Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
The Great Vigil of Easter- Sunday, April 1, 2018
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
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| Br. Aidan Owen, OHC |
The Lord is risen indeed.
But where is he? He’s risen, but he’s not here. Did anyone else notice that?
What a strange resurrection account Mark gives us. It’s a resurrection without a resurrected Jesus. The man in the tomb tells the Marys that he is not here. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee.
And, appropriate, perhaps, for an Easter that is also April Fool’s Day, this account of the resurrection is the punchline to a joke Mark has been telling from the beginning of his narrative. At every point Jesus heals someone or performs a miracle in Mark, he says to those watching, tell no one.
Immediately they run out and tell everyone they can find about this wonder-worker. This morning we hear the only time in Mark that witnesses are told “Go! Tell everyone!” Instead, they run away in fear and tell no one. The only real witness to the resurrection this morning, it would seem, is the tomb itself. The wound in the earth that has become the womb from which Jesus has been reborn.
Much of the Easter proclamation that runs through Paul and that the church’s liturgies and prayers have picked up centers on Jesus as the new Adam. In this morning’s gospel account, we can see that link directly. God molded the first human from the stuff of the earth and filled that clay creature with breath from heaven, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, joined from the beginning.
Like the adamah, Jesus here is reborn from the very stuff of the earth, expelled from the womb that was a tomb, rising out of the ground, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, truly the first born of the new creation.
And yet, he has already gone ahead of us, leaving us only the empty tomb as witness and icon of the new and abundant life of God flowing out of Eden to water the garden of the world. But how do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange and hostile land?
We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. And we will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in our memories. And the next time a young black man is gunned down at a traffic stop and his life blood waters the ground, like Abel’s, will we join our cry again to the earth’s supplications?
What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper, not lighter, and as the light seems further away than ever?
Like us, Mark and his community knew something of the crushing violence of empire. And in the face of that juggernaut, Mark offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of God’s faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now.
Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness.
In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem:
Some of you I will hollow out.I will make you a cave.I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.You will be a bowl.You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain. I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.I will do this for the space that you will be.I will do this because you must be large.A passage.
People will find their way through you.You see, God doesn’t save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.
And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of children killed while they study. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.
Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life.
So this morning let us join with all those who have gone before, let us cry out with saints and ancestors, with the River and the Oak, with the empty tomb and with the Godbearer’s womb. And let us pray to be like that tomb, a womb from which Christ may be born again and again to bring light to the gathering darkness.
ALLELUIA! CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!
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