Easter Sunday 2026
Resurrection, Loudon
John 20:1-18
The Right Rev. Brian L. Cole
“…while it was still dark…”
There is no such thing as Easter Black.
When I think of Easter, the colors are soft pastels. Easter dresses and hats and flowers are white and pink, yellow and mint green, gold and baby blue.
So, when you stand in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, surrounded by 14 large rectangular paintings, which appear to be all black, Easter morning is not what comes to mind. (Click here to see a photo of the chapel.)
The chapel was built to display Mark Rothko’s paintings in a meditative space. Mark Rothko is known for his abstract art from the 1950s and 60s when he painted dark floating rectangles contrasted against colorful backgrounds.
By the time of the chapel commission, however, the blues and reds and yellows from earlier Rothko paintings were no more. These last fourteen panels are black.
If you keep looking at them, with time, dark purple emerges in the space you first saw all black. If you keep looking there, white flecks are present, too.
In the book, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, James Elkins, art critic, makes a claim that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings. And of all Rothko’s paintings, Elkins believes most people have been moved by the fourteen huge canvases he made for the chapel that now bears his name.
But why so many tears when you are looking at what appears to be a dark canvas?
A biographer of Rothko has suggested when you stand in front of the canvases at the Chapel that the viewer is in front of an open grave.
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”
Easter morning begins in the dark.
Mary Magdalene goes early in the morning, in the dark, to the tomb. And while it is still dark, she sees that something is missing. The stone in front of the tomb.
It is dark. But Mary Magdalene looks long enough to see what is and is not there. In continuing to look in the dark, she is rewarded with the first foretaste of Easter resurrection.
After Peter and John return with her to the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene remains there after they depart. She remains there, in front of an open grave, and cries.
Through her tears, she keeps looking. In the tomb, where there had been nothing, now there are angels, two of them. They mark where Jesus has been and is no longer.
“Why are you weeping?”
Why are you weeping? If you stand in front of a Rotkho, and tears come, where do they come from?
The angels ask Mary Magadelene about her tears, and Jesus also asks her about her tears, though she does not realize it is Jesus, the very friend who had been in the borrowed tomb.
She is crying because her friend is missing. Her friend, her Lord, is not at the place where she knew him to be. She knew him to be dead, but in the dark, she still went to be near him.
At the end of this story, Mary Magdalene will cry out, “I have seen the Lord.” The man in the garden, who asks about her tears, is Jesus, her friend, her Lord. But, first, she will cry in front of an open grave, possibly for more reasons than we can imagine.
At the Rothko Chapel, there is always a book for visitors to leave their comments after viewing the panels. All these books have been collected and kept in the archives. Some of their comments simply say, “I liked them,” or “I didn’t like them.”
But for the people who stood in front of the panels, the open graves, and cried, this is what they have said. “This makes me fall down.” “The silence pierces…the heart.” “Tears, a liquid embrace.” “Thank you for creating a place for my heart to cry.”
This morning, we are not here in the dark. We are, however, living in a world where we lose count of how many open graves are before us. No matter where you might choose to stand, like Mary, we have countless reasons to cry.
Before calling Mary by her name, Jesus, the Resurrected One, asks her about her tears. Why are you weeping? What is breaking your heart? He does not tell her not to cry. He does not tell her everything is fine now.
Easter begins in the dark. The Resurrected One was first the Condemned One and the Crucified One and the Dying One.
We celebrate today that it is Easter and that Mary has heard her name called out by her friend, her Lord, who is not missing but is standing before her. But Easter Resurrection does not go back in time and obliterate our memory of Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
The Resurrected Jesus is someone with wounds. Mary’s memory of those wounds might cause her to cry, to weep.
Today, we celebrate Easter Resurrection. We celebrate that God, through Christ Jesus was willing to be touched by death, to descend to hell, to empty it, and forevermore transform death and life.
So, we have countless reasons to celebrate Easter.
And you also need not ever apologize for your tears and all the places where you stand, in front of open graves, with an open heart, weeping for friends and strangers, for things that are near and things that are far off.
Why are you weeping?
Perhaps, because you understand that Easter is not just for us. It is for everyone. Until everyone has known its hope, your weeping is a witness that our work of proclaiming it is not done.