The Ground Is Still Shaking

I've been in enough spiritual direction sessions to know that most people don't arrive hoping for an earthquake.

They come looking for clarity. For resolution. For the kind of settled peace that would let them finally exhale. They've already done their grieving, or they think they have. They've made their arrangements, accepted their losses, and organized their pain into something manageable. They come the way you visit a grave — to pay respects to something that is, definitively, over.

The women in Matthew 28 show up at the tomb the same way. Spices ready. Grief organized. Operating under the oldest law of human existence: dead things stay dead.

Then the earth moves.

What strikes me — and what I keep returning to in spiritual direction work — is that the earthquake doesn't stop before the angel speaks. The ground is still shaking when the announcement comes: Do not be afraid. The women encounter the news of the Resurrection while their knees are still unsteady. Matthew is honest about what they feel on the way out: "fear and great joy." Not clarity. Not calm. Both things, simultaneously, in a body that is still catching up to what the soul just received.

This is what I often see in people at the threshold of genuine spiritual transformation. They want the trembling to stop before they start moving. They want the disorientation to resolve before they trust what they've been told. But the women don't wait. They run while the ground is still vibrating. They carry the news while they're still shaking.

Luther's baptismal theology names this precisely. He says Baptism signifies that the old creature — the one who has made peace with the graveyard, who assumes death has the final word — is drowned. Not reformed. Not improved. Drowned. The stone of the old life is rolled away not because you were strong enough to move it, but because God was gracious enough to shatter it.

The earthquake of Easter is not a past event you observe. It is a current reality you inhabit.

If you are in a season of disruption — if something you assumed was settled has turned out not to be — you may be living inside the seismos without recognizing it as grace. The disorientation is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It may be the first indication that something is being made new.

The tomb is empty. The stone has become a bench. The trembling is not the enemy of faith — it may be the shape faith takes at the beginning.

​If you're navigating a season like this and want a companion for the journey, I work with people in spiritual direction. The contact page is the place to start.

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​Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area
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