Sermons at Saint Mary's

The Great Vigil of Easter
April 11, 2009
Mark 16:1-8

Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This is the night

This is the night when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

And what a night it is—from the wonder of the new fire and the lighting of the Paschal Candle, to the stories of God’s saving acts in the world, to the welcoming of new life in the baptisms of Taylor and Julianna, and then to the great Easter proclamation—Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Those of you who know me well know that the Easter Vigil is my favorite service of the whole year, and in my opinion, the most important service of the whole year. On top of that, last year just at the end of the Vigil, my daughter Megan called me to say that she was in labor and on the way to the hospital, and this year I have the great privilege of baptizing the fruit of that labor, my beautiful granddaughter Julianna. There is truly no greater sign of new life that that act.

Easter is one of those times when a preacher is tempted to say, “What more can I add?” and in all the joy that the Easter Vigil, this first celebration of the resurrection, holds for me, that temptation is all the greater. But we would be doing Easter—and ourselves—an injustice if we did not pause and consider anew what this night means—for those who first experienced it, for us as inheritors of the faith, and for the world. And so for that, we must turn to our gospel.

In Mark’s gospel we hear the shortest account of Jesus’ resurrection, one that ends rather abruptly with the women fleeing from the tomb in fear. And in the original manuscripts, Mark’s gospel ends there too—no post resurrection sightings, no commentary on what has happened, no farewell messages, no ascension. An empty tomb and a messenger who says to the women, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." And that’s it.

Of course, what we know about Easter isn’t limited to Mark’s telling of the story—we have three other gospels which give us the details we lack in Mark—how Jesus met some of his followers on the road to Emmaus, how he breakfasted on the beach with the 12, how he ascended into heaven; and we have the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Paul and other writers to tell us about what happened after all that. But what, as I ask my bible study group, what if Mark’s gospel was the only one we had? What would we know?

We’d know that Jesus was not afraid to rely on unexpected messengers. Mary Magdalen, Mary, mother of James, and Salome—three Jewish women no doubt immersed in their grief, set off to the tomb to do women’s work—preparing the body properly for burial since there had been no time to do it when he was taken down from the cross, anointing it with oils, and wrapping it in linen. These women had no status in society beyond their women’s roles; they had no voice outside the domestic arena. And yet, the angel in the tomb did not hesitate to use them to convey Jesus’ words to the disciples, to have the women spread the word; the angelic messenger did not wait for some men to come along, but trusted in the women who had been on the fringes of Jesus’ ministry.

We’d know that fear always runs the risk of impeding our faith but that when it does we are not alone. These unexpected messengers, Mary Magdalen, Mary, and Salome, ran way from the angelic messenger full of fear, and reportedly did not tell anyone what they had seen. Of course, we know from other sources that at some point they DID tell, but their not telling here presents us with an interesting paradox: Throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells those whom he has healed NOT to tell and they inevitably tell anyway, but now when the women are told to tell everyone what has happened, their fear silences them, at least for a while.

Most importantly we’d know that death is not the final answer. Jesus had given up his life on the cross because he had dared to confront the powers of oppression and domination, political and religious, Roman and Jewish, and he dared to suggest that God calls us to a new way—a way of justice and peace and compassion. The crucifixion was about the powers that be saying NO to Jesus, no to the threat to the status quo that he represented. But the resurrection is about God saying YES to Jesus—yes to his challenges, yes to his vision, yes to the cross. Easter is God saying that the powers of the world will not have the last word; that Jesus’ death is not the end, but the beginning—the beginning of a new life for each of us, both in the here and now and in the world to come.

Mark’s gospel account of that first Easter morning, as brief and abrupt as it is, is enough—enough to reassure us that when fear makes us stumble in our faith, we’re not alone, and that we can still go on. It’s enough to show us that we might find the good news of God through the most unlikely of messengers—and that we should perhaps even look for it there. It’s enough to remind us that we are called to a new way, a life of discipleship, and it’s enough to bathe us in the hope for new life and the assurance that the forces of evil and oppression cannot carry the day when we are alive in Christ.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave—so let us forth into the world, washed in the waters of baptism, and rejoicing in the power of the resurrection. Alleluia, alleluia!

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