Then went in also that other disciple, who came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.
John 20, 8

The night had left its tears of dew over the poppies. In the soft air of that Sunday morning, the last mist were still hovering around the hills of Jerusalem, fading remains of an immemorial nightly mystery. On that morning after the traditional rest, the murmur of the antique city was about to resume. But for the time being, the April light was flowing again over the roofs, slipping in the alleys and silently entering through windows. In the midst of their din, the people were starting to move again in the city, without even noticing the hug of silent peace with which the night was welcoming the extreme fringe of the first east. But will the thick ever be able to grasp the subtle? “The light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not.” That sentence had remained in me my whole life long and it was resonating again on the Sunday morning of April 1999. Sitting in silence on the hills of Ein Karem, I was thinking of another Sunday morning, a long time ago.

Most of the city’s inhabitants were still sleeping, some under the shock and the confusion of these first days of April 33. The majority was sleeping off their indifference, without paying attention to the curious silence hovering around the hills of Judah that morning. The night had already started to clear out. A young woman was hurrying in the still vague dawn. At the end of a non-stop run, Mary knocked discretely, but not without some frenzy, at the door of a secret abode. After some pregnant moments, two young men emerged hurtling off. Peter and John were now speeding in the opposite direction. By then, the night had almost completely receded. The light was about to fill up heaven and earth, but men were sleeping. In fact, they are still sleeping.

John was faster than Peter, so he reached the sepulchre first. Nevertheless, he awaited his friend and offered him the privilege of entering first.

Then went in also that other disciple, who came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

The two thousand years which followed this event largely rely on what men wanted to understand or believe in front of the empty sepulchre of Jesus.

A young exalted woman running in the night, on her way to announce to men a stirring news: it had to be a woman. Almost two thousand years later, many religious men are just starting to recover from it and are at last relaxing, whereas others are still struggling with it, muttering under their mitre and desperately hanging on to their rigid crozier. One has to understand: what became a religion of men who, for a long time, has misunderstood, feared and despised women has started with a woman, the one Jesus cherished among all, to the extent that it is to her that he first manifested after his death. But beyond these stories of men and women, let us ask ourselves if we are ready to open our door to Mary of Magdala, who has come to bring us the news of our deliverance. How can our full sepulchre grasp the profound meaning of the empty sepulchre?

The version of the resurrection that has finally prevailed between the Christian sects, which later became the official religion of the Roman Empire and of the whole West, is that the body of Jesus has “risen from the dead”. A large portion of the Christian structure relies on the idea that Jesus has suffered and died for our sins, that he rose from the dead in the third day, as he had predicted, and that we are also going to rise at the end of times; of course, we’ll go to heaven only if we believe in that story. The thing is that not only the grotesque idea of a corpse or a personality brought back to life is useless, but it covers up a reality that is much more elegant and deeper than what cohorts of men together have adopted as the official belief for the last two thousand years. Men are so identified to their body and their personality that they want to hang on to them at all cost. It is not enough for them to spend fortunes to dye their white hair, dress their baldness, to make their skin up, to modify their appearance through surgical violence and inject themselves hormones that will permit them to sleep few more years on earth: they push the obsession to the point of believing that one day their body will regain life after its disappearance. But until man is able to sit still in front of what is, he is dogged by misery and he is longing for a relief. As long as one wants to apply his make up to what is, he is harassed by an unending agitation.

The late modifiers of the officially recognized gospels, in a move to prevent skepticism, have included some passages in which Jesus shows that he is really there in flesh, such as when he asks Thomas to put his hand on his wounds. But other passages and other texts on which they could not get their hands remain troubling for that naive interpretation. Thus, when Jesus appears to Mary of Magdala, he tells her: “ Don’t touch me… ” Later, he joins his disciples by going through a wall… The Gospel of Mary is more explicit: Mary (of Magdala) speaks of her vision of the master. So, 2000 years later, the mist of that morning has not dissipated for all.

Will we ever know what has really happened in those days? Moreover, is this the most important? The historical facts of the life of the master of Galilee are far from being uninteresting, of course, but it is the forefeeling of what we are that can make us understand events, not the opposite. Men have not grasped the beauty of the empty sepulchre, because they don’t know the nature of the body, of thought, life, incarnation and death. They would like to believe into something, hoping that it will help them to see clearly and they turn it into a dogma, a duty. But one has to see before he believes; not to see with physical eyes a corpse brought back to life, but really see beyond all images. That is the beauty. The essential is not duty, it is beauty. The beauty is to see that one does not see, that everything one sees is image, representation. Was the Master not saying to his contemporaries: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say ‘We see’, your sin remains .” The essential is to see what is here, without any comment, without any preconceived idea to justify.

It is exactly what is said about the disciple whom Jesus loved: “He saw and believed.”

What did John see in this still vague April morning? Nothing. Nothing that his memory was suggesting him to look for. Traces: that’s all what the two disciples have seen at the end of their frantic run: linen cloths and a handkerchief. In other words: nothing. That is our salary for a frantic run through a life full of useless worries and vain calculations. That’s the reality here and now. That’s the present: it is a present, a gift. But when one has dogmas to respect or prophecies to corroborate, one cannot see the beauty: the real. Men have really no idea of what they are missing by trying to see “something” at all cost in the sepulchre and in their own mind!

In relation to that, the story of physics provides us with an interesting example. At the end of the nineteenth century, physicists were trying to precisely determine the speed of the earth around the sun through an interferometer. The essence of the experience was to compare the paths followed by two beams of light, one in the direction of the motion of the earth, the other perpendicular to it. The interference pattern would provide a precise measure of the speed, which was known to be approximately 30 km per second. But the result was null: according to that experiment, the earth was not moving! Artificial and inelegant theories were concocted in order to explain the disturbing result, but to no avail. To succeed, one would have had to question dogmas so anchored into the brains that nobody noticed them anymore. Nobody except one. Einstein dared to gaze at reality exactly as the experiment exposed it and to consider what came out of it. The result was one of the most stirring, elegant and fertile scientific theories of history: the theory of relativity. Most of important discoveries have been made by men and women capable of accepting what is and of appreciating the consequences. These discoveries, like those of relativity, quantum physics, radioactivity, penicillin and many others have often taken place following innocent observations. The profound truth of our existence is no exception.

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
— To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
— The dog did nothing in the night-time.
— That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

So, John sees nothing and he believes. For the last two thousand years men don’t believe. They complain, demand their due, claim their rights. They demand to see something they can have. They want something at all cost: objects, events, money, power, fame, new sources of excitement. The more they have, the emptier they feel and the more they demand. Their brain is not an empty sepulchre; it is a greedy bottomless pit. At the start of the third millennium, the fat cats of economic growth are increasingly bored. Even those of us who have toured the garden of mundane gains and have gone out empty are often only projecting their greed on another level. They then need new beliefs, a new religion, some revelation from beyond, signs, miracles, a new savior, prophecies, angels blowing the trumpets of doomsday, a thunder-like voice from heaven, and what not. Greed is alive and well. Ignorance is alive and well.

It is ignorance which makes us not believe and want to fill up the sepulchre at all cost with a story: a credible story, a respectable story, a moral story, a story to put us asleep. On that morning of April 33, “the disciple Jesus loved” has not only seen that the sepulchre was empty, but also that everything is empty. There is nothing to see, nothing to grasp, nothing to understand for the disciple Jesus loves. Any real understanding points towards that nothing. The sepulchre has always been empty. It is the sepulchre of mental representation. Another word for ignorance is: habit. It is habit which leads us to look for something. Memory knows only things: they are mental impressions left by past experiences of the senses. For a limited thing is nothing else than the mental representation of a reality of something which is forever ungraspable. That which supports things is nothing in terms of objects of perception. That which is generally called the body is an image fabricated by the brain from the activity of the senses, and man’s thought has identified to it. That is why the idea of the body rising up from the dead pleases surface thinking. When one knows what is the body, one doesn’t need anymore to believe in magic, because reality is largely sufficient to satisfy us and to marvel us.

What we are is not the toy of time. Being something or someone is living in misery. Everything that has appeared soon or later disappears. Everything that is composed will decompose. Why that stubbornness in wanting to live in a future which is never simple or in a decomposed past? Can’t we see that that’s what reduces us to haunting and tiring imperatives? Why that clumsy way to conjugate our existence? How about living in the present of the indicative, or better in the infinitive? What we call the world is only a story coming from That which is not a story and which therefore cannot be told. Not only the world is coming from That, but also it is That: what else could there be? The world is That, but it cannot be it as That, only as the world. The beauty is that we no longer need to deserve something, attain something, prove something, maintain something or justify something. What we are, we cannot know and we don’t have to know either: we are it. We don’t have to rise from the dead, because we will never die. In fact, we were never born. Let’s see it. We don’t exist in time, it is time which exists in us. We don’t become anything. There is a story — the story of the world — there is the belief in the images as separate realities in the story, and there is, one day, the cessation of that belief. That is the good news, the gospel, the deliverance.

The Tao is like an empty vessel which no use fills up
A Bottomless out of which every thing has drawn its origin.
Tao-Te-King

The light can burst out only from the empty sepulchre. In a way, one can say that it is the night, which generates the daylight, because one who is looking for something must meet nothingness before being taken by That which is neither something nor nothing. Light penetrates silently in the world, as it penetrates without any din in a forest, in a room or in a brain. Suddenly, it is there. Light is the life of all that exists. Because that light in itself is nothing — nothing to grasp — it generates everything. The real light doesn’t come from a revolution, but revolution comes from light.

We don’t have to burden our brain with our stories just as we fill up an old attic. Everything is in what is here and now. The present moment is full like a lake: we don’t have to add a fabricated tomorrow. With our constant desires to intervene in what we call our life, we ruin the present. Just to see and to believe. To see that everything we want can only come from memory, from the pile of residues of past experiments. To see that any expectation that it will be better in heaven, in the next incarnation or next week, is missing the beauty. That is the usual clumsiness of short range thinking, to which the absence of agitation is equivalent to negating human suffering. It is the surface thinking which is convinced that in a profound tranquillity what has to be accomplished will not be accomplished. That is the lack of confidence that the Son of man denounces again and again, when he calls out to his contemporaries and to the entire mankind: “Oh ye of little faith!” Faith is not believing in a story, it is to be tranquil and confident enough to not need anymore stories. The empty sepulchre is the culmination of every incarnation and not only that of Jesus: the realization that what we are is not something to grasp. “The light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not”, writes John in his prologue. Darkness (thought which pretends to be knowing) have not grasped the light (That which gives its being to things), because it cannot. Light is not grasped, it is grasping: it is not stroke, it is striking. When one thinks he found it, he finds himself in front of the empty sepulchre. If at that time grace is showering, then one doesn’t try to build a story to burden the sepulchre or men’s brain. That, as the saying goes, one has to see it to believe it.

1. Scientists from Oxford University based themselves on calculations to reconstruct the Jewish calendar and to date a lunar eclipse which, according to the Scriptures and other documents, has followed Jesus crucifixion. They concluded that he died on April 3, 33, which leave the discovery of the empty sepulchre at the early hours of April 5 of that year.
2. Mary of Magdala
3. John 9, 41