The Darkness
The Easter Vigil begins in darkness.
We gather outside around a new fire, carry its light with us into the sanctuary, and then sit and listen to ancient texts that remind us of the story of our salvation.
Creation. The fall. The flood. A burning bush. An army swallowed by the sea. A valley of dry bones. Three men in a furnace. A man in the belly of a great fish. Tonight, while the world is still dark, we have been listening to the long story of God and his world, and now we have arrived at last at the empty tomb.
But before we talk about the meaning of the empty tomb, I want us to think for a moment about the darkness that still surrounds us. That darkness has been lingering with us since Good Friday.
On Friday night, we stood at the foot of the cross and watched everything that matters in this world fail all at once. Justice was bent and broken. Beauty was turned into mockery. Freedom was denied as an innocent man was nailed to a tree. Truth was swallowed by imperial power. Power that was meant to defend and uplift the lowly crushed the one who had humbled himself as a servant. The one in whom heaven and earth met cried out in dereliction, feeling that he had been abandoned. And the one who had loved his own εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end — was abandoned by everyone he loved. Every broken signpost suddenly seemed to point to the same hill, the same cross, and the same man, and then he died. He was placed in a borrowed tomb, the stone was rolled in place, and that tomb, and the world along with it, went dark.
It is that darkness in which we started our service this evening, and that darkness still surrounds us now.
The darkness that begins on Good Friday, lingers through Holy Saturday, and is even here at the start of Easter, is the same darkness that was present before the world was ever made.
In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And into that darkness, God spoke.
“Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).
On the first day of creation, God called light out of darkness. On the first day of the new creation, God speaks again, not with words, but with an act so powerful that the earth shook, the stone rolled back, and the light of the world walked out of an empty tomb alive, never to die again.
The Light Shines Backward
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hinge on which all of history turns. And the light that came from that empty tomb does something remarkable: it shines in both forward and backward at once.
When we stand at the empty tomb and turn to look backward, the first thing that we see is the cross. If Jesus is supposed to answer our deepest questions about God, then, looking on the cross from the darkness of Good Friday alone, Jesus’ death appears to be a devastating, silent non-answer. You can feel this in the words of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They have no hope. No joy. Only darkness. They say of Jesus that he was “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” but the “chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.” And then they add, “And now we’re just waiting for him to rise from the dead, just like he said!”
No. They say, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped, but the crucifixion put an end to that hope. In the darkness of Good Friday, the hopes and fears of all the years come crashing down against the might of an imperial cross.
But when Easter light shines in that darkness, something changes. What looked like defeat becomes victory. What looked like abandonment becomes oneness with the Father. What was an instrument of brutal death and torture becomes a symbol of life — eternal, resurrected life.
When the Easter light shines further back into the history past the cross of Jesus Christ, we begin to see that all of redemptive history, like the broken signposts, has always been pointing to Jesus Christ, even though we couldn’t see it until the light of the empty tomb shone backward into human history.
In Genesis 1 and 2, God creates the world and humanity, yet a divide remains between creator and creature. In the Incarnation, God becomes a human being, crossing that divide to be one with us. But when Jesus dies, he surrenders his Spirit to the Father. At that moment, the Incarnation could have been over. It would have been. If Plato had had his way, the Second Person of the Trinity could have left his body behind, returned to heaven as a spirit, and left the divide between God and humans in place forever. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ affirms the goodness of the world that God made, the goodness of the human body that God made, and the permanence of God’s union with humanity. He will forever be with us.
In Genesis 3, humanity is placed under the curse, begins to die, and is exiled from the Garden, the tree of life, and the presence of God. When Jesus Christ rises from the dead in a garden, he affirms that death no longer gets the last word in the story of our lives, that the curse is at last coming undone, and that he indeed intends to dwell with humanity forever.
Noah and Israel are both saved from water. Where they were spared the water, Christ went through it. Noah has the ark. Israel had dry land. But Christ was plunged into the depths of the water, as all human beings eventually are, and has come back out alive. Is it any wonder that Noah’s Ark and Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea are both signposts for Christian baptism?
In the marvel of the burning bush, we see that God can be present in the world, even as a blazing fire, and not consume his creation. God is present, but the bush is not destroyed. What God does in the bush, the resurrection affirms he will one day do for all the world.
Ezekiel envisions the long-awaited restoration of Israel and Judah as a valley of dry bones coming back to life. Resurrection was the metaphor of Israel’s restoration, but now, in the light of the empty tomb, the metaphor has become a reality, and it’s no longer just the hope of one family and one nation but the only hope of all the world.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than normal. Nebuchadnezzar looks in and sees four men walking around unbound. The fourth, he says, is like a son of the gods. Three men went into the fire. Four are walking in it. The only things the fire destroyed were the ropes that bound them. In the light of Easter, we see that God does not rescue his people by keeping them out of the fire. Instead, he enters the fire with them. He is present with us in every darkness, every furnace, and every tomb. And when he walks out alive, he brings his people with him. The only things that do not survive God’s presence are the bonds that held and enslaved his people.
Then there is Jonah. Jonah is called to preach, but he runs in the opposite direction. The storm comes. He goes overboard. He goes down into the deep. Three days and three nights in darkness, in the belly of death. And then the fish vomits him onto dry land, and Jonah goes to Nineveh, and an entire city filled with enemies of the people of God repents. We do not have to guess what this story means. In the light of the empty tomb, Jesus tells us directly.
“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).
The prophet who went down into the deep and came back up on the third day, who was then sent to preach to the nations — he was always pointing forward to the one who descended into death, rose on the third day, and then sends his people out to proclaim what God has done to the very ends of the earth. And yes, even to our enemies.
All these stories. All these rescues. They have always been pointing to Jesus, to his death and resurrection, in ways that no one could ever have imagined. But now, as the light of Easter shines backward into the pages of human history, we see he is where they have been pointing all along.
The Light Shines Forward
But the light of Easter does not only illuminate the past. It shines forward as well, and it gives us a new vocation.
Paul says it plainly in Romans 6:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3–4).
The resurrection of Jesus is not only something that happened to him. It is something that is happening in us and will one day happen to us bodily. The same Spirit that hovered over the waters in the beginning, the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, now dwells in those who belong to him. The new creation that began on that first Easter morning is still, by the power of that same Spirit, breaking into this world, and we, the baptized Spirit-filled people of God, are its heralds and its agents.
You may have noticed last night that I referred to the broken signposts as “vocational signposts” — seven features of human life that every culture in every age reaches for but cannot quite grasp: justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. These broken signposts are not merely descriptions of what failed at the cross. That’s what we talked about on Good Friday. They are also descriptions of what the resurrection is in the process of repairing. And the Spirit of God, dwelling in the people of God, is the means by which that repair happens in the world. These signposts are also our vocation as resurrection people.
When we stand up for the innocent and fight for those to whom justice has been denied, we are not merely doing good deeds. We are making visible the God who vindicated the righteous sufferer of Psalm 22, who raised the just one condemned by an unjust world, who has promised to put all things right. We are living signposts of the resurrection.
When we create beauty — when we make art, tend gardens, sing well, build things worth looking at, and refuse to let ugliness have the final word — we are honoring the one through whose wounds a beauty has emerged that has been generating art and music and poetry for two thousand years. The resurrection does not despise the material world. It redeems it. And every act of genuine beauty is a testimony to the new creation already breaking into the present.
When we speak the truth at personal cost, when we refuse to let power define reality, when we live with integrity in a world of spin and half-truths, we are following the one who stood before Pilate and said that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. Truth is not merely a virtue. In the light of the resurrection, truth is an act of defiance against every empire and every corporation that has ever tried to make its own truth.
When we exercise power as service — when we lead by washing feet, when we spend ourselves for others rather than protecting ourselves, when we resist the seduction of dominance and choose the towel and the basin instead — we are embodying the kingdom that is not from this world, the kingdom whose king was enthroned on a cross and whose power death could not hold.
When we pray, when we worship, when we bring our darkness honestly before God rather than pretending it isn’t there, when we cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and trust that we will be heard — we are living at the intersection of heaven and earth, the place the resurrection has opened permanently for us and the Spirit now inhabits.
And when we love one another εἰς τέλος — all the way to the end, past the point where our love would naturally stop, through disappointment and betrayal and the sheer difficulty of other people — we are carrying into the world the love that went all the way to a cross and came back out of a tomb alive. We are witnesses that the last enemy of humanity shall be defeated, that death no longer writes the final word in the story of our lives, and that love, therefore, can afford to be as reckless and as costly as it wants to be.
In the light of the resurrection, all the broken signposts not only point to Christ, but they also point to our vocation in this world. To start the Easter service in the brightness of a new day is, symbolically, an act of over-realized eschatology. Christ has risen, but there is still darkness everywhere we look. The world is still full of broken signposts. Justice is still denied. Beauty still fades. Freedom is still elusive. Truth is still swallowed by power. Spirituality still reaches out for God but settles for cheap substitutes. Love still falters and fails.
But we are not people of the dark. The world is still sitting in the kind of darkness we gather in tonight. But we are the people of the resurrection, indwelt by the Spirit of the one who defeated death, and we are sent in his power to live in such a way that the broken signposts of this world begin to be repaired, one act of justice, one piece of beauty, one costly love at a time.
The light of the empty tomb does not merely comfort us. It sends us out into the darkness of the world with the light of Christ.
The Tomb is Empty
You can still visit Jesus’ tomb today, and, just as those first visitors did two thousand years ago, you will find it empty.
The Lord is risen, and in the light of that rising, everything looks different. The cross is not a tragedy but a victory. The broken signposts were not lies but merely needed to be seen from the other side. Darkness was not the end; the Light of the world has risen from the tomb.
Go from this place tonight, back into the darkness, and with your words and deeds, live as spirit-filled signposts, always pointing others back to your crucified and risen King.
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Amen.
Life Group Discussion Guide
Intro Prayer
Lord of light and life, thank you for the empty tomb and for an act so powerful that the earth shook and death lost its grip. As we open your word together, keep us from rushing past what this light in the darkness truly means. Give us eyes to see what the resurrection changes and ears to hear what it asks of us. Amen.
Ice Breaker
Has there been a moment in your life when something that looked like a dead end turned out to be a beginning? What was it?
Questions
Fr. Michael opens with the claim that the darkness of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Vigil is the same darkness that preceded creation. What does it mean that God’s first act was to speak light into that darkness? What does it mean that he does it again at the resurrection?
The disciples on the road to Emmaus say “we had hoped.” The crucifixion had ended their hope. Have you ever been in a season where following Christ looked like defeat rather than a victory? What did the light of the resurrection change, if anything?
Fr. Michael reads the Old Testament stories backward from the empty tomb: Noah, Israel at the Red Sea, the burning bush, Ezekiel’s dry bones, Shadrach and his companions, Jonah. Pick one. What does the resurrection reveal about that story that you couldn’t see before?
The Incarnation could have ended at the cross. Jesus could have surrendered his spirit to the Father and left the divide between God and humanity in place forever. What does the resurrection say about the human body, the material world, and God’s intention to dwell with us?
The broken signposts are not only descriptions of what failed at the cross. They are also descriptions of what the resurrection is in the process of repairing. Which of the seven, justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, relationships, do you feel most called to work on? What would that look like in your actual life?
Fr. Michael argues that truth, in the light of the resurrection, is not merely a virtue but an act of defiance. What does it cost to speak truth in your context right now?
“Love can afford to be as reckless and costly as it wants to be” because death no longer gets the final word. Where in your life does that claim need to change how you love?
We are sent back out into the same darkness we came from. What does it mean to live as a signpost rather than as someone who has arrived?
Life Application
Choose one of the seven signposts this week and take one concrete step toward repairing it. Not a resolution but an action. One act of justice, one piece of beauty, one costly love. Bring it back to the next meeting and tell the group what happened.
Key Takeaways
The resurrection is the hinge on which all of history turns. It shines backward into the past and forward into the future, and everything looks different in its light.
God did not rescue his people by keeping them out of the fire, the flood, or the tomb. He entered those places with them and brought them through.
The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now dwells in those who belong to him. The new creation that began on Easter morning is still breaking into the world.
The broken signposts are not only descriptions of what failed at the cross. They are our vocation. We are sent to repair them, one act at a time.
Because of the resurrection, love can afford to be reckless and costly. Death does not get the final word.
Ending Prayer
Lord Jesus, you walked out of the tomb alive, and everything changed. The cross became a victory. The darkness became the threshold of a new creation. The broken signposts became a vocation. Send us back out into the darkness with that light. Give us courage to work for justice, to make beauty, to speak truth, to lead by washing feet, and to love past the point where we would naturally stop. We are not people of the dark. Make us signposts of your resurrection, pointing others back to you. Amen.