Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday: April 19 and 20, 2025
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
This is the question from our Gospel reading that I am stuck on today, as we celebrate the great Paschal Mystery when Jesus passes from death to life.
I suspect that when we hear the word “resurrection,” many of us struggle to disentangle ourselves from all of the “how?” questions, getting stuck in the process of apologetics and explanations that seek to explain away the inexplainable. We might also struggle to make sense of resurrection in light of our present circumstances, in light of the suffocating shroud that seems to be tightening, rather than loosening, its grip on our world. How can we believe in the power of resurrection when its supposed benefits seem so far out of view, so distant from the reality that we experience?In the story of the resurrection, we are confronted by a profound sense of the unimaginable, the impossible, the implausible, the unexpected. As Luke tells it, after Jesus died, Joseph from Arimathea asked Pilate for Jesus’ body. He took it, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and laid it in rock-hewn tomb. The women, who had followed Jesus from Galilee and had stood at a distance and watched Jesus hang from the cross, now followed Joseph and watched as he laid Jesus in the tomb. Luke introduced us to these women back in chapter 8 of his gospel – they included Mary Magdelene, Joana (the wife of Herod’s steward), Susana, Mary (the mother of James – named here), and many others, all of whom ministered to Jesus out of their own resources. When the women had seen where Jesus was buried, they set to work alongside one another to prepare spices and ointments to use in the burial rituals. Together they rested on the Sabbath, and then at dawn the next day, they journeyed together and returned to the tomb to perform what they assumed would be their final act of love for their friend and teacher.
There’s much about these women that we don’t know. There may be some things we can piece together from what Luke and the other gospel writers tell us, but apart from speculation and conjecture, we know only that they were followers of Jesus, that they cared for him and supported his ministry. We know they were the last to leave Jesus’ side and the first to bear witness to the empty tomb. And we know they were the first evangelists, giving their testimony to their bewildered, male counterparts. Luke specifically tells us that the “eleven and all the rest” of Jesus’ disciples accounted the women’s testimony as “idle talk,” tall tales unworthy of belief.
Today, I wonder where you enter into this story: where do you sense resonance and where do you sense dissonance with your own experience of resurrection. Do you find yourself hiding in a closed room, isolated from community in grief over loss, in fear of what is happening in our present moment, at a loss over the senselessness of the wars being waged? Do you find yourself disoriented from the trauma of the whirlwinds produced by the changes and chances of this life? Or, perhaps like the women in our story, you find yourself trudging through the grief by turning to the next tangible thing you can do, to the work of ritual and of putting one foot in front of the other. Maybe you find yourself telling out the bewildering stories of life amidst death only to be shut down and disregarded.
Today, I find myself resonating more with “the eleven and the rest” of the disciples. The world feels overwhelming. The uncertainty of what tomorrow holds feels scary. The weight of pending court decisions, of how to navigate increasing threats against humanity, of how to protect the sanctity of lives; of how to fight against the cruelty of unlawful deportations, against the erasure of human rights, against the loss of access to basic necessities like food, health care, housing, and fair wages – the weight of all of this feels paralyzing. Even apart from the social, political, and economic crises of our day, I am navigating a new normal, sitting in the grief of divorce, relearning what it means to be single, what it takes to co-parent a young child with someone I no longer share a life with. In the midst of all that is happening across the personal and political dimensions of life, I resonate with the “eleven and the rest” of the disciples’ desire to shut themselves away, to turn inward and shut out the rest of the world.Why do you look for the living among the dead?
As I think about the weight of all I bring with me today, this question continues to press upon me. Maybe “press” is the wrong word – it confronts me, accosts me, even. I wonder if it was an equally relevant question that should have been asked of “the eleven and the rest” of the disciples. There in the homes and rooms in which they locked themselves away, in the paralysis of their despair, in the throes of their confusion – were they not also looking for the living among the dead? And was it their isolation that kept them from experiencing the resurrection as the women had?
It would be a misinterpretation to suggest that the women expected something other than a dead Jesus. In each account from the four gospels, the resurrection was unexpected. All who were witnesses of Jesus’ death felt the grief of loss, felt sorrow and madness and confusion in the depths of their souls – of this we can be certain. But there was something… something about them, even in their grief, that left them open to the possibility of life, to the impossible possibility of resurrection, to the capacity to receive the angelic question with such hope that they could immediately comprehend the absence of Jesus’ body with their memory of his teaching about rising again on the third day. I wonder, what it was about these women that allowed them to accept the angelic announcement as truth rather than as idle talk.
I don’t know that I have a good answer to this wondering. But as I immerse myself in Luke’s story, as I enter into this narrative – perhaps especially from my resonance with “the eleven and the rest” of the disciples – I have a suspicion that the women’s capacity to recognize the resurrection flows out of their refusal to carry and to process their trauma in isolation. They have followed Jesus since Galilee – they have worked together, traveled together, done ministry together. Together, they watched the horror of Good Friday unfold. They grieved together, and, in their grief, they once again set to work together. Their story tells us that resurrection is experienced not in isolation but in community, in togetherness.
Friends, we are living through a time in which we urgently need one another. There is no place in our shared experience for individualism, for isolation, for lone wolves. Going it alone will leave us forever looking for the living among the dead. We need one another. We need community. We will never survive the assaults of this world on our own. We must look for the living, not among the dead but among the living. We must be willing to tell our stories of resurrection, even at the risk of being accused of idle talk. We must bear witness to others’ stories of resurrection, affirming the specs of light that break through. Together, we must tell out how the darkness of the tomb becomes the darkness of the womb – a place of new birth, a place of transformation, a place of passing from death to generative life. Resurrection is a promise extended to us – not of some non-descript life at some indefinable point in the future. But a promise of life now, a life worth living, a life shared in the hope of something new.
And it is in times like these where this truth becomes abundantly clear. It is in times of collective trauma, of bearing witness to one another’s hurts, of holding one another’s stories, that we find the capacity to see signs of resurrection. It is in times like these, when we refuse to shrink into ourselves, when we refuse to isolate ourselves and instead turn toward one another, that we will feel it welling within us, that we will begin to sense the restlessness of new life. Because, friends, Jesus Christ is risen today! Amen.