From Western and Eastern Christian traditions, resurrection/anastasis carries an individual and a communal quality. In the days after the tragic school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and in dozens of others before, the question arises: How do communities, families, and friends grieve, lament, and heal after death? Grief is a long and painful journey. How do survivors live on after experiences of sickness, disease, hatred, violence, and death? How do communities move from grief to restoration? This scripture reading gives us a glimpse into life in community after death.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, his friends, his followers, share something with the parents, grandparents, and teachers who witness such violence and killing. They carry unbearable pain. The world has long been filled with violence against the innocent—children, people who are poor, those living with mental illness, those who are estranged and isolated—and against Jesus himself. Often the messengers of movements of nonviolence are blamed. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and the apostles are blamed for the violent acts of others.

Mourning can be done alone; yet within the embrace of community, those who suffer from unspeakable sorrow caused by violence, neglect, and conflict heal and keep an open heart.

In the days following the school shooting in Parkland, young people—like the apostles in today’s reading—raise their voices to those with political power and come together to say, “This must stop. We will rise to end gun violence.” Motivated by pain, sorrow, and suffering they are rising up. They are turning their grief into a movement for nonviolence.