(Genesis 1, Exodus 3, Exodus 12 & 14, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36, Romans 6, Mark 16)
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels! Jesus Christ, our King, is risen.
In the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Tonight, the tomb is empty.
This Easter Vigil is already different for me. For the first time, I find myself celebrating the Resurrection without receiving the Body of Christ. No Communion tonight. No bread broken or wine shared. (Literally — just 12 hours away, if you want to take the fast track and attend the 8 am BCP Communion!) And at first, that absence of the Communion was startling. How do we proclaim that Christ is risen — without Christ on the table?
But maybe that is the right question. Maybe that’s exactly where Easter begins.
Because if you listened carefully, Mark’s gospel ends in a way that leaves us all just a bit uncomfortable. No appearance of the Risen Lord. (Jesus was not there!) No comforting reunion. (Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome did not witness Jesus in person!) Only emptiness. A young man in white saying: “He is not here… he has gone ahead of you to Galilee.”(You could say the young man in white is like Jesus’ PA: ‘Sorry — he’s not in the office. He’s already gone ahead’!)
And the women flee in fear and silence.
We are left, tonight, with an empty tomb. The Body is gone.
And this emptiness is not a mistake. It is not an accident. It is THE story speaking.
In the last few days, we tried to reflect together on suffering, love and freedom in Jesus’s crucifixion and death. Now we can again see the same nature of that love and freedom revealed in the empty tomb.
The emptiness of the tomb is not nothing. It’s not a void that requires us to fill it with certainty or explanations. This emptiness clears out all our expectations in reason, in emotion, and even in the natural order of things. This emptiness is the sign of movement. The proof that something has happened. Someone has gone. God, once again, is on the move.
From the very first moment of creation — when God called light out of darkness and order from chaos — our scriptures have told the story of a God who cannot be pinned down. Who reveals God’s self through continuous creation, through movement, through change, through disruption. A God who creates the heavens and the earth and separates the light from the darkness; who speaks from a burning bush and reveals himself to us; who passes over in the night and liberates his people from oppression; who splits the sea and leads a people through water and wilderness; who promises a new heart and a renewed spirit and sprinkles clean water upon us. God is always just ahead of us. God is always calling us to follow.
And tonight, that same pattern continues. The stone is rolled back. The body is gone. The tomb is empty. And we are told: He is going ahead of you!
The emptiness, then, is not absence. It is an invitation.
Not a denial of faith — but a summons to trust.
Not proof in the usual sense — but a sign that the God we worship cannot be locked in any tomb, held in any box, tamed by any doctrine, or contained in any ritual.
The Risen Christ will not wait for us to catch up before beginning his work. He does not linger in the grave for our benefit. He goes ahead — back to Galilee, back to the world, back to the places of ordinary life where healing and feeding and calling and forgiving still need to happen.
And we — like Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome at the tomb — must decide what to do next.
It is hard, sometimes, to live in that tension.
To live in a faith that begins not with clarity, but with shock, with the feeling of dissatisfaction, with the fear of losing.
But if we can stop trying to grasp and contain this mystery — if we can trust the voice in the tomb and follow it forward — then we may discover that the emptiness is not the end. It’s the beginning.
The resurrection story is not about possessing Jesus. It’s about being transformed by him and this powerful story. And the only way to be transformed is to go where he has gone — out into the world, into the Galilees of our lives, where mercy is needed, where fear has power, where death still seems to win.
There — not here — is where we will find the Risen One.
So tonight, we dwell for a moment in this holy emptiness.
On Good Friday, we stood at the foot of the cross. We witnessed humiliation, suffering, and silence. We saw a love that chose vulnerability over violence, self-giving over self-protection. We remembered that freedom was purchased not by force, but by a sacrifice poured out for the sake of the world. That same self-emptying love now echoes in this empty tomb. The silence of Good Friday and the emptiness of Easter are not two stories — they are one movement where God’s love does not end in death.
On the cross, what Jesus was called to be and do in the world is finished, accomplished and done. But God is not done yet.
The risen Christ is not missing — he is already ahead of us.
Already at work in this broken, beloved world.
Already calling us to follow.
Here, the simple instruction from Jesus, passed on by the angel, strikes me as deeply powerful:
So go. Tell the disciples. Follow him into the world.
He is already ahead of you. He is not here.
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed, Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.