Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:2; Genesis 22:1-18; Exodus 14:15-15-1; Isaiah 55:1-11; Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28; Romans 6:3-11; Luke 24:1-12
“Remember,” the angels tell the women.
“Remember what he said to you
while he was still in Galilee.”
“And they remembered,” we are told,
and “returned from the tomb.”
This night is the night of remembering.
It is the night of reciting and recalling
God’s goodness to God’s people,
from the creation of the world to the covenant with Abraham,
from salvation from slavery to the promise of new life.
It is the night of remembering
God’s dangerous and disruptive interruption of history.
But even as we gather to remember
God’s mighty acts of salvation,
even as the angels command us to remember
all that Jesus said and did,
we are also put to the question:
“Why do you seek the living one among the dead?”
The angels’ question should alert us to a danger:
memory can too easily lapse into nostalgia,
a homesickness for the past that keeps us
from receiving the new heart and new spirit
that is the promise of Easter.
When memory becomes nostalgia,
when dangerous remembrance becomes pious reminiscence,
we are seeking the living one among the dead.
We seek the living one among the dead
when we seek Christ simply
as a great moral exemplar from the past
whose words and deeds might inspire us,
whose story might comfort us,
but who is not the living Christ
who challenges us to risk everything
for his sake and the Gospel.
We seek the living one among the dead
when we seek him
in some idealized past of the Church,
whether it is the 1950s,
when parishes and seminaries were full-to-bursting,
or the 1970s,
when the spirit of Vatican II
was blowing powerfully through the Church,
or (if you’re like me) the 1270s,
when theology was considered the queen of the sciences,
but do not seek him in the messy present,
in the glorious and wounded body of Christ
that God has called us into in this time and place.
We seek the living one among the dead
when we seek him in an idealized past of our own lives—
when our faith was fresher, our life less complicated,
our friends more faithful, our fears less consuming—
and do not seek him in our present joys and hopes,
our griefs and anxieties,
our daily dying and rising.
I am not saying that we do not learn from the past,
nor that we do not need tradition
in order to know who we are now
and to orient us toward the future.
There is a reason why we gather on this night
to hear these ancient words,
to tell these ancient stories;
there is a reason why the angels tell the women
to remember the words that Jesus spoke to them,
to guard the dangerous memory of resurrection.
But if we seek him only in the memories that we can muster—
in the past that lives no more, if indeed it ever did—
then we are merely seeking the living one among the dead
and we have not yet grasped the good news of Easter.
Resurrection is not a matter of our pious efforts
at remembering the past—
we cannot remember Jesus out of the tomb;
we cannot remember our way out of history’s injustices
or life’s dead ends.
Remembering may be humanity’s best weapon against death,
against the relentless flow of time that sweeps everything away,
but it is not enough.
Even our most treasured memories
falter, grow faint, and fail.
The good news of Easter is not that we remember Jesus,
but that Jesus remembers us.
The good news of Easter is not
that we treasure in our hearts
the words and deeds of Jesus,
but that we are treasured in the heart of the living one,
the one whose human life has been taken up into deathless eternity.
Easter is not about our remembering what God has done,
but about receiving a new heart and a new spirit
to see what God is doing at this moment:
God is remembering us.
At every moment our lives are enfolded
in the eternal thought of God
who knows us more perfectly
than we could ever know ourselves.
In a few minutes,
we will renew our baptismal promises:
an act by which we recommit ourselves
to life in the body of Christ.
We will remember our baptism,
when, as St. Paul says,
“our old self was crucified with him”
so that “just as Christ was raised from the dead…
we too might live in newness of life.”
But even more than our act of remembering,
this is an act of being remembered by God:
God’s act of re-membering us into the risen Christ,
knitting us anew into his glorified body.
This re-membering is God’s gracious gift to us,
not something that we have done for ourselves.
So whether you have kept the Lenten fast with zeal,
or felt your love grow cold and God grow distant,
God remembers you this night.
Whether you have come here full of faithful expectation
or feel that the faith you once possessed
has become a faded memory,
God remembers you this night.
Whether you come hoping for a new heart and a new spirit
or simply stand confused and conflicted in wordless longing
for something that you cannot name,
God remembers you this night.
God remembers us into resurrection
so that we live eternally in the heart of Christ.
For Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and on those in the tomb bestowing new life.
