, horrific, hellbent moment.

I’m not sure we can even begin to understand their sorrow. Did they sleep or eat even one bite during these dark days? Did their eyes ever stop pouring forth tears? I imagine not. 

And then the third day they come again to the tomb only to find an angel kind of casually sitting upon the stone and whose “appearance was like lightning and his clothes were white as snow.” The bright light of him surely must have felt like daggers in their tear-soaked, tired eyes. He was the last thing they expected to see. This angel who then went on to calmly relay, “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.” And because the angel knows these Marys are women and they are going to need proof of this, he continues, “Come and see the place where he lay.”

And the very next thing is a couple of Marys running out of the tomb and back into town full of both fear and joy. 

Fear and joy. Fear and joy. How can they possibly go together? Aren’t they seemingly opposed? Incongruous? Incompatible? 

And, yet, we know so often they do show up at the same time in our lives. Hand in hand. Like a couple of misfits.

Maybe, for the Marys, the fear was a bunch of what ifs …

What if the body of Jesus has been taken?

What if the angel is lying?

What if something even worse is about to happen?

But then this little seed of joy is somehow present and begins to grow in the midst of their fear and sorrow —

What if it’s true? 

What if Jesus has, indeed, risen? 

What if this casual, snowy-white angel is right?

Fear and joy. 

Oh, dear ones, this is the very same line we all seem to teeter upon all the time in our messy lives, is it not? Crossing back and forth between sorrow and joy. Between hope and fear. The lines blurry. The lines blend and bang and bump up against us and our fragile humanity. And even in the resurrection of Jesus — the greatest day, the most important moment of all time — we are given this example through the eyes of our dear Marys-----This! This is life here on earth. Uncertain. Unsure. Unconvinced. Unable to always know or see or predict or plan for.

A beautiful and bitter mix of sorrow and joy and fear and hope and it’s all tangled up together in a wild web and will be until the Lord returns and —

“everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.” Isaiah 35:10

Oh how poignant this is in my own health journey. Right now it is a constant dance on an ever-moving, always-changing line. One bad report. One good. One day of sorrow. Another brings joy. All of it so temporary. The emotions so overwhelming and, honestly, exhausting. I can’t ever quite seem to get my footing. 

The pet scan report was so good on Friday, but we still have these very accurate and very worrisome blood results. The images look good, but the blood hints at something perhaps hiding and growing somewhere we can’t quite see. Unfortunately, that’s what my kind of cancer just happens to do. And so I want to rejoice and relax, oh heavens, yes I do! And yet, after communicating with my doctor on Friday afternoon, I know vigilance is the name of this game. We cannot take our eye off the ball of this blasted cancer.

And some days, the fatigue feels almost crushing. Like I’m on the edge and constantly looking over. I'm so tired from looking over the edge. Maybe you're on an edge in your life too. Maybe you are running out of an empty tomb a little bewildered and a little bedraggled. Eyes red from constant crying. Body tired from lack of rest. Unsure what it all means. Afraid, yet, strangely, somehow, recognizing this seed of joy. Unable to fully understand. But running. Hoping. Hoping and running.

Kate Bowler in her book No Cure for Being Human wrote “you can’t live on the edge of the abyss forever.” And maybe that’s true, but we sure as heck do need some helping backing away from it. If there’s an edge in our lives we simply can’t help ourselves from staring over it, can we?

So I guess that’s what I’m writing about today. The permission for us all to fully realize life doesn’t exist in tidy boxes or well-labeled lanes. It’s not all joy or all sorrow or all this or all that. It’s everything. Mixed together. Mixed up and messy. That’s how we live in our current human curable or incurable state. 

That's how we live until that crown of everlasting joy is placed upon our head and all sorrow and sighing flees away. 

And that is why we can claim joy today regardless of the messy emotions and circumstances which circle around it. We have joy, because we have hope. Amen. 

This week, memorize with me and remember the Marys running out of the tomb ---

“So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” ~ Matthew 28:8