What Cannot End Us
Mark 16:17–18 NRSV
“And these signs will accompany those who believe…”
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These words are difficult. Very difficult.
They were spoken on Sunday and I found myself wishing I had not heard them.
They sound like promises of protection.
As if belief could shield the body from harm.
As if faith could prevent what we know, from experience, is not prevented.
I have lived too much to hear them that way.
Bodies fail.
Suffering comes.
Prayer does not always turn it aside.
I cannot wish them away.
So what are we to do with words like these?
Perhaps they are not describing a life without harm.
Perhaps they are trying—imperfectly—to speak about a life
in which harm is no longer the final authority.
They will pick up serpents.
They will drink what should destroy them.
They will lay hands on the sick.
It reads like invulnerability.
But it may be something else.
It may be the language of people who have come to believe
that even what wounds them
cannot end what has begun.
Not because suffering disappears.
Because the meaning of suffering has changed.
The cross remains.
The wounds remain.
The body still bears them.
And still—he stands.
If these words promise anything, it is not that we will be spared.
It is that what we endure
does not have the last word.
I cannot say this easily.
I have stood where this was tested.
But I cannot say that suffering is all that remains.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not enough to explain.
Not enough to prove.
Enough that I cannot call it final.
Perhaps that is what these words are reaching for.
Not protection.
But persistence.
Not safety.
I know one thing:
A life cannot be closed by what would destroy it.
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Prayer
God, when suffering speaks as if it is final, teach me to live as though it is not.
The World Is Too Much
John 20:26 NRSV
“Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them…”
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The world is too much.
Not only in its weight, though it is heavy.
In its insistence. Its density. Its claim to be all that there is.
What can be seen, measured, named—this is what we learn to trust.
This is what presses in on us.
This is what fills the room.
And so we live inside it.
Easter does not remove us from the world.
It does something more unsettling.
It asks whether what we have taken to be the whole of reality
is, in fact, only what we can perceive.
He stood among them.
The doors were locked.
Nothing had changed that could be pointed to.
The room remained what it was.
And still, he was there.
Not outside the world.
Not beyond it.
Within it—without being contained by it.
They did not recognize him immediately.
Not because he was absent.
Because what they were looking at
was still being interpreted by a world that had not yet made room
for what had happened.
I know that condition.
It is not that presence is nowhere to be found.
It is that the world, as I have learned to perceive it,
leaves little space for anything that does not behave
as presence used to behave.
I do not fail to perceive because nothing is there.
I fail because too much else is.
Too much that insists on finality.
Too much that closes the case.
Too much that declares what can and cannot remain.
And yet—
I cannot say that absence is complete.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not consistently. Not in a way I can prove.
But enough that I cannot live as though what is gone
is all that is real.
To live inside resurrection is not to see clearly.
It is to discover that what I see
is no longer the measure of what is.
The world is too much.
And still, it is not all there is.
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Prayer
God, loosen the hold of what I can see, so that I may not miss what is already present.
Unless I Touch
John 20:27 NRSV
“Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”
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Thomas is not there the first time.
He misses the moment the others describe—the presence, the voice, the showing of hands. By the time he hears it, it has already become testimony. Something reported. Something he is expected to accept.
He does not.
Unless I see… unless I touch…
It sounds like doubt.
It is something else.
Thomas refuses to say more than he can sustain as true. He will not borrow certainty from someone else’s experience. If this is real, it must be real in a way he can trust.
I understand that instinct.
I cannot insist that I feel her presence. It does not come when I ask for it. It does not remain when I try to hold it. Most mornings, I weep if I do not distract myself. That is what I can say with certainty.
And still, I cannot say she is gone.
Absence does not behave cleanly. It does not remain contained. Something in my experience resists that conclusion. Not enough to prove. Not enough to name. Enough that I cannot call it absence.
So I do not say that I know.
I say that I hold.
Thomas stands in a different place.
He will not hold what he has not encountered. He will not say that something is real until it meets him in a way he can trust.
And Jesus does not refuse him.
He does not correct him. He does not shame him for asking. He offers what Thomas requires.
Reach out your hand.
Touch.
The wounds remain.
Not erased. Not explained. Still present in the body that stands before him.
And Thomas answers.
My Lord and my God.
We often hear what comes next as a correction.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.
But it may not be a rebuke.
It may be a description.
There are those who encounter and those who are asked to live without that kind of certainty. Those who are given something they can touch, and those who must remain inside something they cannot hold.
I find myself there.
Not seeing.
Not touching.
Not able to insist.
And yet, unable to say that nothing remains.
To live inside resurrection is not to feel presence consistently, or to prove it.
It is to discover that absence is no longer a sufficient explanation.
Thomas needed to touch in order to trust.
I am learning to trust what I cannot touch—and to admit how difficult that is.
God meets him in what he needs.
God meets me in what I cannot hold.
I do not yet know how both can be true.
But I will not reduce either one.
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Prayer
God, meet me in what I can touch and in what I cannot, and give me the courage to remain without resolving either.
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Do Not Hold On
John 20:17 NRSV
“Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me…”
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She does not recognize him at first.
Not because he is hidden. Because grief has arranged the world in a way that leaves no room for anything else. She is looking for a body. Something that can be found, carried, returned.
She is still speaking when he interrupts her.
“Mary.”
Not an explanation. Not an argument.
Her name.
And in that moment, everything shifts.
Recognition does not come through sight. It comes through being addressed. Through hearing what only one voice can say in that way.
She turns toward him.
Not gradually. Not cautiously. All at once.
“Rabbouni.”
She reaches for him.
Of course she does.
Not to test what she sees. Not to prove it. To hold it. To keep it from being taken again. To close her hands around what has already been lost once.
And that is where he stops her.
Do not hold on to me.
Not a rejection. Not a withdrawal. A boundary.
What is now present cannot be held the way it once was.
Resurrection does not return things to their previous form. It is not resuscitation. It does not restore what was lost so that it can be kept again. It changes what it means for something to be real.
She is not being asked to let go because he is leaving.
She is being asked to let go because he is no longer confined to what she can grasp.
The garden is quiet.
No crowd. No explanation. No resolution offered.
Only presence.
She does not understand it.
She cannot hold it.
And still, she has encountered it.
We are often taught to look for clarity. For something that settles the moment, explains what has happened, secures what has been given.
But this moment refuses that.
She is recognized.
She responds.
She reaches.
And she is interrupted.
Not so that the moment can end—
but so that it can become something she cannot possess.
Silence would have left her alone.
Quiet allowed her to hear her name.
And what she heard was not something she could keep.
Only something she could receive.
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Prayer
God, teach me to receive what is real, even when I cannot hold it.
They Were Afraid
Mark 16:8 NRSV
“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
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It ends there.
No appearance.
No explanation.
No resolution.
They run.
Not because they doubt what they have seen. Not because they have rejected it. Because something has happened that they do not yet know how to live inside.
The tomb is empty.
The body is gone.
The message has been given.
He is not here. He is going ahead of you.
And they are afraid.
We expect more from them.
We expect understanding. Composure. Something that resembles faith. We expect the story to move quickly toward clarity—toward proclamation, toward confidence.
It does not.
They say nothing.
Not because nothing has happened. Because what has happened has not yet become speakable. The world has shifted in a way that has no name.
Fear is not the opposite of faith here.
Fear is what happens when reality changes before we understand how.
We speak now with the advantage of distance. With language that has been shaped and refined and repeated until it feels settled. We say resurrection as if it were a word that resolves things.
It does not.
It unsettles them.
It unsettles everything.
The world is no longer something they can stand outside and make sense of. They are inside it now. And for a moment, there is no way forward except to run.
Mark does not fix this.
He does not soften their fear. He does not carry them forward into understanding. He leaves them there—mid-sentence, unfinished.
Because the story does not end with them.
It continues wherever it is being read.
We are not asked to move past their fear.
We are asked to recognize it.
Not as failure.
As the beginning of any honest response to a world that has already changed, even if we do not yet know how to live inside it.
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Prayer
God, meet me in what I do not yet know how to believe.
On a whim... 