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Archives: May 2009
An old car and an empty tomb...
By Mike Pilavachi
It was 1974 and my Dad had gone out one day and bought a brand new car. Looking out of my bedroom window I was amazed to see him cruise around the corner in a limited edition black 3 door Fiat Cinquecento. I cooed, wowed and dribbled over it with such intensity that I hardly noticed that my Dad was trying to talk to me.
'Mike, this is for you. As soon as you're 17 and have passed your test you can have it.'
This was without doubt the best present I had ever been given and the euphoria stayed around for days. I thought about it, dreamt about it and told all my friends, ex-friends and total strangers all about My New Car. I was - to put it mildly - on a buzz.
Not everyone believed me, which was a shame but perhaps not all that surprising. What did surprise me, though, was the fact that a few months after that wonderful day, my Dad started using MY CAR. He said that it was just because his had broken down, and at first he insisted that his borrowing changed nothing.
The months went by, his car went to the scrap heap and my old man settled back into the regular comfort of the Fiat. My Fiat. The Ex-Mike Fiat. By the time I was 17 and eligible to take my test the car was well and truly the property of Mr P Senior. Little P junior - embarrassed, disappointed and upset - was left to stew.
And stew I did. Instead of carrying out the plan I had hatched a year earlier (which involved taking my test as near to the stroke of midnight on my seventeenth birthday as test centre opening hours would allow), I acted as if learning to drive was the last thing on my mind. To prove that I was not hurt I pushed all driving ambitions to the back of my mind. In fact, I made such a big deal of it not being a big deal that it wasn't until I was 28 that I finally got round to learning how to drive.
We've all had disappointments in life. Some of them have been the result of our own failings, while others have been caused by the let downs of others. Whatever the story, coming face to face with the stark realisation that life isn’t quite what we thought is common ground for us all. More than that, it has been on the menu almost since time began.
Mary Magdalen knew about disappointment.
Then the disciples went back to their homes,
…but Mary stood outside the tomb crying.
As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."
Mary was so upset that all she could see was her own pain. 'They' had taken away her master. Perhaps there is even a note of self pity creeping in there, but looking elsewhere in the Gospels it's clear that there is more to her than meets the eye.
In Luke 7:37 she is described as a 'woman who had lived a sinful life' - a polite way of calling her a prostitute or a woman who slept around. Jesus was probably the first man who had ever shown her true respect and dignity, who had loved her not for what he could get out of her, but simply to giver to her.
Jesus changed her life and gave her hope for the future. We see this in the retelling of her pouring the Alabaster jar of expensive perfume all over Jesus' feet (John 12). She was so grateful to him that she would have given everything. I wonder if she ever thought that it might be him who would end up giving everything for her.
Once he had been crucified, everything changed for Mary. All her assumptions about life changed. She had spent most of her life as an outcast, confined to the fringes by polite society, but in Jesus she had found acceptance. Perhaps there had been a thought in the back of her mind that it may have been too good to be true, and with him now dead her worst fears had been realised. Kneeling before the empty tomb, peering in to see what had happened, Mary was too consumed by her own grief to notice that what she thought were guards were really angels.
At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realise that it was Jesus. "Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Of course Jesus knew exactly who it was that she was looking for, but for Mary, the empty tomb represented a lifetime of hurt and disappointment; of let-downs, foul-ups and the fast fading echoes of a promise that might have been but - so she thought - never was. So consumed was she with her own grief that she actually mistook Jesus - whose death acted as the trigger for her anguish - for the gardener. She wasn't having a very good day, yet all it took to turn it around was one word:
“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means Teacher)… Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ And she told them that he had said these things to her.“
John 20:10-18
Many of us are kneeling in front of our own empty tombs; the pain of a divorce, a father who left us or a relationship that never worked out right. There may have been an accident or the pain may have been deliberate. It may have been a car that was never given or the realisation of wasted potential.
We too can be so consumed with peering into these tombs of ours that we fail to recognise Jesus standing right by us. OK, so we may not actually be constantly hallucinating about gardeners, but you get my point, yes? It's all too easy to miss out on God when things are going wrong for us.
The answer? We need, like Mary, to hear him call our name. Then we need to embrace him, turning our focus from the tomb and placing it on him. Does that mean we should all be Black Belt Stiff Upper Lippers? No way - Jesus didn't take Mary from the cemetery right away, nor did he say 'cheer up love'. No, there's a gap in the story that comes between Mary recognising Jesus and him saying 'Let go, Mary.'
Why let go? Because she was hugging him, right there and right then. He gave her permission to be genuine about her emotions with him, at the same time as presenting himself as the solution. That's what we need to be able to do too; to avoid the wallowing but not resist the welling up. We need to be genuine, to allow the pain out, but also to look for the life on the other side of it all.
About the article...
This is an edited version of chapter of one of Mike's older book's 'Weeping before an empty tomb', published by Hodder and Stoughton. It's currently out of print, but is used here with the kind permission of the publishers.
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