Easter Day by, Sunday 20th April, by Fr Jack
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
It is a great joy to celebrate Easter together. If you’ve been here every day this week as we have journeyed through the drama of Holy Week, and if you have come to St Giles’ or to church at all, for the first time ever this morning, and everything in between:
we have made it, together, to the empty tomb.
And here - in today’s Gospel that we have just heard - we meet the women who we have been following all this Holy Week in a series of sermons on the ‘women of the passion’. St Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and, Susanna, and the other women with them. The men have fled, but these women have faithfully come, to the tomb. They have turned up, and thereby become the first apostles of the news that changes the world forever. Christ has risen from the dead.
His death on the cross was as real and horrific as these women know it to have been, they were there (once again, when most of men had run away). But when Christ died and descended into hell, the chains of death and hell could not keep Him. Instead, He empties hell and abolishes death. By undergoing death, He dismantles it, once and for all.
Now, when you and I face death, whenever that is (hopefully peacefully in our beds, and after a long and happy life, rather than under the wheels of the Number 18 bus), whenever that is, a way lies open before us, not just from life to death, but on through from death to life. A life that is yet more glorious, more real, and everlasting. Because it is the life we will share with the risen Jesus. The life he inaugurates in His resurrection today.
It is good news… and the women are terrified, St Luke tells us in today’s Gospel. And even the slow witted men, we’re told, finally catch up, and are amazed. St Mark, in his Gospel, has the disciples simply run away in fear.
And well we might. You and I have had twenty centuries of Easter days to get used to this reality. We sit pretty on this side of centuries of the Early Church working out what this all means, the years of sifting and compiling the Scriptures, the punch-ups at all those third and fourth century Ecumenical Councils as they wrestled with who Jesus really is. A long way down stream as we are now, it all seems rather neat and tidy, this resurrection and the Christian life. It’s all rather cosy and pretty fluffy. That is our first mistake. It is, of course, nothing of the sort.
These wonderful women, Mary, the mother of Jesus, St Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and, Susanna, and the others with them. They have it right. We should be terrified and amazed.
If our relationship with the risen Jesus is comfortable or fluffy or predictable, then it isn’t with the risen Jesus that we are in relationship.
‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?’ The dazzling angels tell them in today’s Gospel. The dead of the tombs, but also the sepulchres of our expectations, our prejudices, the God we think we do or don’t believe in. The challenge is to look beyond those carcasses, and towards the One who is.
The Christian community, this bizarre body of people Jesus collected together, these women among them, and the millions, billions of people who have followed in their footsteps: we call it the Church, but it is simply the rag tag band of humans who have gathered around the risen Jesus for the last couple of millennia. Those who have been baptized into His death and resurrection, who have feasted on His life in Holy Communion, and tried, often in vain, to work out how we are to live as a result.
The church isn’t really an institution or an organisation, it is a bizarre global family of people, still reeling (with these women today) at the news that Jesus is risen, and what this means for us and for all that God has made.
To be a Christian is to be a member of this ragtag band, still reeling. Still reeling from today’s events, and in terror and amazement, to be open to the adventure that lies at the heart of the Christian life. And every little parish church across the world in the heartbeat of prayer, in worship, in community (with all its joys and pettinesses), in reading the Bible together and finding our lives vibrantly anchored in the stories of Scripture, in regular and purposeful reception of Holy Communion, in all these things and more we become more and more our true selves. Together, living towards death and resurrection, every day, an adventure with God.
This Easter Day, and every day between today and next Easter we continue this joyful, terrifying and wonderful pilgrimage together, following Jesus, who has gone before us, and is leading us on.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!