The Easter good news
Easter Day: 23rd March, 2008
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Easter is the greatest of the Christian celebrations. Lent has given us six weeks of preparation for it. Holy Week and the ceremonies of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday brought us last night to the wonders of the Easter Vigil and the special joy of welcoming several of our own worshipping community into the fullest participation in our life together. Our own baptismal promises were renewed, even as they made them for the first time.
Something happens, and then everything falls into place. The first Easter morning was like that. Just consider the situation of all the characters, all the people we have heard about and got to know a little in the re-telling of the story over this past week. All of them must have thought that what had happened on Friday could scarcely have been surpassed. Caiaphas the High priest. Herod the King. Pilate, the Roman governor. Judas has by now killed himself. Yet the events of that Friday were just the beginning. Now look at the events of that first Easter morning we celebrate again today. The resurrection morning gospels tell us of the reaction of Mary Magdalene, the very first to see, and of the other women. They tell us of Peter and of John. We are told nothing of the reaction of the Lord's mother, but she must surely have been at once involved. And what of some of the smaller players? The soldiers who had been guarding the tomb? Uncertain career prospects. Simon of Cyrene? Veronica? The centurion?
The stories spread. An empty tomb. Undisturbed grave-clothes. Actual appearances to very many people, in widely different locations. Eating food, being able to have his wounds touched. Just incredible, but too widespread to be discounted.
Seven weeks later, Peter, one of the first to whom the risen Lord had appeared: the same Peter who had denied the Lord three times on the Thursday evening, declared to a huge crowd: 'God raised him up...because it was not possible for him to be held by death.' (Acts 2:24) It was not possible. It was as irresistible as the new life that comes with the spring. Now there is a message.
There will be people coming to these Easter masses today searching. They will be coming to hear the Easter message of hope and to find a Christian community sharing the Easter joy of the resurrection. They will be looking for places where the theology and the doctrine finds connection with the living and the practice. They might even be considering looking for a spiritual home. There are many such church communities around and they are worth seeking out. These are places where those spiritual connections are able to be made, where God and neighbour are loved, where a living tradition is honoured and developed, where human networks of care and support are cherished and where the struggles and challenges of attempting to grow in the spiritual life are approached with honesty and integrity. The future of the Church is going to be in these places — and this is one of them.
The hope, the re-newed hope that was given to the disciples on that first Easter morning, re-fired their faith, their belief and trust in their Lord. It filled them with an overwhelming and powerful love, for him and for each other. Without the resurrection there would assuredly have been no Church. And the continued existence of the Church down the centuries, through thick and thin, bears witness to the truth which it was first summoned to proclaim: God is with us. The risen Lord is with us. God was in Christ, says St Paul: God is in Christ, reconciling us to himself. The Easter proclamation that Christ is risen, is in fact the starting point for a whole new way of looking at life: whole new way of ordering our sense of meaning and purpose and a whole new basis of motivation for action.
In Christian teaching, everything extends out from this point. Everything extends from the acceptance in faith of the working of the power and purpose of God in this way. It is the principle of the new, bursting from the ruins of the old. Of life where there was death. Of good where there was evil. Of closeness to the love and mercy of God, where formerly there was separation. Of closeness, service and outreaching care to each other. Of commitment to living and working for justice and peace and with respect for the whole of creation. God in Jesus Christ shows us the nature of God. The nature of God is love. God in Jesus Christ shares our humanity. God knows our hopes. God knows our failings and our fears. Yet God is with us.
So today, we celebrate this festival of all festivals: the feast of the resurrection of the Lord. It was this resurrection that did indeed give to his dispirited followers that complete revival of faith, which was to so characterise their living and sharing of the good news, in the years to come. It was this belief, this experience, which was to give authority and legitimacy to everything that the Lord had previously said and done and taught. Here then, for all generations, is to be found the basis of all Christian hope, in the context of so much that so desperately needs renewed hope.
And on this day of all days, we would wish to offer and share in the experience of corporate Christian worship — a gathered community of people from various backgrounds who together find themselves nourished, sustained and reinvigorated by this common liturgical action. As we say together within the centre of this liturgy— "We lift up our hearts to the Lord." And it is indeed a right and good thing to do. The Anglo-catholic tradition of which this church is a part sees this coming into the presence of God and this receiving of God's presence, as basic to the shaping of the lives that we then are to lead. How we are to live. How we are to pray. What others are to see and find in us. What social action we are going to be part of.
At the end of this mass, with the Easter alleluias ringing in our ears, we are dismissed to "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord." We have heard again the Easter good news: of the triumph of good over evil; of the victory of life over death; of the setting aside of that which separates and divides and distorts in our relationship with God and each other. It is all summed up in those simple words: Christ is risen!
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
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