Easter Sunday 2010
Easter Sunday, 4th April 2010
It was during the Blitz. Early one morning after a night of intense bombing a man was walking through the devastation. He came across a woman, with a small child in each hand. Their house had been hit, the roof blown in, shattered glass, dust and rubble everywhere.
The sun was shining brightly; the woman stood serene and beautiful. The man paused to absorb the scene before his eyes, and said: “What a terrible night.” And she responded: “Yes, a terrible night, but what a glorious morning.”
Easter Sunday takes us to the very extremes of our imaginings. We are challenged to try and see what is beyond the furthest we have ever seen. Sometimes people talk of the emptiness of their lives usually because of a deep sadness. They might say it feels as though there’s nothing left. Resurrection has been described: “what there is the other side of nothing.”
This morning we are challenged with the question: “What happened that first Easter morning?” Our answer can shape the rest of our lives – and that’s a promise.
Today, the Easter event reaches out to each of us in a new way – we are taken beyond our frailties and limitations to engage with a new way of seeing and hearing. To touch a place that has never been touched before.
Sister Ruth put it this way:
“O God, let me rise to the edges of time and open my life to your eternity;
Let me run to the edges of space and gaze into your immensity;
Let me climb through the barriers of sound and pass into your silence;
And then, in stillness and silence let me adore you, who are life – light- love- without beginning and without end,
The source – the sustainer – the restorer – the purifier – of all that is;
The lover who has bound earth to heaven by the beams of the cross;
The healer who has renewed a dying race by the blood of a chalice;
The God who has taken us into his glory by the wounds of the sacrifice;
God.... God.... God.... blessed be God
Let me adore you.”
The despair of Good Friday was transfigured by a love the like to which the World has never known.
Resurrection is an inexplicable transformation. The best we can say about it; is that it is a life lived after death. A life lived the other side of nothing.
What resurrection means is that God’s dominance over death is re-established. It follows that if we believe in God we have nothing to fear.
It’s not surprising that our imaginations are more acutely tuned to suffering than to new life. It’s not surprising that artists and composers have often struggled to convey what resurrection means.
Very often resurrections seem to be very, very quiet – if not silent. And when we finally notice it we realise it’s been there all the time.
The first sound of resurrection in that long ago garden was a woman’s name on the lips of the resurrected Christ – “Mary”.
What we observe this side of death is that a person falls silent when they die. We no longer hear the familiar voice. Resurrection can be described as their voice being restored – and not only to speak but to sing.
I’d been at Peter Symonds College, it was raining, I was thinking about today, I didn’t realise anyone could hear me, and I found myself singing an Easter hymn – “the strife is o’er, the battle won”. Suddenly from a doorway the voice of someone I know called out – “It’s lovely to hear someone singing!” (That was very kind of her).
Resurrection is the eternal song. Resurrection isn’t a metaphor for mere happiness; or relief, at coming through something difficult. Resurrection is not resuscitation. Resurrection is what’s the other side of death; the other side of nothing. It’s the life we had not thought of, and despite our best efforts will never be able to imagine.
Martin Luther King famously said: “I have a dream....” We are a people who dream a dream – a dream that will never die. Even though we can never make it fully come true, this dream calls people, in every generation, to work for its fulfilment. Every thought that has integrity, every action that reaches for justice. Everything we do to include rather than exclude, to create rather than destroy. Every act of love rather than hate, every creation of beauty rather than ugliness. All these things come from this dream and help to bring it into reality.
At the heart of the dream, is the one who dreamed it, who died for it. In a way we will never understand, he moved through death, to call us, to dream the dream. Our task here on earth is to do our bit to build that kingdom of God in our own lives, and in our own society.
If you could have asked Mary of Magdala what she believed, she would have said simply, He is risen. Peter and John would have answered, He is risen. If in each generation over the following twenty centuries you had asked, “What do people believe about all this?” Millions of people would have answered you: Jesus Christ is risen.
Today, in a world that sometimes seems very different from any world before it, it is still possible to ask, “What do you believe?” And millions of men and women reply: “Jesus Christ is risen.” What you yourself say in reply to that question has to be your choice. For my part I want to say Jesus Christ is risen, Alleluia.