“The women fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)  

This seems to be how Mark’s gospel originally ended – the women coming to the tomb and being given the message about Jesus’ resurrection from this mysterious “young man,” but running away terrified, not passing the message on. It was only later that verses were added to describe the risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene and the other disciples.  

At first the good news seems unbelievable, and the horror and shock and pain of what the women had experienced just two days earlier was still with them. Hope doesn’t come easily. Resurrection isn’t encountered at once. Easter can be a slow motion journey that doesn’t erase past suffering in one glorious moment. In fact all the gospel accounts of the friends and followers of Jesus encountering him risen from the dead describe how halting and confused it all was, and how sad and scared they were.  

Our journey of faith is much like that, in my experience: halting, confused, with periods of suffering that can’t be erased just because we’re believers. Hope, recovery, resurrection come slowly, and we can’t leapfrog into the Alleluias and bypass the darkness.  

Back when we were in church for our Easter Day services, I used to have the children hunt for coloured pieces of card shaped like butterflies and flowers, hidden all over the church, that they’d then stick onto the large wooden cross that was set up at the front, to decorate it. Sometimes I talked to them about the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly being like Jesus being raised from the dead, leaving the cocoon of his grave cloths in the tomb.  

But lately I’ve been looking more deeply into the biology of that metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly, because I think it has something to tell us about our own experience of resurrection.  

Do you know what actually happens in that cocoon or chrysalis that the caterpillar makes for itself? It doesn’t just magically grow beautiful butterfly wings in there: it digests its whole body with its stomach enzymes and turns itself into caterpillar soup. And it’s out of that broken down, liquidized soup of a body that the makings of a whole new creature emerge.    

The new life comes from being broken down and re-formed.  

Have you experienced a time of being broken down? Of having to let go of what you used to do, be, or know? A time that felt as if you were losing everything? A time of grief and great fear.  

That’s what Jesus’s friends felt: Mary Magdalene, Peter, John, all the others. They’d seen the worst, the very worst, and they felt as if everything was lost and over. The truth of the resurrection didn’t come upon them all at once. They were still in that dark place of brokenness when the angel spoke.  

I know that for some of you that dark place is all too real. I know that some of you are suffering a loss – the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship. Some of you have been hurt by a person close to you, or are hurting because of the suffering of someone you love. Some of you are facing life-threatening illness with all the physical and emotional suffering that brings.  

And all of us, in this community of St Aidan’s, in this city, throughout the world, have suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all endured some hard, dark times of letting go, loss, change not of our choosing and not in our control. Caterpillar soup.  

But in that soupy mess of broken down tissue there are some groups of cells with the wonderful name of imaginal discs. These are the cells that don’t break down, but become the new parts of the adult butterfly: the antennae, the legs, the wings. It’s as though these cells have the imagined future contained within them, which they then become. They imagine new life. They imagine and make real resurrection.  

And so it can be with us, starting two thousand years ago. The angel told the grieving women at the tomb that Jesus was not there, dead, but was risen, and he showed them the tomb’s emptiness – the very emptiness pointing to resurrection, inviting them to imagine it, making it real. St Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth to “hold firmly” to the good news of Christ’s resurrection – hold firmly because it’s not obvious, it’s counter-intuitive, but it’s our salvation.  

Our times in tomb-like darkness, our times of suffering, contain within them the imaginal discs of new life, the seeds of resurrection. God’s creative power, God’s divine imagination of what can be, is embedded deep within all things –in the caterpillar’s cocoon, in the prisoner’s cell, in the hospital intensive care bed.  

We sometimes call resurrection “the new creation,” because just as God created all things in the beginning, imagining what could be and calling it into existence, so too God made a new creation in Jesus’ resurrection, bringing life out of death, hope out of despair, healing from suffering. And God continues to work that new creation in us, even in our darkest hour.  

“The women fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” But we know that later they encountered the risen Christ, their fear left them, their grief was transformed to joy, and their lives were changed for ever.  

May it be so for us. May you know and feel that the seeds of resurrection are planted by God deep within you; the imaginal cells of new life (even beyond your understanding) are embedded at the heart of your being.Amen.