“But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Lk. 24:11).
Our Vigil service this evening began with readings from the Old Testament: part of a liturgy traditionally seen as the Church’s most complete telling of the story of salvation. “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history,” we were told, “how he saved his people in ages past; and let us pray that our God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption.” On this night, these ancient stories are joined to the New Testament account of Jesus’ resurrection to paint the fullest picture of how God works out the salvation of the world.
There’s a method in this madness. As we stand tonight in the clear light of Jesus’ resurrection, we look back and see how God was at work all along: from the beginning and the making of the world; through the call of Israel and the exodus from Egypt; through the ministry of the prophets and the People’s return from exile. We see in retrospect that these events were part of a sacred history, a deliberate progression from one act to another, with a meaning and a purpose hidden with God.
But remember for a moment our Gospel, which details the disciples’ response: “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Lk. 24:11). On Easter day, it was not readily apparent to the disciples what it all meant. The Gospel writer channels the responses of Jesus’ followers to the word that the women brought: that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had been raised from the dead. “An idle tale” is their reaction; that is, it’s foolishness, incoherent nonsense that doesn’t add up.
In other words, the message of the women was not what they were expecting. To the ears of the disciples, to borrow the poet’s words, the women were telling “A tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). If history is by definition a narrative with meaning and purpose, then the news that the women brought didn’t seem to make the cut. It was alien to the disciples’ experience of life, and their understanding of God’s purpose in the world. The empty tomb signified nothing but a non sequitur, a puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
Now here’s a truth: sometimes the only way to make sense of things is through something that doesn’t make sense, something that defies our human attempts to reduce the world to the merely understandable. The good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ seemed to the disciples but an idle tale, that didn’t fit with their expectation of how the world worked; but it turned out to be the key to making sense of everything. We can’t explain it, or even explain it away, but the resurrection provides hope to an otherwise hopeless world.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the event sourced from beyond time that makes sense of all times. God, who has no history, having no beginning and no end, made history by entering our time and becoming human. “Made history” quite literally: creating meaning and an ultimate purpose through a timely intervention. With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, history now has a direction. God’s loving purpose in creation, in the calling of Israel, in the exodus from Egypt and the return from exile: all of it became the sacred story that we tell tonight, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Of course, there’s a lot more of human history that we’re challenged to account for. The death of millions in a worldwide pandemic; brutality and war in the waste places of the earth; malice and enmity in our domestic social context: how do we make these things add up? Are they more than random, tragic, or meaningless events? How do we make moral sense of them?
Well, the truth is we don’t; but God does through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Life out of death; fellowship in the face of division; healing in the midst of devastation: God confirms his promise and gives us hope by raising Jesus Christ from the dead. It’s the event that resists explanation that, through faith, helps us grow in understanding; it’s the inexplicable action of God, “beyond our knowing” as we heard this evening, that saves us and makes us whole.
The French priest and theologian Louis Bouyer writes that “the great object of faith and hope” is “the principle of an unlimited expectation, founded on an unforgettable past, which gives reassurance in the mystery of a problematical present” (The Meaning of Sacred Scripture). That just about sums up our celebration tonight. The words of the women were not an idle tale, but an invitation to faith: not only to the disciples then, but to everyone today. Tonight, the newly baptized, our confirmands, and all of us, are taken up in God’s mighty action in Jesus Christ our Lord. His resurrection is the source of our hope, and the present-day promise of new and everlasting life with him.