The Easter story is about wiping the slate, inviting us into a new vision of the world, to replace the one that’s killing us.
the resurrection changes things
The Great Vigil of Easter | Mark 16:1-8
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
After a long Lent, it is so good to be able to say it. Alleluia! It has happened! We are saved!
And we have come once again to remember the miracle of absence: the tomb is empty. Never are we so happy to find nothing where something was supposed to be. He is not here. That’s the good news. How often it’s the opposite! Usually, when we lose a thing, we get tired of it not being there! Then we celebrate when it is!
I love this backward feeling. Celebrating the absence. Here, that is good news. Because we expected death we are freed from the expectation. We can now begin to embrace another possibility.
The tomb is where dead people are laid to a permanent rest. But tonight, we celebrate that death could not keep Jesus. And here, in this place of death, is a sign of life!
They’ll need some help
This group of women get up while it’s still dark, when everybody else is sleeping, and head out to the tomb. They clearly have a plan to anoint Jesus.
Astute readers will remember that an unnamed woman anointed Jesus for burial on Holy Wednesday—in act utterly misunderstood by the disciples. So for those keeping track, Jesus is already set.
But they are looking to do this offering without anyone’s help. It’s the middle of the night.
And when they’ve already committed to this clandestine visit to the tomb, they suddenly recognizing a problem with their plan:
“They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?””
Clearly they hadn’t planned that part of it out. They hadn’t figured out how they’re actually going to get in! This secret anointing won’t be so secret after all. They will need help.
This isn’t what they expected
What awaits them is a tomb that is already open and empty. Their problem has already been solved. And yet nothing about this is remotely like they thought. The tomb is supposed to be closed. Their problem is solved. But now a new one is present.
And I think this is what Mark wants us to grasp about the Resurrection. That it isn’t what we thought. It doesn’t match our expectations.
When someone dies, they stay dead. There are few things more true about our world. People don’t die and then just get up and walk around. And heavy stones don’t just move themselves.
But here we are.
And the thing is; we want to be happy! We want to hear this good news and celebrate. But it also means that the world is changed. Things are different. And the future is now wide open.
Like a Magic Eye
Our expectations (about life and death, the world, Jesus, God) are pretty well set and tangled up. This moment is like a tug at the string. And we’re not sure if it will lead to a knot or freedom! But, either way, it is a change.
We are asked to take a new look at death. Something we feel so confident about. Something that we all rather avoid thinking about. But the thing about the Resurrection is that it goes first through death. For us to see that death doesn’t have the last word, we have to see what happens when it is changed. And then what happens to life.
And this sensation: of wrestling with death before we can get to new life: this is what Jesus was preaching along the way. This is what we’ve been exploring on our own journey with this way of love.
What we’ve spent the last few days exploring isn’t just a thing that happened two thousand years ago. We’ve engaged with the way Jesus invites us to see the kin-dom on the other side of this world. That the world God dreams for us is within our grasp. But we have to unsee the world we know.
I’ve long thought of our looking at the Kin-dom like those old Magic Eye books that were big years ago. Books full of crazy, mesmerizing images that make no sense until you stop looking at the details, let your eyes relax, and look at the whole of the image, and then suddenly, the other image leaps from the page.
This two dimensional mess reveals a three dimensional reality. One that was hidden within it.
An invitation to transformation
From the moment Jesus prepared his disciples to follow him into Jerusalem, he invited them to see it. Not the messianic fulfillment they were taught. There would be no armies to overthrow the empire. We’re not looking for a good empire to overthrow a bad one. We’re looking for a world without empires.
We cannot see the kin-dom when we expect it to be an empire.
And each step toward the cross laid out this vision of the world God dreams for us and contrasted it with the world we make for each other.
Every step, even to the cross itself.
God offers an invitation to transformation. We are not being forced.
And every step contrasts with how much this world wants to remain stuck.
A brand new day
This is why we return each year to these final moments and fix our gaze upon the cross — the device of torture and death. Because it symbolizes the evil will to power that grips so much of our world. It helps us see how the evil terrorizes us and compels so much oppression. That fatalistic, nihilistic, selfish world of unrepentant exploitation is the antithesis of God’s dream for the world.
We are called to gaze through the cross. Not as a blip or some late unpleasantness. The cross exposes the evil we stand against and reveals Jesus’s alternative resistance to it.
A way that rejects evil and embraces good: encouraging generosity to those who have nothing and commands those who have to be generous. Making real justice, truth, beauty, genuine spirituality, freedom, and the power of love when all around us is counterfeit brutality.
God doesn’t justify the evil power that steals our dignity, but opens our eyes to Christ’s way of love. A way that shares in the transformation of the world.
Because the tomb is empty, we are not shackled to the way of death. We are free to imagine what the new creation will be. We are free from the inevitability of evil and the patterns of ingrained thinking that deprive our generous and creative hearts from soaring.
In other words, the empty tomb helps us empty our minds of those bad expectations.
And like addicts quitting a bad habit, we are invited to fill that empty space with the stuff that will certainly transform our world for the good. To make that world of justice, truth, beauty, spirituality, freedom and love with our minds and hearts wide open to the dawning sunlight of a brand new day.