“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark...” so begins John’s account of the Resurrection.

While it was still dark, Mary headed to the tomb. I think we can learn a lot from the posture Mary adopts while it was still dark. The two other disciples return home when they discover the tomb is empty. As for Mary, she stays there and she attends to her grief, making room for it, allowing herself to feel it as fully as she can. When I was training as a Spiritual Director, we were reminded that tears can be a sign that the Holy One is drawing near. Tears come as divine gifts, and they have something to say to us, if we’re willing to listen. As Mary weeps, she sees two angels, sitting where Jesus' body had been. Like good spiritual directors, they draw attention to the tears, and ask: Why are you weeping? What are the tears about Mary? She repeats her anguished cry: “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” Just then, Mary sees someone, someone she mistakes for the gardener.

And all it takes is for him to say her name, and the scales drop from her eyes. Mary is the first to lay eyes on the resurrected Jesus. That she’s the first I credit with her being willing to linger in a hard, barren place, in the place of confusion and grief. Notice that Jesus doesn’t come to her in blazing brightness. As Deb Thomas has reflected:

So often we want God to come to us that way… with unmistakable clarity. If the resurrection accounts are to be trusted, more often than not the life of faith involves a lot of stumbling around in darkness with no small measure of bewilderment. Jesus comes in the darkness, and sometimes it takes a long time to recognize him. He doesn’t look the way I expect him to look. He doesn’t let me cling to old ideas of him. He disappears again just as I grab hold of him. But he comes, nonetheless, and calls my name even when I’m lost in grief. And in that instant, I recognize both myself and him.

How about you? I don’t necessarily know where your dark places are, but I know you have them. There’s a line I love from one of the Night Prayers in the New Zealand Prayer Book:

The night is dark. Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in you.

We don’t need to be told that the night is dark, do we? The darkness of our world and of our own lives can be despair-inducing at times. As for our world, it feels like the social fabric is disintegrating in the face of war, ever increasing polarization, and economic inequities. It feels like the fabric of life itself is unravelling as we plunge still deeper into the sixth mass extinction episode planet earth has known. We are losing a staggering number of species, with one in four now at risk of extinction. And what of our own lives? Some of you have been walking in darkness for quite some time, whether it’s the darkness of long Covid, financial stress, illness of mind, body or soul, the death of a loved one, or relational fallout.

What does the resurrection of Jesus say to us who are still living in darkness? It says this: while it is still dark, God is at work bringing life from death. That’s true of a seed in the darkness of the soil or a baby in the darkness of the womb. Darkness is where new life is born.

While it is still dark, while they mourned, while they looked, while they wondered, while Mary wept, Jesus was already risen.  

Already risen indeed. And that changes everything.

Because Christ is risen, death has been defeated once and for all.

Because Christ is risen, there is hope not only for our own human lives, but for the life of the whole created world.

Because Christ is risen, a new day has. dawned. We are called to live as people who lean into the truth of this, declaring it with our mouths and with our lives. As we live as resurrection people in the here and now, may our lives anticipate the renewal of all things. Amen.