“At the Edge of the Empty Tomb” - Fr. Pete's Sermon for Easter Sunday (Witnesses Along the Way series)

John 20:1-18

I wasn’t the first one to come to the tomb. Mary was. Then she came to us before dawn, breathless, shaken. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,” she said, “and we do not know where they have laid him.” That was all she could manage. No angels. No resurrection. Just absence. So Peter and I ran to the tomb, and Mary returned too.

I remember the sound of our feet on the path, the way fear drives the body faster than hope ever could. I outran him—though I would never hold that over him. But I reached the tomb first. But I stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe it was reverence. Maybe fear. Maybe I was not ready for whatever waited inside. I just bent down and looked in. I saw the linen wrappings there.

That’s what struck me first—not the emptiness, but the order. Death does not usually leave things
folded. Thieves do not take the time to unwrap a body carefully and set the cloth neatly aside.

Then Peter arrived, as Peter always does—breathless, determined. He went straight in. Then I followed. Yes, the tomb was empty. And the cloth that had been on his head was rolled up, separate from the others. As if someone had risen deliberately. As if nothing had been rushed.

I saw—and I believed. Not because I understood the Scriptures. We just didn’t know yet what resurrection was supposed to look like. We had no framework for this. No category large enough to hold it. I believed, because something in me recognized the shape of love again.

Standing there, in the quiet of that garden, everything we had lived through over the past week came rushing back—not in order, but like waves, one after another.

I remembered the road into the city just a week ago, the palms in the air, the sound of the crowd swelling with hope, shouting “Hosanna! Save us!” Joy rose in the air easily that day, and we were so sure that God was finally about to act in a way we could recognize.

Then I remembered the upper room. The shock of seeing him kneel. The sound of water poured into a basin. The way love suddenly felt far more demanding than we expected.

I remembered the garden at night. The confusion. The fear. How quickly courage dissolved when the torches came. How easily we scattered.

I remembered the hill outside the city. The cross rising into the sky. The long hours of watching, waiting. The feeling that everything we had hoped for was being undone, wave after wave, until there was nothing left to stand on.

Hope. Confusion. Tenderness. Terror. Grief. All in that moment. It had all come at us so fast, like the sea in a storm—lifting us up one moment and pulling us under the next. And now, standing at the edge of an empty tomb, the storm suddenly stilled.

I saw—and I believed. Not because it made sense. But because love, once again, had proven stronger than our worst fears.

So we went home. I know how strange that sounds. No shouting. No proclamation. Just… stillness. Faith, still learning how to breathe.

But Mary stayed. Later, she would tell us the rest—about the angels, about mistaking him for the gardener, about hearing her name spoken in that voice she knew so well. About being sent to tell us that he was alive. She was the first to proclaim the resurrection. She carried that news when the rest of us were still trying to understand what our faith meant.

But my resurrection day began quietly. It began with noticing. With seeing that God had not abandoned what God had begun. With trusting that even when everything had seemed lost—when power crushed innocence, when love was nailed to a cross—God was still at work.

Resurrection did not arrive for me as certainty. It arrived as recognition. This—this—is what love has always looked like. This is the love that enters cities on donkeys instead of warhorses.
The love that kneels instead of commanding.
The love that refuses violence, even when violence seems inevitable.
The love that goes all the way through death rather than around it.

Easter does not erase the wounds. It does not pretend the cross did not happen. It does not undo the cost. It declares that the cost was not the end. The tomb is empty. Christ is alive. And belief—real belief—begins not with having all the answers, but with trusting that love has already gone ahead of us.

Mary was told to go and tell the good news. And soon Peter would learn how to lead again. And I—I would learn how to bear witness. Because that is what the beloved disciple does. He does not stand at the center of the story. He points to it.

This day is not only about what happened then. It is about what happens now. About what we see
when we stoop down and look into places we thought were sealed shut forever. About what we
believe when the evidence is partial and the future is unclear.

You and I have walked this road together—through cheers and silence, through stormy seas and a
rugged cross, through darkness and dawn.
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And now, standing at the edge of an open tomb, we are invited into the same quiet, courageous
trust: That love has not been defeated.
That death does not have the final word.
And that whatever comes next, the risen Christ is already there. Alleluia! Amen!