Sermons
The Easter Vigil
31st March 2018
by Revd Chris Palmer
In the year 63 BC, the Roman army conquered Jerusalem. The Roman General Pompey who led the army had subdued the Jewish population and, like a typical conqueror, he had no respect for the sensibilities and dignity of the population. The most outrageous thing he did was he forced his way into the Jewish temple; and not only into the temple, but into the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary, the place that represented God’s presence, the place where only the High Priest was allowed to enter – and he only once a year.
Pompey, this Gentile and pagan despot, forced his way into the sactuary because he wanted to know what the god that the Jews worshipped was like. He was well used to temples. Temples to every god known to Roman and Greek culture stood on the street corners of cities and towns from Rome to Jerusalem – and they were filled with the images, the statues of the gods the people worshipped and sacrificed to and spend their time trying to keep happy.
And Pompey wanted to know what the Jewish god was like. And what he found shocked him. He had not anticipated it. He found an empty room. The inner sanctuary, the most holy place had no statue, no image – it was simply empty. He declared that the Jews were atheists – they had no God.
But of course the truth was that they had no image of God. The Old Testament law strictly forbade them from making a likeness of God. God could not be represented. God could not be painted, drawn, or sculpted. The God who fills the universe could not be reduce to a statue. The room was empty.
I think there is a significant parallel between Pompey finding an empty room at the heart of God’s purposes, and the women on Easter morning finding an empty tomb. It is bizarre in a sense that our Gospel reading is about finding nothing. The feast of resurrection ought to be about finding something – and instead the message is simply: the young man in the tomb says to the women, ‘he is not here’.
Pompey was perplexed by the empty Holy of Holies and the women on the first Easter morning were perplexed. We jump too quickly to the idea that they were filled with joy and hope. But Mark tells us instead, ‘they went and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.’
But their discovery and their response is a description of true faith. We too easily buy into an easy faith in which God solves our problems and answers our questions. Such a God is like a pet that we’re in charge of, or like a statue in a pagan temple. It is nothing to do with the creator of the universe, who is not at our disposal, and whose amazing being cannot be contained in our words, or ideas, or even our feelings – still less in our tombs or temples.
The ultimate discovery of the faith in Jesus is ‘he is not here’ – how dare you think you can control him. And in this disorientating discovery, terror and amazement are the right response. The people who arranged for Jesus to be crucified, those wanting to cling to power at all costs, they used the death of Jesus to control him. The tomb was the place where he was safe – or at least they were safe from him. In his tomb he could do no further damage. The presence of his corpse was just as much a way of trying to order the universe to their desires as were the idols in their temple. To discover that the tomb is empty, that the holy of holies is empty is to discover that the creator God will not be made safe. The resurrection of Jesus undoes the despotism of every tyrant who locks up and murders their enemies. We cannot visit the tomb of Jesus to assure ourselves that God is still under control. Nor can Jesus be discovered by a search party.
Despite searching, there is no sense in which the disciples ever found Jesus. When Jesus appeared to his followers it was about Jesus finding them. He found Mary at the tomb, he found the women as they fled, he found the disciples in the upper room, he found two followers on the Emmaus Road, and he found Peter on beach. He allowed them on each occasion to glimpse him – but then he left. He could not be contained or held – in fact he says explicitly to Mary, ‘do not hold onto me.’
In the resurrection of Jesus, God is inviting us to encounter emptiness, to stand in the place that has been abandoned, and to stay just long enough with the ‘he is not here’ to allow the risen Jesus to find us. There will be challenges in your life where you’d just love God to be on a leash to fix the situation. Maybe you’re short of money, maybe you’re anxious about whether your boss likes the work you do, maybe you’re worried about a love one who’s travelling to dangerous places, maybe you’re living with illness. But in these places, your greatest hope is not a God who’s on hand to make it all right. Our greatest hope is the empty place in which the true God can never be contained. Because that emptiness is the peculiar sign of true grace of true life – it is the place not where we find answers, but where Jesus finds us.
Tonight, the risen Jesus, finds Isabella. In her baptism he invites her into the unknown, into the life of God, of whom the truest artefact is an empty tomb. And in renewing our baptism promises we recommit ourselves to the same strange empty space of faith in which we are often bewildered and amazed, and in which the living Jesus discovers us and calls us.
