Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
There’s always a moment during Holy Week or Easter Vigil when I start to wonder whether we’re really going to get to the end—where I start to feel like the somberness of Good Friday or the quiet darkness of the Vigil we gathered for this evening will actually be the whole event. Of course, rationally, I know that Easter is coming, I know that we will joyfully proclaim the Lord’s resurrection with all the attendant fanfare—but somehow as it draws close it feels like it might not happen. And so there’s always a kind of surprise for me when the lights all come up and the Great Noise is played on the organ—there’s a feeling of newness and freshness as the first Mass of Easter proceeds in all this brightness and cheer.
I wonder if you ever feel something like that as we journey through Lent and Holy Week together—if, during those 40 days, it’s ever hard to see to the other side of the Cross to the Empty Tomb. I think this uncertainty is a good thing—not only because it intensifies the joys of this new season and the new life of the risen Lord that we celebrate tonight—but because it puts in touch with the reality of how surprising—how absolutely mind-blowing—the resurrection is.
We gathered for our vigil tonight under the cover of darkness—just as the disciples huddled together in that upper room in the night after Christ’s death. The disciples were mourning. They were in shock. They were afraid. They had been following their beloved teacher for three years and things seemed so promising—how could their time together come to such a quick and violent end? The disciples were faithful followers of Christ, but they didn’t understand what was happening. They didn’t know if they were going to be okay, or if anything was ever going to be okay again. They didn’t understand quite yet that Christ’s resurrection was just around the corner.
We gather for our vigil tonight under the cover of darkness—just as the ancient Israelites did on the night of that first Passover in Egypt, as they huddled around their dinner tables, eating hastily the lambs they had prepared, their sandals on and their loins girded—ready to flee at any moment—as the angel of death passed over their houses. They were God’s chosen people—and they were faithful—they prepared their feasts as Moses had told them to do, and marked their doors with lamb’s blood as instructed. But think of the fear, think of the anxiety they must have felt—they didn’t know, after all they had been through, if this would really be the night they would gain their freedom, if this would really be the night that pharaoh would finally let them go—and they couldn’t be sure that they’d be safe from all the terror going on around them. But God kept them safe; God brought them into freedom.
When Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome return to Jesus’s tomb on the first day, they’re not expecting what they find. Like the disciples still gathered in that upper room in Jerusalem they are in shock, in deep and acute mourning. They’re expecting to have trouble getting into the tomb, that they’ll need some help rolling away the stone at the entrance. When they find the stone already rolled away, they see a young man inside, and Mark tells us that the women “were alarmed.” Even when the young man tells them that they needn’t be alarmed, that Jesus “has been raised,” that Jesus is not there at the tomb but will be waiting for them in Galilee—the women aren’t able to process it. The women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
For they were afraid! Can you imagine? These three women are the first witnesses to this most amazing moment—Jesus’s rising to life again on the third day, the resurrection which brings all of us into new life, the resurrection which offers restoration and healing and hope to a fallen world, the resurrection that defeats death and offers us a share in the eternal life of God’s heavenly kingdom—and they’re afraid!
That’s how radical, how unexpected, how beyond human comprehension this event is.
It makes me feel a little better about my own moments of doubt, my own fears and anxieties. Even Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—these three women who were the first to testify to the resurrected Lord, the apostles to the apostles—even they feared and doubted; even they were, at first, speechless.
But God is faithful.
Friends, I wonder if we can let ourselves be shocked by resurrection, just as these three women were. I wonder if faith asks us to greet the risen Christ not only with the joy and jubilation of this magnificent celebration of Easter, but with our whole selves—with all the questions and doubts and fears and anxieties that we carry, just as the disciples did, just as the people of ancient Israel did. I wonder if, in a way, that’s the whole point—that we can bring our vulnerabilities to God because we can trust God to handle them—we can trust God to be with us, we can trust God to free us from our burdens, we can trust God to be with us even at the gate of death, we can trust God to lead us into new life—God is faithful.
“If we have been united with Christ in a death like his,” Paul writes to the Romans, “we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” When we join with Christ in the way of the Cross—when we, with Jesus, face those darkest moments—God, the faithful God who brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt, the faithful God whose Son rose to new life on the third day—that same faithful God will raise us also into the newness of life.
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!