Easter Day Dawn Eucharist

Ian Black

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Flowering of God's Grace

Sermon preached at St Mary's Church, Whitkirk, Leeds

Easter Day Dawn Eucharist - 8^th April 2007

I took a double take last week in Woolworth’s in the city centre. There standing deciding which Easter eggs to buy were two women. Nothing unusual about that, except that the two women in question were dressed in black and wearing the hijab. They were Muslim and buying Easter eggs. I’m not sure what this says, but surely something has got diluted if Muslims don’t have to think twice about buying Easter eggs. It is possible that they were buying them for Christian friends, or perhaps they just don’t make the link between Jesus’ resurrection and Easter eggs.

One of the problems is probably to do with all that spring stuff that we have tried to make links with when understanding Easter. Spring follows winter and succeeds to summer and in turn to autumn and winter again. The cycle is predictable and regular. It may change with global warming, but the seasons are still recognisably different and they just move gradually from one to another. We know that spring is coming and while it is life filling and delights our senses, it does not surprise us very much. It may make us wonder at the mystery of life and how it comes to be from what seemed so still and life-less, but we expect it.

Easter has become like that. It is what we expect. Lent has been a period of sober abstinence - sober in many senses if you gave up beer, like me. We had Palm Sunday last week, so this week must be Easter Day. How comforting and reassuring to know that the expected pattern will not be disrupted. It has become a gentle scene of little lambs skipping and bunnies hopping over Teletubby mound.

But Easter is not about the expected, the comforting and the reassuringly familiar, it is a dramatic disruption of what was expected and a massive surprise. The disciples did not bury Jesus on Good Friday with the words “see you for breakfast on Sunday. Have a good rest!” They were utterly despondent. Their world had collapsed and they were shattered. The clocks were stopped for them and hope drained away. Early in the morning Mary went to the tomb. John doesn’t say why, just that she drifted there, like so many do when in deep grief and shock. The last thing she expected was that Jesus would be risen.

Shock! Horror! The tomb is empty. “They couldn’t even leave him to rest in peace!” Distraught she runs to the others. Breathless she blurts out their worst nightmare. “His body has been snatched.” What else do you assume? There was a body on Friday and today there is an empty space. It is too distressing for words. Gradually it dawns on them all that something beyond their comprehension has taken place. “He is alive.” Even this is too big for their brains to contain. And it is Thomas who points out the obvious. “What do you mean, alive? The dead don’t go walk about, stupid.” He assumes the next possibility: Jesus has come back to life in the ordinary spring follows winter sense. He too has to learn to think bigger because the obvious doesn’t make sense at all!

Easter is not about expected new life, but unexpected new life. It is the biggest surprise we can ever get and we take it for granted as if it were nothing special. We assume that life after death is a right. Further, a God who didn’t grant that right would be abusing our fundamental human rights! Why should we be thankful for what we are due?

But we are due nothing. We deserve nothing. We didn’t choose to be born and can’t expect anything to follow. Sometimes I think that oblivion sounds quite nice, or absorption into the great Other. The great surprise is that the life we have is given a dignity beyond our dreams and there is a paradise to come.

We see this rescue reflected in remarkable ways. Situations of conflict and violence that look completely hopeless and lost find a way opens for new life to come. Hurts and tensions that looked intractable find a path to healing. People who have lost everything that matters to them find they are able to piece something together from the shattered fragments of their lives. There are many areas that we pray for Easter new life to break in to. We pray for it in Iraq and the tensions in the Middle East, we pray for it in how they perceive us through a history that involves unhelpful meddling and betrayal. There are communities and factions within communities that seem at pains to destroy because they are so filled with hatred. There are personal tensions that look lost and irredeemable. There are personal crises that may seem intractable - be it debt, fears over housing or just making ends meet. It might be facing that decline of faculties and the fear of what is to come. To all of these Easter brings a surprise in the gift of new life and hope.

This is not part of the way Islam sees Jesus. It gives an honoured place to Jesus, to ۥIsa, but assumes he was assumed into heaven because they believe he didn’t really die. This is very different to our understanding of what we celebrate today.

We clearly know that Easter comes at the end of Lent, with the onset of spring, though, paradoxically we don’t always expect it to permeate very deeply into the whole of life as an archetypal model. It goes beyond the cycle of spring following winter. It is a disruption of what would naturally follow, because the natural consequence of hatred is more hatred, the natural consequence of death is decay. Spring is replacement life: a lamb is not new life for the sheep, it is a different life. Resurrection, on the other hand, is the life that died being reborn and that is much more amazing than eggs, bunnies and daffodils. Easter is the flowering of the grace of God and that is much better than chocolate or even Black Sheep.