Great Vigil of Easter: God at Work In the Darkness

Matthew 28:1-10

CONTENT

Introduction

         Good evening friends. On Thursday we were reminded of Christ’s institution of the Eucharist and what it means to serve Christ and one another in the kingdom of God. Last night’s service drew us into the mystery of salvation in what happened on the cross. This morning we joined together to walk the way of the cross through the stations of the cross. When Christ died on the cross, creation responded with darkness, and yet God was not absent. Into the darkness, the light shined and the darkness did not overcome it. Jesus was at work in the darkness, conquering Sheol and rescuing humanity from the clutches of sin and death which would ultimately be done in the triumph of His resurrection. 

         There is an ancient Christian baptismal hymn from the 2nd century, part the Odes of Solomon, which sings of Christ’s victory. This hymn says, “And I opened the doors which were closed. And I shattered the bars of iron, For my own shackles had grown hot and melted before me.”[1] The early church has always made this connection between the death that Christ died, the work of his conquering of Sheol, the victory of his resurrection, and how you and I are joined to Christ and his work through our baptism. Tonight we had the privilege of praying for Les as he has walked with Jesus into baptism; in doing this we also renewed our own baptismal vows. We have died and risen with Christ.

         From our passage tonight we see two important truths: 1) God is at work in the dark, and 2) Christ’s resurrection is our commission to the work of new creation.

         As we look at Matthew 28, let me pray for us, “In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.”

I. Earthquake, Angel, guards, and empty tomb — God is at work in the dark (1-6)

         God is at work in the dark. When we left St. Matthew’s Gospel text Last Sunday, the final verse was that the stone had sealed the tomb and guards were there to guard it. The extra measures of security were because of fear and unbelief. Under the cover of darkness, just as dawn was about to begin, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary come to the tomb. As they arrive on scene, there was an earthquake. And as the earth is shaking, an angel descends from heaven to roll back the stone. Heaven and earth are both testifying that the Lord is risen. 

         The angel of the Lord proclaims the good news to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come see the place where he lay.”[2] Far from abandoning the one who died on the cross, God heard his prayer. Jesus the Lord of heaven and earth, who had created all things, had been crucified on a pagan cross. After Jesus was buried, the disciples head off. How could the joy of those travelers on Palm Sunday ended with this? I can imagine that over several days they were processing their grief, feelings of guilt over abandoning their teacher, wondering what they had just been through over the last several years, and still holding onto some slight hope that maybe Jesus would actually rise like he said.

         Satan has been working hard from the beginning of humankind to weave sin and death into the fabric of all humanity. The work of God in the darkness of Jesus’ death is the dismantling of the systems and powers of the kingdom of darkness. The stone is rolled away to reveal what God has done for these faithful women searching for him. This testimony that Christ has risen has changed their fear to joy and has changed their story forever.

         Jesus had given glimpses of new creation and the kingdom of God in his ministry. His resurrection from the dead shows his followers that the age to come is here. Death is defeated and sin is no more. The systems and structures of evil present outside of us and at war inside of us no longer have the final word because Jesus is alive. One church father says, “Pray, brothers, that the angel would descend now and roll away all the hardness of our hearts and open up our closed senses and declare to our minds that Christ has risen, for just as the heart in which Christ lives and reigns is heaven, so also the heart in which Christ remains dead and buried is a grave.”[3] Where are these places of doubt where we need the revealing of the resurrection? I remember a friend saying they never wanted to have kids because they were afraid of what this world would do to them. It was a place of doubt and unbelief. Some doubt that God will begin to heal them if they begin to get honest about the parts of their stories that shaped them. Some are afraid to apologize to their kids because they’re afraid they’ll lose a sense of authority. Some have addictive coping strategies to keep them from facing their fear of vulnerability about what hurts. Disordered fear and unbelief are two sides of the same coin; and they are pervasive, but they’re also a defeat-able enemy. I don’t want to pass over the risk involved in each of these kinds of scenarios, but I do want to name that these are the dark places of doubt where Jesus’ triumph will put death to death. And because Jesus is alive, we can pray for God’s help in rolling back the stone to reveal the goodness of Jesus’ living presence in these places where fear and darkness reigned.

II. Commissioning of new creation (7-10)

         The empty tomb is a place of commission. The women are charged with the task of going to gather the disciples to tell them to meet Jesus up in Galilee. They leave the tomb quickly with fear and great joy: fear for the magnitude of the miracle they’d experienced, and joy for what the resurrection means for them and the world. As the women travel on the way to meet the disciples, Jesus meets them. Our text says that Jesus greeting them by saying “Greetings”. If this were 21st century America it would feel like “Oh hey”! The women recognize who they are speaking with and they take hold of his feet and worship him.

         Worshiping Jesus is a beautiful paradigm for following Jesus. Grab hold of his feet and worship him. Come to know him. Read the Gospels, hear what he has to say. Read the rest of the Scriptures. Create spaces of silence and stillness in his creation and know his love for you. Discover the ways he fills out the Old Covenant in Scripture; look for his unsearchable glory that is sung by multitudes of heavenly choirs of saints and angels around his throne. Join this song in the mystery of the Eucharist; discover the resurrected Jesus in everyday moments. Discover and name the places of darkness, fear, and doubt. Hold them in the presence of the one who has conquered the kingdom of darkness.

         After worshiping Jesus, he tells them not to be afraid, but to go and tell his brothers that he’s risen. That Jesus calls the disciples his brothers here is significant. It follows on the heals of their utter failure and their desertion of him in his time of need. Jesus had predicted their failure in Matthew 26:31. But in 26:32, Jesus predicted that after their failure he was go to Galilee after he was raised up. His mention of “brothers” here is gently restorative. He is restoring to brotherhood those who had deserted him. The good news of Jesus’ resurrection is the good news that death is defeated, sin has no more power, and the age to come has broken into this present evil age. The new day has dawned in the darkness of an empty tomb, these women were entrusted with this news by a heavenly messenger and Jesus himself. These apostles to the apostles would bring this good news to the twelve, and from Galilee, the new creation of the kingdom of Jesus would go forth to all the world.

Conclusion

         This night reminds us of the power of the resurrection. God is at work in the darkness to overcome the power of darkness with the light of the resurrected Christ. All things will be made new. Our places of doubt, death, and fear will be transformed into the places where the glory of God shines forth. As we walk along the paths God has called us to, we take hold of the risen Christ and gain perspective for the journey. He has commissioned us to live into the age to come, the life of new creation in the resurrection, and to bring this good news to others as we live it out for ourselves. This is what we have renewed in our baptism vows. As we celebrate the mystery of the resurrection, remember that Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of new creation: God is at work in the dark, and Christ’s resurrection is our commission to the work of new creation. Alleluia!

Let us pray:

O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that we, who have been raised with him, may abide in his presence and rejoice in the hope of eternal glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1]                Odes-Sol. 17:8-9. Charlesworth, pp. 74–5, and 76, n. 11.

[2]                Matt 28:5-6.

[3]                Peter Chrysologus, Sermons 75.4; Manlio Simonetti, ed., Matthew 14-28 (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture; Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 306.

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.

Easter Vigil: When Brokenness Tells of God's Story of Redemption

Great Vigil of Easter