There’s an iconic scene in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The movie begins in black and white on the plains of Kansas. After the opening drama, the main character, Dorothy, and her dog, Toto, are whisked away by a tornado while in their house. Once the dust settles from the storm, and all is quiet, Dorothy tentatively approaches the door, opens it, and suddenly, the film shifts into vivid color. She’s in a magical land, Munchkinland. She’s in a different world.
In a time when most movies were filmed in black and white, this brilliant stroke of cinematography captivated film audiences for its technological marvel and its symbolic depth. The black and white of Dorothy’s humdrum past on the Kansas plains shifts into a world of vibrant color in a land of shining newness.
Dorothy, of course, eventually returns home after her adventures along the Yellow Brick Road and confrontation with the Wicked Witch of the West. She clicks her heels three times, saying, “There’s no place like home.” When Dorothy returns home, the black and white of the film returns, but Dorothy is not the same. She will never be the same. She can no longer see home in the same way either. Although the movie ends in black and white, the dazzling color of Munchkinland has transformed Dorothy’s perception of life back in Kansas forever.
On this first day of the week, it’s as if we have opened a door onto a world shining with dazzling color. And if we were to portray St. John’s Gospel in film, we could use that same innovative technique mastered by The Wizard of Oz. In his Gospel, John plays with light and darkness with ingenious theological and literary depth. In its opening lines, light emerges from darkness, just as God created all that exists out of chaotic nothingness in the beginning of time, and just as light was created out of darkness. For St. John, Jesus is the true light coming into the world, creative, colorful light in a world that is black and white.
In some sense, the radiant, eclectic colors of creation as first seen in the Garden of Eden were dulled into black and white with Adam and Eve’s act of defiance in the garden. They were banished from that same garden, and though the rest of salvation story had plenty of moments of color, humanity seemed stuck in dullness, a dullness that could not or refused to see the kaleidoscopic goodness of God’s hand and saving works.
And so, in John’s Gospel, true, perfect light emerges in full color from the shadows of a world mired in sin, decay, and waywardness. The Son of God’s bright light reveals healing where there is illness, truth where there are lies, goodness where there is evil, hope where there is despair. In Jesus’s earthly life, it’s as if the movie shifts from dull black and white into full color.
But on Good Friday, we saw the darkness creep back into the picture in an overwhelming way. According to St. John, Jesus’s moment of glory is on the cross. But to the bystanders like the Blessed Mother, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, it must have been hard to see the glory from the cross. Their world must have been cast into shadows. As Jesus breathed his last on the cross, to them, the film must have shifted abruptly into black and white again.
And this is where we pick up the story today. It’s early in the morning. We’re in a garden, just like we were at the beginning of creation. It’s still dark. The movie is still in black and white, and Mary comes to the tomb to discover that it’s empty. There’s a dim haze of confusion about the events of the past few days. Even though Mary sees two angels where Jesus’s body had been, she doesn’t know what has happened. She can only attribute Jesus’s absence to theft.
When Jesus first appears to Mary, the movie is still in black and white. He calls her “Woman,” and she thinks he is the gardener. She doesn’t yet recognize him. But then, like Dorothy emerging from the house into Munchkinland, the film morphs into full color. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, calls one of his sheep by name. Mary! And now she knows who he is. He is her Lord. He is risen. The one she has been seeking is still alive. Everything has changed!
Mary runs from the tomb a different person. Her world is in color. Jesus tells her not to touch him or cling to him because that will simply turn the film back into black and white. Jesus can no longer be enshrined in the same way he was while walking the earth. He will, in fact, ascend to his Father in heaven, so that his body will become Mary and the other disciples, the Church, us.
In an ironic way, although Mary mistakenly thinks Jesus is a gardener, he is a gardener of sorts. He is the one tilling the soil of a new creation, preparing it to bear much fruit. When Mary runs from the garden on Easter morning, the color has been recovered from a film that had regressed into black and white. It’s not that the color of the world and its inherent goodness went away after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the beginning of time. It’s that humanity had simply forgotten creation’s radiant color through ingratitude, sin, and stubbornness.
When Jesus utters Mary’s name in the garden, he speaks into existence a truth that she must begin to realize in a new way. God’s raising of Jesus from the dead is the visible sign in our finite world that any dullness we perceive in creation is not the final word. With God, anything is possible. With God, all things are made new. In resurrection truth and light, the color in God’s world is ready to shine in all times and places.
As a child, I remember asking my mother why some movies were in black and white. It was one of fifty million nagging questions I asked as a little boy, curious as a cat. My mother said it was because those films were old. But I mistakenly thought that those movies, languishing in some dusty, dark room, had simply lost an original color. They once were in color, but that color faded over time with age. The truth, of course, was that those movies lacked the technology to show the color that was really there.
But suppose for a minute, as in my naïve childhood assessment, that our world has let its natural, innate vibrancy become dulled. Because it has become worn, tired, and old, it has lost its color. If you are weary and exhausted by these disturbing, trying times, on this day, the first day of the week, the beginning of a new creation, there’s another story to tell.
This past week, we have waited and waited and waited with Christ through suffering, despair, and death. And because we have waited, we are able to celebrate on this day that the black and white of our existence has never been purged of its natural color and goodness. And it never will be.
The world’s natural color can’t be stamped out by any forces of darkness or even by a Church that allies itself with secular forces of brutality. The world’s natural color can only shine as it did from the tragedy of the cross, showing that earthly violence couldn’t quench the radiant power of love, a love that gave itself willing to death and forgave in spite of sin and death.
Because the tomb was empty on the third day, because God raised Jesus from the dead, because Jesus has ascended to his Father and breathed his Spirit upon us, we can never return to a black and white world. We are perpetually in the Oz of a new creation, not a magic land but a land full of possible impossibles. As Jesus said to Mary, so he says to us. Do not touch me. Do not cling to me. Release your fears, anxieties, and despair, and run from the empty tomb in hope. We’re not in Kansas anymore. We are the inhabitants of a new creation. And this new creation is sparkling with color that will never fade away.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Easter Day
April 5, 2026