Easter Vigil Yr C 2025

Title

How Goes the World? The World Goes Not Well, but the Kingdom Comes

Outline

God created a good world. We also know that the world goes not well because of us. And we know that our solutions to the dysfunction, while helpful in part, end up taking us deeper into the darkness. We create governments and usually they end up oppressing us and eventually collapsing. We create fertilizers and pesticides, which increase our crop yield, and their cost destroys the family farm while the chemicals end up in our water. We create plastic water bottles to get water to thirsty people and never dreamed that by now the average American has about a teaspoon of plastic nanoparticles in their brain increasing their risk of dementia. Our energy production and use, while powering our lives also affects the climate as do our dietary choices. Our technology is so helpful but it also enslaves us and saps our minds. We seek to go up and instead we spiral down. We see that in some of our readings: human attempted solutions seem to help but end up making things worse.

All along this frustrating historical tale God’s intervention keeps pointing to his solution. He provides the lamb in Genesis ch 22 and Isaak lives. He provides a path through the Red Sea, a parable of baptism, and Israel lives. He calls Israel back to his way and it is life from the dead. Indeed, it is life from the dead that Romans sees as pictured in baptism. But still we humans pursued our literal dead ends as the solution to our problems.

Then came Jesus and we killed him, fearing he was a problem, not a solution. But that was the solution to our root problem and it led to Easter, for on that day Jesus broke the power of death itself and offered life under his rule to all who committed to him.

Notice how no one expected Easter. Even those most faithful to him, the women, go to the tomb with spices, not to strew them in welcome before a triumphant king, but to “do the burial right,” for preparing bodies for burial was women’s work. They are shocked at the angelic question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” They did not remember what he had said in Galilee, nor did the eleven apostles. Even Peter could look at the evidence in the tomb and go away scratching his head.

It took Jesus’ appearing to Simon Peter and to two “of them” on their way to their lodging (revealing himself in the breaking of the bread for it was only then that the penny dropped on his instruction) and then appearing to the group in Jerusalem to open their minds to the new reality. And even then he had to drive home that he was alive, physically present, really and truly by eating before them, although later it will be him giving himself to us to eat.

Without the resurrection Jesus and his teaching are just another human dead end, helpful, but not an ultimate solution. Because of the resurrection we can make sense of the scriptures and the history they narrate, have the solution to the world’s dead ends, and most importantly have a King who has broken the power of death and can actualize the solution as he renews the earth.

We celebrate this tonight, but the real issue is whether it is burned into our hearts so that we can face death unafraid and follow him through it to the transformation of our world?