Easter Vigil (2007): “Why do you look for the dead among the living?”

Easter Vigil (2007): “Why do you look for the dead among the living?”
Genesis 1:1-2:2; Exodus 14:10-15:1; Isaiah 55:1-11; Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 6:3-11; Psalm 114;
 Luke 24:1-12
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, on April 7th, 2007

When Moses arrives at the edge of the Red Sea with the rest of the Israelites, the Egyptians are very close at hand. And the Israelites start complaining. So Moses offers some advice to the Israelites: “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” Which is kind of funny, because the Lord is hardly happy with this advice.

The first thing the Lord does is, well, complain a little too. “Why do you cry out to me?” Stop complaining, says the Lord.

But then the Lord, seemingly unhappy with Moses’ advice to the Israelites that they ought to keep still, the Lord says don’t keep still. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” says the Lord.

The Israelites are asked to go forward right into the Red Sea, without knowing that Moses was about to be given the power to divide that very same sea. I don’t care about this keeping still business, says the Lord, go forward – and I don’t care if you think you’re going to get a little wet.

***

So we can give some credit to St. Mary Magdalene. While the eleven were elsewhere (we’re not sure where, but perhaps they were heeding Moses’ advice, hoping that the Lord would fight for them, if only they kept still), St. Mary Magdalene, and a few other women, went ahead and did something.

There’s a lot to be said for keeping still. Most of us are like St. Mary Magdalene, at least in some respects. We just want to do something, to keep busy with unimportant things, distractions. There is something important about knowing that the Lord will fight for us, if only we keep still.

But St. Mary Magdalene didn’t go to the tomb because unimportant things distracted her. Her friend, her teacher, and Lord had died, and she did him a great honour: she brought prepared spices in the hopes of paying her deepest respects to a dead body. That is what you expect to find, when someone dies and is put in a tomb, right? A dead body? St. Mary Magdalene was acting in good faith according to what she already knew and expected. This was no busy work, no distracting task- it was an errand of mercy, affection, and adoration of her dead Lord.

Many of us do the best we can in our tasks of mercy and affection, and adoration of our Lord, according to the knowledge we have on hand. And this is good – mercy, affection, and adoration, are good things! But what do we do when something new comes to pass?

Sometimes what we know changes deeply, as it did for St. Mary Magdalene that early dawn. St. Mary Magdalene went looking for a dead man, but what she found was something entirely different: she found an empty tomb with two angels standing there.

Now we can do two things when such an event happens: we can cling to what we once knew, and continue believing that our Lord is a dead man; we can keep up our acts of mercy, affection, and adoration as we had once done according to what we once knew.

But St. Mary Magdalene does the more difficult thing. She changes her mind. She acts differently. She finds no dead man, and discovers that this particular errand of mercy, affection, and adoration actually makes little sense anymore: because only dead men need burial spices.

Living and risen saviours ask something different; they ask for conversion, they ask for a turning of the mind, a changing of what we do and how we do it, because all things are new, all things are changed – “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Good question!

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen.” But by the resurrection, abd by our distance from the grave, we can now ask the question a little differently: “Why do you look for the dead among the living?” Look for dead men somewhere else. They won’t be found here. Here is not the place to go on an errand of mercy, or affection, or even adoration of any dead man. Here – in this church, in this worship, in this liturgy, you will find no dead man. You will find the living God, our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, at once man and God, the one who, through his empty tomb and the resurrection of his body (the one in whom we will partake at this table), this is the living God of wondrous possibility, the one who makes all things new.

Let us let the Lord do this work through us; let us leave old things behind; let us imagine (because it’s true!) that all things are made new through this, our risen and living Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.