The Great Vigil of Easter, Year B, March 31, 2018
Romans 6:3-11, Psalm 114, Mark 16:1-8
St Thomas the Apostle
The Rev’d Leo Loyola
What comes to mind when we think of Easter?
Our sanctuary blanketed with white lilies and other spring flowers?
The sight of our pews filled with everyone dressed in their Sunday best?
Or perhaps the delightful sight of children outside, hunting for plastic Easter Eggs.
Images such as these fill our hearts with nostalgia for Easters Past. But this was not the case for the three women spoken of in our Gospel reading (Mark 16:1-8).
For Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, this first Easter Sunday could be best described in two words: “terror and amazement”.
It was Sunday morning. The sun had risen and the memory of Jesus’s death was still fresh in their minds. They were themselves witnesses (as the previous chapter Mark 15 describes) of Jesus’s last moment alive.
Jesus gave a loud cry and he breathed his last. The centurion looked up, pondering upon the man’s noble death. Instantly moved, he commented “Truly this man was God’s Son”.
Off in the distance were a group of silent mourners, women who could be best described as caretakers of the caretaker.
Jesus never asked that they serve him. They simply did so out of their love for Jesus.
There was Mary the mother of one of Jesus’s disciples, who we call James the Less or James the Younger. And there was a mother of two other disciples Salome, mother of James (who we call James the Great) and the beloved disciple John. As mothers who cared for their sons, they must’ve felt a special fondness for this rabbi who welcomed their sons under his wing.
And then there was Mary Magdalene, described in Mark 16 as a woman who had suffered her whole life possessed by seven demons. Then Jesus showed up one day, took pity upon her and drove out these demons from her body and soul. Like the other Mary and Salome, this Mary’s heart was filled with deep gratitude for the new life she now had with Jesus. Nothing she could ever do could fully repay her debt.
And now their Jesus was dead. The very man who gave these women new life was no more. All that was left was their undying devotion to Jesus even in death. And so when the Sabbath ended, they pooled what money they had and bought spices, myrrhs and aloes to anoint Jesus’s body.
I’m sure they knew about the burial preparations Nicodemus made when he took Jesus’s lifeless form off the cross to be buried in a newly purchased tomb which he intended for his own family. I’m sure they knew that Nicodemus had already had the body preserved in spices meant to control decomposition.
But I’m sure they had Lazarus in mind, the day Jesus woke his dear friend up from the dead. At burial, Lazarus’s body was also preserved in spices. But the opened tomb still smelled with stench of death and decay.
As the three women dutifully carried the purchased spices to Jesus’s tomb, they did not want a repeat of what happened with Lazarus. Ever the caretakers, both in Jesus’s life and now in death, they would feel horrible if anything bad happened to—
They stopped and saw the tomb door opened.
They expected to see a dead body. But instead they found the place—where his body once laid—empty.
They looked to their right to find a young man dressed in a white robe sitting.
I’m sure they must’ve screamed about perceived indignities done to Jesus even in death. Why can’t they at least give the dead some dignity? I’m sure they thought about asking the young man where the body was taken so they could retrieve it.
What the young man says put the women in shock: Jesus was alive. “Don’t be alarmed”, he says, “He has been raised; he is not here. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as I told you.”
And they ran to find the disciples in terror and amazement.
Terror and amazement, in that, an unexplainable event that defies human expectation: Jesus conquered Death.
Even in this pre-scientific world, everyone understands life and death. We are born into this world, we live and then we die. And all that remains as a testament of that person’s life is the living who mourn and then move on in life.
Everyone dies. Death is a quality we all share. Our common end.
But that all changed with Jesus’s resurrection. With his resurrection, death no longer had dominion over him. As the Apostle Paul says: the death Jesus died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
What these three women discovered filled them with terror and amazement because the impossible suddenly became possible. Just as Christ died and lives again, those who died with Christ, we believe will also live with him.
Because of the resurrection, though we die, death is not our common end, but life in Christ.
The resurrection is essential to our story, to who we are as followers of Christ.
The resurrection is not some empty philosophy or some metaphor for life.
It is our reality. Even in the ever-real evil present in this world, the risen Christ drowns out this noise.
I like how beautifully author and Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber describes the impact of Jesus’s resurrection in our daily lives…
The sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices. It drowns out the sound of political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty—because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.
We are a spiritual community where messy, beautiful people can come together to gather around a story and a table.
This is our table, where truth and bread are shared.
Our story—our truth—can be summarized like this:
We remember his death
We proclaim his resurrection
We await his coming in glory (BCP 368)
AMEN.
