This open door

A recurring dream I’ve had over the years has a door appearing in the hallway of one of my childhood homes in Winnipeg, Manitoba where no such door ever existed.  Doorways in dreams, I’m told, represent novelty, change and new direction.  Apparently it’s very good news when doors appear in your dreams – well done you!    One of the icons of Easter is the empty tomb with the large stone rolled to one side.  You might see it stitched into church banners and worked into stained glass windows.   An empty tomb is an open door.  It’s an uncompleted story – a marvellously altered trajectory.

Isn’t there something “sadly wearying” about the events of the last few weeks with the airport and metro bombings in Brussels?  Shock comes first, of course, but then we see the true intent of such terrorist attacks as they compel people to harden and reinforce their prejudices.  Ah, we say – here’s the trajectory:  Communities driven in upon themselves and communication across cultural and ethnic boundaries faltering.  Suddenly we hear things from normally good-hearted people which seem shocking and abnormal.  We find ourselves thinking some of these same things.  We mediate the shame of feeling this way by appealing to its normalcy.  That’s what always happens, we say.  It’s the way things go because that’s the way the world is or because that’s the way we are.  Why fight it?  They go that way because powerful people are pushing events along that path.  Who are we to stand up to them?   

The Good Friday opponents of Jesus felt that the trajectory was on their side.  They had settled and ended forever this particular rabbi’s take on the Kingdom of God, clicked shut his open door to restoration for the outcasts amongst the common people he’d met and preached to in the Galilee and Jerusalem.  All those parables, those healings, those glimpses of the kingdom – all these were locked away forever. For their part, Jesus’ scattered disciples knew the trajectory was against them.  The story had no extra chapter.  The Jesus story was sealed in a guarded tomb – the new normal.   

The Easter tomb is not an “ordinary” outcome in any generation.  Within the plot of the New Testament this open door remains God’s extraordinary pledge that the world’s predictable downward spirals are not the last word.  

Stitch that on your banners.   Set it in your church windows. Love will achieve its outcome and hope will have its day.