Help Down Here

James K. A. Smith describes a scene I like from the TV series The West Wing. White House chief of staff Leo McGarry is talking to one of his employees who’s struggling with PTSD. Leo tells him a parable that he thinks will help:

This guy’s walking down the street when he falls down a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. 

A psychiatrist passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey, you! Can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription and throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts, “Father, I’m down in this hole. Can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. 

Then a friend walks by. “Hey, Joe, it’s me! Can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. 

Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” 

The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

This Easter season is about finding the way out. At our clearest moments, we recognize how we need more than self-help hacks or insight delivered from a distance. We need someone to show up in the scenes of our lives, someone who’s “been down here before,” and who can lead us out of our small, walled-in life. 

Christians during this time of year recall how the promise of all this gets lived out in a story. It’s enacted before us in a vivid way. For as we read and see in the Gospel of Luke, “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the [burial] spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, [and] when they went in, they did not find the body.”

They are bewildered. Who wouldn’t be?

Two messengers from another realm appear, saying, “He is not here. He is risen.” Jesus has been raised. Conquering death.

I find it interesting (and not accidental) that the women were the first to receive the message. And I think it’s fascinating that the apostles, when the women come back breathless with the news, received the women’s word as “an idle tale.”

But something in what the women said nags at Peter. Perhaps all of them. He began to wonder against hope if the “tale” could be true.

“Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in,” Luke tells us. He had to come and see for himself the empty tomb, the burial linens cast aside. 

And “then he went home, amazed at what had happened.”

Luke tells this story to make clear that the women’s tale is not an impossible legend; it’s a story that can resonate. It’s not wishful thinking or mere hearsay. It’s something real, something worthy of belief, news that evokes hope.

Lots of us feel stuck, wedged in to old patterns, wishing for another kind of life, but pretty sure it’s beyond us. The resurrection suggests that Jesus, who had jumped into hole of our earthly life, leads us beyond what hems us in. That even includes death, or our fear of it. He’s able to say, “I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

Tim Jones