The Great Vigil of Easter, rcl yr a, 2023
EXODUS 14:10-31, 15:20-21; CANTICLE 1;
EZEKIEL 36:24-28; PSALM 42;
ZEPHANIAH 3:14-20; PSALM 98;
ROMANS 6:3-11; PSALM 114; MATTHEW 28:1-10

go and tell

We bear witness.

Tonight we bear witness with Israel to God’s deliverance of Israel from bondage. It can be a hard story to hear—that some should die that others might live. That the Egyptian charioteers are swallowed up into the Red Sea in order to deliver God’s chosen people. And while this doesn’t tidy things up completely, we do need to make sure we get one thing in the right order: Israel is God’s chosen people, a people from whom God promises to deliver the whole human family from bondage.

That is, God is for Israel because God is for us all. And God is for Israel well before he can ever be against anyone. At this juncture though, in the history of salvation, as a consequence of being for Israel, God will be against Egypt; and God is against Egypt, at this juncture in the history of salvation, because God is against bondage, especially the slavery of Israel, the nation that has a special place in the deliverance of us all from bondage.

But we know where this is heading, don’t we. We are bearing witness tonight with Israel, and we are bearing witness to God’s love, God’s love of Israel. Even as Israel doesn’t return that love the way God hopes, God still makes a way. First through the desert. Then in return from exile. And finally God makes a way back from death.

Because tonight we do not simply bear witness with Israel to the deliverance and preservation of God’s chosen people Israel; we also bear witness to the way of God’s love for us all, a love that begins with Israel, and continues in the Holy One of Israel. We bear witness with Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, we bear witness to the resurrection.

The guards aren’t able to bear the weight of what they witness: the angel whose appearance was like lightning, the angel who rolled back the stone and sat on it, to see that angel of the Lord for the guards meant shaking and becoming like dead men.

Not so the women. Not so us, either. Because we bear witness  with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary not only to the angel, but to the empty tomb, and then to Jesus himself, the Holy One of Israel emerging from the grave. And just as Mary Magdalene and the other Mary bear witness to all they saw to the rest of the disciples, so to would we bear witness.

We bear witness  to their courage and their faith, and we bear witness to what they saw: a man to be worshipped; the Holy One, chosen by God from the nation of Israel to be first among the dead to be raised.

First there is Jesus, raised from the dead; then there will be the rest of Israel, raised from the dead; then all peoples, raised from the dead, me, you, and the Egyptian charioteers, too. This is the promise to which we bear witness, with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary: that the God who ransomed Israel from bondage in Egypt, that the God who ransomed Israel from exile in Babylon, is the God who ransoms us all from death.

This is our witness, this is our faith, this is what God’s love poured out for us looks like: a ransomed people; and then a cross; and then an empty tomb; and then the one who emerges from that tomb, the one in whom all the peoples of the world are ransomed from death, the Holy One of Israel, Jesus Christ our Lord, the one who lives.