Easter Day - 31st March 2002
What does Easter mean to you?
It is not surprising then that 4 words occur twice in that short gospel passage. They are “Do not be afraid”. First it is the angel who says this to the women after they discover that the tomb is empty, and then Jesus himself uses the same words a little later when they meet him. Clearly they were scared out of their wits and the soldiers are described as being ‘like dead men’, petrified with fear. Easter day is not just about the ordinary, the cycle of new birth and new life, of nature’s way of renewing, refreshing and regenerating itself, it is about something which smashes through the normal boundaries of that. The final boundary, death itself, has been smashed down, so much so that in a society much more used to death than we are, including a group of hardened soldiers used to the horrors of warfare, they were frightened, scared stiff by what they were experiencing.
There is no attempt by the gospel writer to pretend that this is an ordinary event and that they were just being thick for not getting it straight away. What happened is so unusual that it requires an angel to fill in the gaps. Whether an angel really appeared is beyond us to know for certain either way, but as at the beginning of the story of Jesus, in the birth narrative, the appearance of an angel is used as a kind of stage narrator who fills in the bits that neither the characters in the scene nor the audience can be expected to see. So we are told ‘he is not here, he has been raised, just like he said he would’.
The women are given a message for the rest of the disciples. They are told to jog their memories by telling them to go to Galilee, the place where it all began. They are to go away from what would be expected to be the centre of things in Jerusalem and move out into all the world.
Encounters with Jesus have a habit of setting people off on journeys. They rarely leave us in the same place. New life means new life; changed life; transformed life. The response to ‘Christ is risen’ is not supposed to be ‘O that’s nice’ but ‘Alleluia’, a word that should pick us up so that we become people who sing God’s praises in our hearts and lives. The resurrection changed the disciples lives for ever. Men and women depressed, shattered with grief, found a new song in their hearts and started a movement that is still changing lives today.
That movement became the Christian Church. Even though it has gathered a lot of clutter and become a major institution with traditions and rules and ways of doing things, it is still fundamentally at its heart a movement or it is nothing. Easter people are people on the move or they are like dead men, still petrified with fear. This is what Easter is to mean to us.
Easter is the most important day of the Christian year and nothing replaces it or takes precedence over it. Without it this church would be just a pile of nicely carved stones, it would be a stone tomb with the dead still inside. With it and because of it this church becomes a place to meet the living God, to be transformed in his image and a place to celebrate the life we are given - here and in the world to come. With the resurrection we are called to anticipate the life to come in how we live now; we are to live as people for whom there is a new tomorrow and a new today, who are to make a difference on the world around us.
This is a particularly important message, since this last year has seen some shocking and terrifying events. Where were you on 11th September, when those planes brought down the twin towers in New York? I was standing by the wreckage of our old car having just been involved in a head on collision in a country lane, because another car came whizzing round a tight corner too fast. These events, though on startlingly differing scales, remind us how vulnerable we are - be it to international violence or to other people’s driving. As we live with the light and hope of Easter, there is still a darkness around for the light to shine into. But the message of Easter is that no matter how dark things may get, and as we have seen they can get pretty dark, that light will never be extinguished because the final battle has already been won. Death, and therefore those who live under its spell, has been defeated in Christ rising from the grave.
Yesterday evening we heard the news that Her Majesty The Queen Mother had died peacefully in her sleep. For many here this morning she will have been an important figure, someone to whom they had looked in some of the darkest moments of the Second World War. The Archbishop of Canterbury reminded us last night that she was thankful when Buckingham Palace was bombed, because it meant she could look the East End of London in the eye. He reminded us of her support for many charities, of her putting Alleluias into practice and in this way showing faith in action.
She had a long life, with the full weight of public service thrust upon her unexpectedly after the Abdication of her brother-in-law. It may well feel like an era has passed with her. Whoever we mourn, be it a figure head of state or someone we knew and loved personally, Easter reminds us to sing Alleluias for them, because in Christ we share with them in the hope of new life.
So eggs and the new life that comes from them, spring flowers and decorated hats are to fill us with thoughts of the new life which comes through God. That new life is for the future, for those who have gone before us - been promoted to glory - AND it is also for us to live and breathe now as we allow God to turn us from being like dead men, petrified with fear, into a movement, a people who not only sing Alleluias but live them and therefore who sing God’s praises in everything we proclaim.
© Ian Black 2002