Great Vigil of Easter: Hesitant Joy about What is Next
TranscriptioN
Oh, what a joy. I love this service, this opportunity to worship with you at the Easter Vigil. Well, good evening, my dear friends. It is good to be with you.
Tonight we heard God's story of salvation throughout the Scripture. We witnessed a death and a resurrection tonight in baptism, and we remembered the death and resurrection that we've experienced in Christ in our own baptism. Tonight's gospel passage in Matthew chapter 28 brings us to the women who discover that Jesus has risen from the dead.
They encounter resurrection life with joy, but a hesitant joy, and I think hesitant joy is something that feels close to home for us. We walk through each day in small acts of faithfulness to Jesus, discovering these glimpses of new creation and resurrection amidst all of our daily moments of fearful hesitancy and hope-filled joy as we bring the of the new life of the resurrection to bear on a broken world, a world that's been broken by sin and is bound to death. And the encouragement to us tonight is the same encouragement given to the women in this text.
Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. It was on the first day of the week that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary had gone to see the tomb.
Mary Magdalene is often called the apostola, apostolorum in Latin, or the apostle to the apostles, as she and the other women become the first to bring the gospel of the resurrected Christ to the other followers of Jesus. And as they went to the tomb, there was a great earthquake as an angel came and rolled the stone away and sat on it. The angel tells them, Jesus is risen.
He's not here. And the guards see the angel and their terrified. They tremble. They fall to the ground. The women are equally terrified in that moment. These aren't angelic cherubs like you see on Christmas cards.
The angels in the Bible are in fact terrified. And so they are rightly terrified when they see this angel, but the angel addresses them and says, do not fear. The angel invites them then to walk into the tomb and to look in on this empty tomb.
So they're the first ones to walk in and to see death defeated. But I would imagine that as they stand there and they're looking in the void of where death had once been, that they're fearfully and somewhat hopefully teasing out all of the implications of what this might now mean. The angel tells them to go to Galilee, where Jesus is going ahead of them, to meet the disciples and share this good news about Jesus's resurrection with them.
They leave the tomb quickly and the text says, with fear and with great joy. Joy for what God's done, but fear about what's next. And so while the angel tells them not to fear, I do wonder what that conversation looked like on the road.
What in their lives now needed to stay the same or change? Rome hadn't actually been overthrown, so what did God's kingdom actually look like that Jesus had promised? Jesus had conquered death, but what does that mean for everybody else who is still alive and fearing death? There are so many unanswered questions for the women and in their anxious excitement and in their unanswered questions, Jesus comes and he meets them along the way. Jesus meets them with a greeting and they come to him and they hold on to his feet and they bow down and they worship him. Like the women, I think that it is in God's kindness, in Jesus's kindness, that he meets us in places of hesitant joy, where we experience this kind of hesitancy and delight on the road of obedience.
He offers us the comfort of his presence and a glimpse of his resurrection to sustain us along the path. He tells the women, like the angel did, do not be afraid. Then he says, go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee and there they will see me.
As we walk in faithfulness, in the little daily obedience that Jesus has for us, he often meets us with these glimpses, however small, of new life and resurrection that sustain us along the way. Maybe he comforts us in a time of prayer, speaks through his scripture to us, gives us joy through the smile of a child, reminds us of his goodness through the kind words or the kind actions of a dear friend, restores a relationship to us that might have been broken, or something else that reminds us that the kingdom of darkness and the power of death no longer have the final power over us, who are in Christ Jesus. To search for Jesus and his kingdom is to invest in the life of the resurrection that outshines the darkness of sin and death.
His reminder to the women is a reminder for us that he has risen, he is with us, he goes before us as we walk with him in hesitant joy, so do not fear. We live in an anxious world that is longing to escape death, nervously seeking reprieve from its slavery to death and sin in all sorts of insufficient ways, denying the reality of death, numbing our pains with addictions, other escapisms, turning towards disordered loves and appetites, looking for saviors where there are no saviors, believing false narratives to avoid addressing what's actually broken inside. But having died to this world and risen with Christ, the Spirit has made us in our baptism an unanxious sacramental presence of Christ-like new creation for the life of the world.
Jesus is alive and he's conquered death and we get to join him in that victory. I don't know if you know this, but in the Anglican liturgy the funeral pall that covers a Christian casket is an echo back to the white garments that are given to the newly baptized. It's this defiant declaration that death is defeated and our baptism is now complete and we await the glory of the resurrection to come because Jesus has defeated death.
Jesus is alive and we will ultimately be made like him. I've been really encouraged lately by reading the biography of the late great pastor Eugene Peterson and I want to read a bit of the book to you this evening, a bit that I found really encouraging as I was thinking about the resurrection of Jesus. It says this, ““Dad didn't know what state he was in,” Eric, Eugene's son reflected, “didn't know what year of the Lord it was, didn't know his dad built the house that he was sitting in, didn't know who the president was, but he knew in the depths of his soul the unshakable reality of God's presence.”
And Eugene out of that confused disoriented state maintained a holy awareness residing at his core in an interior place completely intact untouched by dementia. “That life of prayer grooved itself deep inside my dad and he had full access to that until the day that he died. I think in those last moments dad was simply descending deeper into that interior world that he built with God his entire life, only we could not access it with him.”
The last light was fading. During Eugene's final weekend, Leif and Eric and Amy and Elizabeth kept vigil at the lake. Eric and Leif kept the lantern on the dock burning 24 hours, light flickering over the dark water. Eugene took to his bed declining visibly.
Jan, his wife, held his hand as he drifted in and out of consciousness, walking that precarious threshold between our two ways of being and then unhurried and gentle, Eugene went at 630 a.m. on Monday, October 22nd, 2018. The lantern on the dock went dark. Eric placed his hand on his dad's head and passed the blessing. “Together we are witnesses to this glad fact that in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, I declare the baptism of Eugene Hoyland Peterson is now complete. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, says the Spirit, that they rest from their labors and their works follow them.””
So this Easter season, let's be an unhurried and gentle people who look to the day where our labor here is done and the beloved around us can speak over us that our baptism is complete. Build that type of interior life, that interior resurrection life that gets brighter when the light of the world fades so that others will learn to praise God for the works that you have done in their midst. The kind of interior presence where Jesus's presence is enough to meet the doubts of today. Christ is risen and we have died and we have been raised with him.
Carry the good news of death's defeat in you into this broken world that's bound to the kingdom of darkness and that's longing for its redemption. Do not fear. Jesus is alive and he is with us in our hesitant joy.
Let me pray for us. Almighty God, who through your only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life, grant that we who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's resurrection may by your life-giving Spirit be delivered from sin and raised from death through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.