One of my favorite books is Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford. An occasionally vulgar, frequently funny, and yet completely orthodox defense of Christian belief, Unapologetic has its own retelling of the Gospel story that is simply brilliant. That chapter, “Yeshua,” ends like this: 

Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough.

Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.

“Far more can be mended than you know.” In my office, I have an autographed picture of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, and I would gladly give it up to write one sentence that good in my lifetime. You could fill a room with theology books and sermons and commentaries that don’t explain the Good News as well as that. And it has the added benefit of being true. As we wake up on Easter, alone and scared, just as the first disciples did, we have evidence everywhere that, in the midst of a health crisis unprecedented in our lifetime, the world is also healing itself.

• Even as people are isolated in their own homes, old grievances are being put aside. I myself know of two different people that have reconnected with family members after years of estrangement.
• Reports from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and all around the world tell us that crime is down.
• The water in the canals of Venice is clearer than anyone can remember, because there are no cruise ships and launches to drop petroleum and stir up the silt.
• Air contamination in Delhi and Rio de Janeiro and other chronically polluted cities is one-tenth of normal. In fact, some reports from China suggest that more people (77,000 by one count) with chronic lung disease were spared death because of the cleaner air than died from coronavirus.
• Along with a viral pandemic, we have a charitable epidemic. It comes from the wealthy: Bill Gates says that he will throw billions of dollars into producing vaccines even before they’re fully tested, just to be ready with the first one that does prove itself. And it comes from ordinary folk, whether it is seamstresses sewing face masks, or small distilleries making hand sanitizer, or, in our own Advent family, food bank volunteers delivering groceries to hungry families.
• In the Hong Kong zoo, a pair of giant pandas has mated for the first time in more than ten years, apparently because of the increased privacy provided by the zoo’s closing (proving that pandas have a more highly developed sense of modesty than half of Hollywood, including anyone named Kardashian).
• Here at home, I have been cutting the grass less often, and leaving it longer when I do cut it, because there are so many other things to attend to (and because I’m essentially lazy). What I didn’t expect is that the grass likes being left alone, and is sending out runners all over the bare spots in the yard.

And, interestingly, we have an incipient outbreak of equity — or, at least, a renewed consciousness of how inequitable our society has become. The virus’s tendency to prey on the chronically ill and undernourished, which in the United States means disproportionally people of color, reminds us of how inequitable much of modern life is. For instance, in Chicago, which has a 30% African American population, fully 70% of the Covid-19 deaths are African American. It’s like holding a match up to a paper with invisible ink writing — the message just appears. And people are responding. Governors and mayors urge that services and supplies be redirected to historically underserved areas. All across the country, thousands of nonviolent prisoners, many of whom never belonged in prison in the first place, are being released from incarceration to minimize virus outbreaks in overcrowded prisons and jails. Multiple senators and Congressmen who liquidated their portfolios even as the President was telling the nation that the coronavirus wasn’t as bad as the ordinary flu now face prosecution. Cities and states across the nation are ordering a halt to residential evictions, and paying emergency benefits without regard to immigration status. School districts are providing every student that needs one with a computer or tablet, to avoid a new era of educational segregation.

“Far more can be mended than you know.” In John’s gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are “It is finished.” Mark and Matthew say that Jesus let out a loud cry from the cross, and then dies. We’re not told, however, what that cry was. Luke has a different, and for me a more satisfying, ending; Jesus says “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Maybe that was the loud cry: a cry just as anguished as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” A cry of resignation, that Jesus has done all he can do, and turns it over to his father.

Which is exactly what we are now asked to do. It should be some solace that the disciples, the weekend after the crucifixion, were hiding, despairing that their leader had been killed and their hopes dashed, and terrified that they would be next. They didn’t know how the story would turn out. Just like us, today. We are at home, alone, scared and frustrated. Scared for ourselves and our families. Scared for the church and the world. Not knowing how this will turn out. And yet, all around us, there are signs of things mending themselves. Life is not finished; it is only renewing.

But at some point it is up to us to continue the renewing. Samuel Johnson said that many people are more inclined to be friends of goodness than actually good themselves. It will not be enough to note the inequities around us. We will be required to do something about it. When Clementine Churchill told her husband Winston that his losing the 1945 election was a blessing, legend has it that he replied “Mrs. Churchill, if this is a blessing it is a well-disguised one.” No, the virus is not a blessing. But we do now have the opportunity to allow God’s healing power to work, and to join in that work.

Indeed, far more can be mended than we know. Happy Easter.