Easter Day, 20 April 2025, Austwick, Clapham
Have you noticed the one person who is missing from Luke’s description of the events at the tomb on Easter morning – is Jesus himself? We never sew him.
We witness his faithful group of women friends carrying their precious burial spices; we see them at the open tomb shocked to find two men in dazzling clothes speaking mysterious words; and later we watch Peter getting up and running to the tomb, but finding nothing but discarded burial cloths. We may share these people’s perplexity, their terror, their amazement, as with them, it dawns on us, that in the tomb where Jesus had been laid, there is no body.
There is no body. The absence of God is something you and I may sometimes ourselves experience. We ask, Where is God when it hurts? Where is God when there is so much suffering? We ask, When I pray, is anybody there?
These questions have been a recurring theme of art and literature through the ages. The great Welsh 20th Century priest and poet R.S. Thomas was very concerned with the absence of God. His poem In Church opens with this question: “Is this where God hides From my searching?” [1]
In the deadly silence of a country church Thomas “nails his questions One by one to an untenanted cross.” He’s doing just what Jesus did on that very cross, when he cried to the darkening skies, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” [2]
An awareness of absence can feel eerie. The writer Mark Fisher said that things feel eerie “if there is nothing present when there should be something”. It’s the feeling you may get when visiting a ruined ancient monument, like, say, Castlerigg stone circle, and you sense the absence of the people who created these structures, which makes the atmosphere in the stones strange, unsettling. [3]
On a more commonplace level, we may encounter a sense of the eerie when we’re moving house, standing in an empty building which yesterday was home to us, full of familiar objects, our words now oddly echoing through the abandoned rooms.
At the edge of a wide open field a farmer described to me the eerie absence of insect, bird, and animal life which he said once teemed through the hedgerows. And at the water’s edge a fisherman lamented the eerie lack of life in a once-thriving river.
This sense of their being nothing present when there should be something can extend to our wider society. What would a time-traveller from a century ago returning home, make of their village today, the hustle and bustle of everyday rustic activity around the green now replaced by an eerie calm, the sundry busy small businesses they’d have known, now become private dwellings, with their occupants lying low behind locked doors.
We may feel that we’re living in an era of absence. In our lifetimes we have witnessed the steady dismantling of the post-war settlement so that the doctor, the policeman, the bank manager, even the shopkeeper, once so present and available to us, are now remote, accessed digitally; they may even be a chatbot, not a human. Many lament a growing absence of moral leadership corresponding to the rise of the technocratic elites: an absence of trustworthiness, of empathy, of care. When we sense these things lacking in society when we feel they should be there, then our world starts seeming eerie.
There is a bleakness to this reflection which may feel somewhat unseasonal on this bright Easter morning, and yet at the same time, is never more appropriate than on this very occasion. For Easter invites us to pay attention to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, the other women, and to Peter, and what they did on that odd morning, in response to the absence of Jesus.
“They remembered his words,” Luke records. “That the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” They remembered his words, and this set them running, running to tell the others what they hadn’t seen – and what that must mean.
Another of R. S. Thomas’s spiritual poems he entitled The Absence, and in it he wrote:
“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply.” [4]
“It is this great absence that is like a presence.” It may sound incongruous, but maybe not to those who are bereaved, who have experienced those moments of remembering that our loved one is no longer here, but somehow, in that same instant, we’ve felt that loved one as close to us as ever. As Oscar Romero said, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”
“It is this great absence that is like a presence.” This is the inverse of eerie: for whilst there is nothing present, there is also something. For R. S. Thomas that something is the God who hides from his searching. For Jesus’ friends that something is their resurrected Lord: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” asked the shining men in the tomb. So they ran back home, confidently assured that they would find him among the living. Which, in time, of course, they did.
In the terrifying absences of our world there is a presence which offers healing, comfort, and hope. It is a presence which is never extinguished. All spiritualities sense this, and express it in various complementary ways.
The Hindu Chandogya Upanishad says,“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the radiant light that shines in our heart”; whilst the Gospel of John speaks of the One “In [whom] was light, and that light was the light of humankind”. This is the Word who was with God at the beginning, who was God; this is the Word who became flesh and came to live among us. [5]
In the terrifying darknesses of our world there is a light, which is the source of our life and its fulfilment. It is a light which never goes out.
We have seen what Jesus’ friends did on that oddest of mornings, in response to the absence which they had found. Easter invites us to join our spirits with theirs, and with sombre old R. S. Thomas, in seeking for the understanding that what we haven’t seen must be, for us, the most substantial thing we have.
Notes
[1] R. S. Thomas, In Church.
[2] Matthew 27.46.
[3] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. p.61-64, Approaching the Eerie.
[4] R. S. Thomas, The Absence.
[5] Alastair McIntosh, Matt Carmichael, Spiritual Activism: Leadership as service. p.94-95. Quoting The Chandogya Upanishad, Verse 3.13.7, and John 1.1-5,14.
