Greeting in the Dark

Easter Morning: Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24;

Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

April 5, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1182459009

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. Easter Greetings!

We greet this life in the dark. It is what we do year by year, week by week, day by day. This greeting is an Easter practice.

All week we have been moving toward it. We launched into Holy Week on Palm Sunday one week ago, tracing, walking the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. We followed him through his final meal with his beloveds, his trial and execution. Taking in that sacred and terrible scene, we watched in our imaginations as he was sealed in a tomb and darkness fell. Then last night at the Easter Vigil, we returned to that scene. We lit what is called the New Fire. From that fire, we lit the Paschal candle, illumined body of resurrection life. By its light we sat around the font and shared stories of God’s saving deeds in generations past, until the moment of declaration that, alleluia, Christ is risen. Then the light returned in force. This morning we celebrate that deep, earth-shattering truth bathed in glorious sunlight. But let us not forget the scene of darkness. It is there that Christ meets us, greets us, prompts us turn and receive his rising.

The darkness is crucial. In John’s gospel particularly, it is a space in which fear and danger are named and new life is born. Several weeks ago, in the penitential season of Lent the prepares us for this day, Jesus was approached by a communal teacher and leader named Nicodemus—we are told he came specifically “by night” (John 3:1-17). This was a darkness of curiosity, caution and likely fear. Who was this Jesus, a teacher who clearly had “come from God,” as Nicodemus said. Jesus spoke to him of a different kind of “being born,” of being created afresh, birthed of the Spirit, a new wind from God blowing us where it chooses in ways we cannot fathom. This night of greeting was filled with questions and possibility. There was a night, too, of fear, as the story progressed and the one who would betray Jesus to the Roman authorities had left the disciples’ shared table to carry out his deed. Once he departed, John’s text declared simply, “and it was night” (John 13:30). Here the night names the experience of anxiety and fear, of not knowing what may come next, of impending suffering and loss.

It is here, in the darkness, that resurrection emerges. “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark” (John 20:1). These are the first words of John’s resurrection account. Not, “as the sun rose over the tomb” or “as the light shined onto the expectant disciples.” It was still dark. Still signifies that it would not remain dark forever, that light was coming. But that light is not meant to drown out the darkness. God meets us in the spaces of our questions and fears, our loss and confusion—not simply smoothing them out but inviting us to turn as we stand in the midst of them, to see something further, something more. When Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb she is shattered. Not only had her beloved Jesus been taken from her by death. Now even his body was missing. The stone was rolled away – by whom? When? How? The loving service she was prepared to render, anointing Jesus’ body with traditional spices – as the other gospel accounts describe several women approaching the tomb to do on that morning – now appeared to be for naught. Then Mary is abruptly bypassed by the male disciples who get caught up in a frantic running race after she had relayed the disappearance. She stands weeping outside the tomb, stooping to take in the scene in the tomb. The angelic visitors she encounters there do not dispel this night as they ask her, nonsensically, “why are you weeping?” How could she not be weeping? Nor does the stranger who repeats the question just outside the tomb. This stranger appears to Mary to be a gardener. Seeking at least to locate and dignify the missing body, she tells him, “if you have carried him away, tell me” (20:15) so that I can complete what I have come her to do. This is the moment when the stranger says her name, Mary.Which causes her to turn again, to look with fresh eyes, and to declare, Rabouni! Teacher! Beloved! Christ the risen one had greeted her amid this darkness. He had called her by name.^[1]

At the dawn of all things, the Spirit had hovered, beginning to blow where it would. Even into the first humans, planted in a garden and given the breath of life. God greeted them there and to til and nourish, to safeguard and grow. Now in this darkness, life was birthed anew. It could not be extinguished even by humanity at its worst. Though Jesus, who went about doing good, healing the oppressed, though he was put to death on a tree, as we heard in the our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, God raised him (Acts 10:38-40). God allowed him to appear. Particularly, poignantly to Mary Magdalene in the darkness between night and day. God in Jesus the Christ came to Mary and called her by name and in that greeting creating her afresh. God activated her as an agent of Good News, the emergence of God’s kingdom right there in the soil outside the tomb, telling her to go out, cultivate it, and share it.

One of my favorite images of this moment is depicted in an icon by Kelly Lattimore.^[2] You have photocopies of it to color in and take home this morning. You may color it however you like, but in the original, the darkness of this moment is rendered with abundant ambiguity. The night sky is still winks with stars, while a touch of dawn licks the horizon just to Mary’s left. She stands with one hand over her heart, the other holding her anointing oil. She looks down with an expression that speaks multitudes: as I look, I still see the impress of worry in her knit brows; I see deep consolation and love. And there is Jesus, crouched before her. Notably, it is he who crouches, not she who is often portrayed as being rebuffed from grabbing his feet (a semi-rejecting interpretation of the “do not touch me, I have not yet ascended” line). Instead Jesus touches a knee to the earth, a hand tenderly cupping a sprouting plant. He looks up at her as he does this, as if to say, look, Mary, now the green blade rises. And indeed, not simply one green blade but three tiny sprouts, like beans you might started in the dark of a garage or potting shed. But no, this is the dark of all that they had gone through, the fear, the suffering, the loss. These things truly had taken place. They were not wiped away as if they had never occurred. And these realities could not suppress the new life that was coming. Resurrection hope emerges out of death, amid our groanings and longings. The icon depicts that upwelling life not only in the three small sprouts, but in a multitude of sprightly, flowering plants that turn out to surround Mary right where she is standing. The empty tomb lies in the background, the grave clothes clearly visible. All of this was and is real, here in the dark as unexpected new life yet grew. Will you help me cultivate it, Jesus seems to be asking.

Theologian and priest of the Church of England Kenneth Leech, who died 2015, has written of faith that refuses to shrink away from the most existentially challenging scenes this world delivers to us. Darkness, to Leech, references both the terrible things human beings go through and the soil of faith. He writes that our entry into darkness “is the very heart of faith and hope. To be a Christian at all is to enter in this dark night: the night in which we do not know the way but in which God becomes luminously present. This dark night is a paradigm of the Paschal transformation by which we are integrated into the life of God.”^[3] His phrase “the dark night of the soul,” references the famous the sixteenth century mystical theologian John of the Cross who teaches, writes Leech, that “the darkness is the light and the love, the ecstatic light of God as seen from our finite and fallen position…. Only those who pass through the darkness can know the wonder of redeeming love and the power of grace. The way of faith is obscure: as Saint John says, we travel by night.”^[4] We grope our way forward in the dark, confronting searing losses, terrible fears, deep concerns in our world and in our lives. We have very real reasons to be afraid, as Deacon Margaret preached at our Vigil last evening.^[5] And in this darkness, God in Jesus Christ greets us. He calls us by name. He gives us living water and draws us into new creation.

And so on this Day of Resurrection, as Christ greets us in the dark, may we receive that welcome. May we open our hearts to the Mystery at the very heart of our faith. The liturgist and poet Janet Morely has written a litany “For the Darkness of Waiting.” I’ll quote it in part.

For the darkness of waiting

of not knowing what is to come

of staying ready and attentive,

we praise you, O God.

For the darkness of choosing

when you give us the moment

to speak, and act, and change,

and we cannot know what we have set in motion,

but we still have to take the risk,

we praise you, O God.

For the darkness of hoping

in a world which longs for you,

for the wrestling and laboring of all creation

for wholeness and justice and freedom,

We praise you, O God.^[6]

This morning let us praise God for newness of life that greets us in the dark.

Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.

^[1] My reading of John's resurrection account is influenced by Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), especially chapters 3-5.

^[2] Kelly Latimore, Mary Magdalene and Christ the Gardener: https://kellylatimoreicons.com/products/mary-magdalene-and-christ-the-gardener  

^[3] Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucified (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1994), 76.

^[4] Kenneth Leech, 76-77

^[5] https://www.staidansf.org/post/easter-vigil-3

^[6] Janet Morley, All Desires Known (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1988, 1992), 58-59.