The Passion Gospel is read.

Then, they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

These were his disciples, his followers, his confidantes; he had told them that this would happen, and that it wouldn’t be the end. But they had seen him helpless on the wooden gibbet; they had seen him mocked and pierced; they could not leave him defenseless against the elements or the wild beasts, be they animal or human. They rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

I don’t know if it was an act of faith, expecting that if Jesus were to rise from the dead, rebuild the temple of his body in three days, that he would at least be able to cope with a rock, or whether it was an act of doubt and despair, a walling off the hope that had attended them as long as he was with them, now crucified along with him. I do think that in the moment, it was an act of love, of tenderness, of care for the body they had known. In the moment, caught between grief and wonder, wrenching hope and twisting despair, they did the only thing that they could think of to honour the love they had shared: they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

However we come to the Cross tonight, there is a reason we come here, to sit in its sorrow together instead of alone, to watch the shadows gather and hear the silence that follows the death of God, made all too human on the cross. Whether we come to hollow out our despondency, whether we are trying to scrabble together hope, whether we are bringing a heart of stone or a bleeding side, there is tenderness that awaits us here.

There is a tenderness that doesn’t insist that we see the Cross only as prelude to Resurrection. There is a love that rolls the rock across the entrance to the tomb in order to protect our grief, to honour our sorrow, to keep out the wild beasts that have no mercy. 

There is a tenderness that persists in hope on our behalf, knowing that even when God is dead and buried, God is not gone, that eternity cannot be so easily ended as by our devices. That the rock is no barrier if God should choose to move it.

The emptiness of the Cross that night seemed hollow to those who had not yet witnessed the emptiness of the tomb. Yet even in his absence, Jesus called out of those who tended to him the kind of love and mercy, the kind of persistent insistence on the goodness of God that he had embodied. They rolled a stone across the entrance of the tomb, aching to hold on to him, knowing that in order to do that, they must go home, and light the candles for their sabbath prayers; to keep the faith, however shadowed with doubt it might become, to say a blessing, and let the rock, the rock of our salvation, be its seal.

For God alone my soul in silence waits;
For Christ alone is my rock and my salvation. (based on Psalm 62:1-2)