Heartbeat

There was a heartbeat, heard only by God and by rejoicing angels and insects in the darkness of a death-cave. Before the sun’s rising, there was a heartbeat and resurrected life.

Sabbath ended with Sunday’s breaking light and on a dirt path leading to a tomb the steps of three women scattered dust, causing the earth to beat with urgency.

There was a rhythm to the morning felt only by God, and rejoicing angels, and spiders and butterflies, and those that sensed such things. The work of wrapping the body of a Savior needed doing but the body was gone.

Quickly did the women mean to flee but brighter than the breaking morning sun, gleaming like lightening thrown against the morning sky, an angel stood in the way of running. The rhythm of his wings beat the morning air into a symphony of power, it shook the earth into the service of God. The tomb’s stone shuddered; its tonnage broke free, thunderously shouting from its sunken place.

Who remembered? Who remembered that one Sunday before, the Savior said, “If the people are silent, the stones of the earth will shout the glory of God” and now, against gravity, against the edict of all authority, against the power of evil, the stone declared the glory of God.

The angel folded his wings, quieted the morning, and sat upon the stone. Was he smiling when he said, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is risen from the dead!”

To some whose hopes lay buried in that tomb, the women’s cry of joy seemed nonsense. They did not, could not, hear the heartbeat. They did not sense its rhythm till Jesus walked patiently among them.

“How slow of heart,” he said. And quietly, patiently, he explained what, at first, they could not hear. Quietly, patiently, he pulled them close, he called them to listen. Hear it?

More than once the Savior said, “Listen, and understand.”

Post by Barb Pine