The central theme of salvation history is survival. The Old Testament speaks of how God led his people from slavery to freedom through the Exodus and Passover. The New Testament speaks to our survival and how Jesus, the God man and Messiah, overcame sin and death through His resurrection.
There is not a gospel writer who tells the story of Easter by beginning with the risen Christ. Everything begins around a Table, a Cross and an Empty tomb. The disciples who shared a last meal with the Master felt the emptiness of not understanding. The women who gathered at the cross and who first went to the tomb “very early in the morning” find only an instrument of death and an empty tomb.
First comes emptiness. Then comes rejoicing. First comes the Cross. Then comes glory. Resurrection begins with emptiness because life begins with emptiness. Every time we take a step forward in life we must leave something behind. Before we can embrace new life, we must empty ourselves of the life we already possess.
The message of Easter is: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Without seeing, we believe that Christ is alive and with us. We meet him when we worship with others who are witnesses to his life. We have our eyes opened to the risen Christ when the words of Scripture touch our hearts. We come to know him in the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the cup. And we also meet him where he has told us he can be found - in the needy, the outcast, the stranger, the exiled and abused.
Our belief in the Risen Christ also lies within those who give of themselves in the service of others. Our proof is seen in the lives of those men and women who quietly and continuously work for human justice and peace, who are willing to lay down their lives for their brothers and sisters, who embrace suffering and death with open arms - not as a final statement of courage, but as one of total self-giving into the new life of Christ.
The evangelists never describe Jesus’s resurrection. No one saw him rise. They leave us a blank canvas. But they do so with the confidence that through faith and life in the Spirit we can fill in the picture and make the Easter story complete.
The Easter story defines who we are. We are the people of the Table, the people of the Cross, the people of the Empty Tomb.
Jesus gives us the vision to re-examine all that we do and all that we are in the light of Easter Dawn. It is this brilliant and undiminished light of Easter Faith that the Lord calls us to live and become people of the Resurrection.
