Sermon for Easter Day morning
Sunday 16th April 2017
Acts 10.34-43
John 20.1-18
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
So we gather again – chocolate on our minds perhaps? – and hope in our hearts. For this is surely, above anything else, a festival of hope. Hope and celebration in the face of unbearable suffering and loss. Over the last three days we have journeyed with Jesus and the disciples, through the rather sleepy and confused celebration of the Last Supper, through the arrest and torture of our Lord. Through the show trial and attempt by Pilate to wash his hands of the whole affair. Through the agonizing and lonely death of Jesus on the cross, through burial in a borrowed grave. Now, finally we arrive at the empty tomb and find – in that absence, the greatest cause for celebration and joy that can be imagined.
And we are filled with cravings. We have gone through the lean days of lent – maybe denying ourselves all sorts of good things.
Now finally, we can allow ourselves a little self-indulgence surely? That craving for sweet things or for a little alcohol, or for other things we may have denied ourselves, can – for a while at least, be satisfied.
But what of our deeper cravings? Cravings for faith and hope and love?
Just over forty years ago an Ugandan Archbishop, Janani Luwum, was murdered by Idi Amin – the dictator of Uganda at the time. Officially, it was announced that he had been killed in a car-crash, but the people did not believe that lie / alternative fact, especially when the body was not released for the planned funeral. Despite this, thousands of people gathered at the cathedral to hear another Bishop repeat the message of the angel which we hear this Easter Day: “He is not here. He is risen!” – and according to Matthew, the angel adds, “He is going ahead of you to Galilee.”
So for us too, the risen Jesus is ahead of us and we must set out after him. So we do not get stuck in Good Friday. We do not haunt his tomb, by dwelling endlessly on the question of “What actually happened” all those years ago in 1st Century Palestine.
Certainly something wonderful happened on that first Easter Day. But, ours is not a religion of the dead, but of the living. To seek the risen Christ is ‘to go ahead into Galilee’. In other words, it is to live in hope. Yet this is not escapist romance – not at all.
Writing also some forty years ago, another theologian wrote, “Those who hope in Christ, can no longer put up with reality as it is. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”
He is not here in the tomb, he is risen to stand alongside us. Belief in the risen Christ entails a commitment to a better world. To the new social order that Jesus called the ‘kingdom of God.’ Such a commitment means inevitably a costly confrontation with the powers that be.
The reality of our world can – at times – seem a frightening place to be. We watch in horror as crimes against humanity unfold, as tyrants continue to hold power and innocent lives are lost. We live with the threat of mass destruction – one that this Easter seems all too possible, given the personalities that lead some nations. So by the light of Easter Day, we seek not only the peace of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, but of the whole world.
And yet this is still the world that Jesus died for. And this is the world into which he is risen. We cannot linger here by the empty tomb. We cannot hide from reality within the church and behind our traditions. It is in this world, this Easter, that we must seek the risen Christ and act on his words.
Thanks be to God