Hear It On Sunday, Use It on Monday: Rolling the Stone Away

This morning during Easter Sunday worship we read from Mark 16:1-8 – the scene in which Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus and Salome arrive at the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with oil and spices. When I got home from church I saw that my dad had emailed me a devotion on the same verses by Father Richard Rohr {as an aside, if you are not familiar with Rohr, visit his website. You can subscribe to his daily email devotions – they are very short and really good! I love the way this guy interprets the Gospels!}.

In his devotion Rohr notes that as the women walk toward the tomb, they ask themselves, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:3).

“We still have the same human question,” writes Rohr. “Who will roll away the stone of our various blockages and our blindness?”

The answer, of course, is Jesus. But it’s the question the women ask and the image of the stone in front of the tomb that gets me thinking. For me, the stone that blocks the entrance of the tomb represents all my sins that stand in the way of my relationship with God. What are my stones? I could probably name more than twenty right off the top of my head: envy, coveting, impatience, gossip, selfishness, pride, distraction, doubt and self-righteousness are the ones that first spring to mind. Each one is a stone, a heavy burden that focuses my attention on myself and away from God.

Yet what does Jesus do with these stones that impede access to him? He takes them and rolls them away:

And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back – it was very large” (Mark 16:4).

No stone is too large for Jesus to move. No sin is too large for Jesus to push back.

As I sit on the couch on this Easter Sunday afternoon, while the scarlet cardinal swoops gracefully to the feeder and violets dot the lawn like wild boutonnieres and the dishwasher whirs the dinner china clean, I feel light and unencumbered and blissfully free. Two thousand years ago Jesus rolled the stone away. He did it then and he does it now, for you and me – today, tomorrow and forevermore.  

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