Easter Vigil A 2026

​ Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ resurrection is perhaps the most dramatic of the four Gospel narratives. The earth shakes. Angels appear and roll away the stone covering the entrance to the tomb. Then they sit down on the stone in all their blazing glory. Guards freeze. Witnesses wonder even as they’re invited to take a look for themselves. 
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They expected to grieve. They’re prepared to finish the task they didn’t have time to complete just a couple of days earlier. Sundown beginning the Sabbath meant they needed to get home. It was Passover on top of that, but they didn’t feel like celebrating that year. 
I imagine that at least one of the two Marys mentioned in this version of the story is the same one who broke open an expensive jar of ointment and poured it on Jesus. We’re told she bathed his feet in tears and wiped them with her hair. This morning, she likely repeated some of that, this time bathing his feet in tears of joy. 

Then the two companions are given a new task. They are to go tell Jesus’ friends to meet him in Galilee—not Jerusalem, mind you—and Jesus will meet them there. These first witnesses to the resurrection are to convince skeptical disciples that despair has been turned into hope, that death has become new life. 

Matthew tells us that just a couple of days ago, the earth shook, the veil of the Temple concealing the Holy of Holies—the dwelling place of God—was torn in two. Tombs shook open, and many of the dead were raised, then seen walking around town. I wonder what the response to that was. After all, it’s not the zombie apocalypse, not a forerunner of The Walking Dead. 

It’s entirely new, something that never happened that way before. All because Jesus died—entered into death itself—and death could not hold him, despite its powerful grip on life. 

Matthew tells us those things happened at Jesus’ death, as his presence in death stirred them into new life, not pointing them to old ways of life, mind you. New life, just waiting for the moment of new birth. 

We, too, are given a new task this day. Well, not entirely new, because it’s been ours to do from that first resurrection morning. Our task is to bear the new life of the risen Christ into the places of death and oppression in our own time, and to witness what the very presence of the life of Christ can do to transform the many ways death continues to hold life in its grasp. 

The risen Christ waits for us in the many Galilees of our own time. We just need to recognize that those Galilees can be within us, and also the place where others find they meet new life for themselves. We carry the new life of Galilee into the tombs of our own time, where we join with others to proclaim new life in those places and ways of life where death no longer has power.

So go to Galilee. Meet the risen Christ. Then be the new Galilee, where the risen Christ is made known.