"He is not here..."

Some years ago, when a family in his community had suffered a terrible loss, a Lutheran pastor preached an Easter Vigil sermon:

.... For almost two thousand years, humans have heard this story and for almost two thousand years we have been coming up with reasons not to believe it. Perhaps Jesus' body was stolen, it is argued, and the appearances to his disciples were the work of an imposter. Perhaps the appearances were a mass hallucination by the disciples, unresolved grief expressing itself as a sort of denial that he was even dead. Maybe the empty tomb is a later addition to this story. Maybe the whole thing is a metaphor for the power of Jesus' teaching. Maybe it is an echo of the stories of the pagan gods of the ancient near east, who go to the underworld for a season and then come back, bringing spring with them. The sun will come up tomorrow and life will renew itself.

These arguments are, briefly, all balderdash. Yes, the stories are strange and filled with mystery. No, they do not create one consistent picture of that morning and the days that follow. But the doubt and confusion are written into the story from the start. This is not a confidence game or a fraud or a metaphor. The stories would look totally different if they were. The people who were there believed this had happened. What and how, exactly, they couldn't say. But it was unbearably, unbelievably real to them. ....

Yet there it was, and there it is: a tomb with no corpse. A door opening to a possibility we may not even want to entertain. That there is something beyond the grave—not in our warm, rose-tinged memories, not in some distant shore where the souls of the righteous congregate, not in the recurring cycle of nature, spring following winter and day following night, not in our plucky human desire to go on living despite it all—but in the love shown to a broken body as it is knitted back together. In the care shown to a dead body as it is revived to life. In the promise of salvation and in-gathering of all the peoples that is initiated by this one lonely empty tomb. In a new age that begins now, in the devil being cast out from this one cranny of earth, hell being crushed under this one foot, death being deprived of its spoils in this one corpse. .... (more)

Benjamin Dueholm, "Preaching the Easter Vigil," The Parish Bulletin, April 17, 2025.