Isaiah 25:6-9
6 And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.
7 And God will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations.
8 God will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of the people shall God take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.
9 And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for God who will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited; we will be glad and rejoice in God's salvation. KJV, alt.
Resurrection
Whether at a close to Saturday midnight Easter Vigil, a sunrise service, the regular Sunday morning hour, or easing into afternoon or early Easter Sunday evening, as Act III, the first Eucharist of Easter concludes the three act liturgy of the Triduum or Three Days. Easter isn't simply a isolated special day; Easter is fifty days, a week of weeks, and occupies about one-seventh of the year. It's that important!
Today's First Reading I
Sometimes referred to as an example of apocalyptic writing, Isaiah 25:6-9 is the Hebrew scripture reading for Easter Evening every year. We find it amidst writings mostly from Isaiah of Jerusalem (pre-exilic First Isaiah, chapters 1-39), yet chapters 24 through 27 probably come from at least a century afterwards. Despite all of Isaiah rocking a considerable sense of hope with salvation for all creation, this passage may have been written from Babylon during the exile, or probably even later, during restoration of the city of Jerusalem, rebuilding the temple, and rediscovery of Torah.
These imaginative words remind us the God of Israel is God of all people, a God on the side of everyone. All Saints Day pairs this extravagant banquet with Jesus raising dead Lazarus [John 11:1-44].
Today's First Reading II
In the northern hemisphere we've cycled from browning autumn root crops, leaves falling from trees and decaying to enrich the ground, shorter days, longer nights into an apparently quiet, still, and silent winter that in many aspects feels similar to the stillness and quiet near-silence of the desertscape's surface.
Wintry days lengthened as earth produced tender green sprouts, tulips, crocus, and spring agricultural crops (my header collage illustrates a few, although peach trees are only in bloom now, peach and other pit fruit will arrive fairly soon) all remind us of God's gift of the agricultural cycle, God's gift of land.
The vail – KJV, "veil" in modern English – or shroud of death becomes a festal tablecloth as God prepares and serves a bountiful spread of a covenant meal shared by God and people. That eschatological feast – as we called our extravagant potlucks in divinity school – will be God's sign that death and dying are no more.
God will swallow up death and the shroud of death – coverings that hide the light of life, anything that lessens our joy – into God's own being. God will obliterate all the different kinds of death. Did you know the pall that covers the casket at a Christian funeral is a baptismal garment signifying death and resurrection?
Where We Live
But the church has celebrated the Day of Resurrection for two millennia; most readers of this blog have observed a few decades of Easters. We look around us and still see, still experience hatred, poverty and injustice. Illness, death, and dying. Grief. Tears.
Although agriculture's seasons of tilling, planting, growing, and harvesting keep cycling continuously, our theology tells us Easter, the event of Jesus Christ's resurrection, that eighth day that's also the first day of the new creation, marked the end of death and dying. Jesus' death and resurrection concluded ongoing cycles of poverty, illness, injustice.
Despite the dawn of the new creation on the day of resurrection two thousand years ago, God's renewed, restored natural creation and righteous society has only begun. It still waits – and hopes – for us to help finish it. Theology of the cross emphasizes Saturday, the interstitial time of winter-like quiet when apparently nothing happens yet everything happens. But God calls us to live as fully alive, resurrected, and redeemed people of the cross.
In the Acts of the Apostles [Acts 1:4-8] when the risen Jesus' followers ask him if now he'll finally restore the reign of heaven to earth, Jesus basically tells them "the question is wrong," and to wait until they've received the gift of the Spirit because then they'll be his witnesses in word and action. In the power of the Spirit they'll be the ones to bring heaven to earth.
On the third day, the third act of the Triduum aligns and unites nature and history, but wait! Filled with the Spirit of the Day of Pentecost that's the fiftieth day of Easter, like Jesus' original disciples, we become agents of the justice, inclusion, and freedom of a finished new creation. Amen? Amen!
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