Even after they hear Mary’s “I have seen the Lord,” the disciples stay locked in a room, hiding from the Jews. Throughout John’s resurrection story, the leading disciples remain utterly, ambiguously silent. They enter the tomb, but neither speaks to or of Jesus until he joins them later for a seaside breakfast. Peter and the Beloved Disciple see the grave clothes neatly arranged, like a priest’s after the day of atonement. She’s not entirely wrong, because Jesus strides the graveyard as the new Adam, a living man among the dead, ready to delve while Mary spans. She at first mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Like the Bride in the Song of Songs, Mary carries on a desperate search for her Lord, weeping outside the tomb that has become a holy place flanked by angels. Thomas famously comes slowly to faith, but so does everyone else. In some Christian traditions, the octave of Easter is the feast of St. But in John’s Gospel, Easter has an octave, since Jesus’s resurrection is replayed eight days later when Jesus appears to Thomas. The temple dedication climaxed with a solemn assembly on the eighth day.Įaster is itself an octave, striking all the notes of the old creation on the first day of the new. Lepers, men with discharges, women with flows of blood were cleansed on the eighth day. Aaron entered the priesthood on the eighth day. Firstborn animals were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth day after birth. Fittingly, Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. The octave is rooted in creation: After the Lord God strums his six-plus-one song of creation, the cycle begins again with the day after the Sabbath, a first day which is also an eighth.
Octaves mark new beginnings in the Bible. It’s not the first note played again, but the first note at a higher pitch.
An octave is a repetition, but a repetition with difference. Sunday is the octave of Easter, which commemorates the eighth day after Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.