Introduction
The readings set for this Easter Day are:
- Isaiah 65:17–25
- Acts 10:34–43
- Luke 24:1–12
But, I would like to start with a quote from a Facebook post by Archbishop Justin, posted on Good Friday this year:
“Today is the most confrontational and difficult day in the Christian story.
The Crucified God tells us that the human problem of sin is too serious to be dealt with by us alone. It needed God himself to carry the pain and cost of sin.
To understand what Good Friday means for us all – for the whole world – we have to do the hard work of reflecting on the pain and despair that Jesus felt on the cross and on our contribution to his crucifixion.
We have to be willing to hear his cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That cry was his in order that it need not be ours.
That cry echoes through the centuries. That cry tells us what it means for God to love us so much that he become one of us. More than that it tells us of the cost of sin, of the darkness that our choices bring over the earth, and which is absorbed into his light.
Another cry from the cross comes at the end: “It is finished.”
Jesus means, it is completed. The work of the cross has been entire, and he has done all his work. In John’s gospel the cross is seen as a moment of triumph, for through it life is offered to every human being.
On the cross, Jesus knew all our pains and guilt – so that we would never again be alone in facing them. So the message of today is this: we are offered hope. Wherever each one of us is: in light or darkness, in joy or pain, God is with us.
As we move through the final days of the Easter story, I pray that you know the comfort of God’s presence, his hope and his forgiveness – today and always.”
Justin Welby – Facebook 19 April 2019
That was Good Friday, but this is Easter Day. Why dwell on the death of Jesus, when we should be celebrating his resurrection?
The answer is that Easter Day makes no sense without Good Friday; they are part of one action on God’s part. If we do not recognise this and hold them together as one work, we are going to drift into ideas about Easter that are our own wishful thinking rather than a reflection on what God was actually doing.
The Challenge of Easter
So, I might use Justin’s words – Today is the most confrontational and difficult day in the Christian story – about Easter Day and the Resurrection.
Easter Day and the resurrection of Jesus is of one piece with Good Friday; you cannot separate them. Without his death, there is no resurrection, there is only ‘he didn’t die’, which anyone can do just by waking up each morning.
But Jesus did die. So Easter Day and the Resurrection is ‘confrontational and difficult’, because it runs counter to most people’s idea of Easter.
To most people, Easter is about the triumph of Life over Death. Winter has symbolised (and actually demonstrated) the death that ends the year. But now Spring has come, with life reasserting itself in new flowers, and new birth. Easter takes all this on with displays of flowers and exchanges of eggs (chocolate or otherwise); it symbolises and encapsulates the triumph of Life over winter’s Death – or so you might think.
But, in fact, Easter has nothing to do with a triumph of Life over Death. Far from it. It is, in fact, a judgement upon all that we glibly call life.
Our life, what we call life, is precisely that Sin and Darkness that Justin speaks of.
- We see it written in all our history; in all its horrors, with every progression producing worst outcomes;
- And in in all our prospective futures (global warming included);
- And in our present; reflecting on the violence resurfacing in Northern Ireland and the bombs today in Sri Lanka .
We try to persuade ourselves, again and again, that we can make it better – that we can overcome the darkness that stalks our humanity – that life will triumph over death. But who are we fooling?
Easter Tells us the truth about our life – what we call life – it’s dead … diseases, guilty and dead. As God told Adam it would be, if he rejected the way God had prepared for him.
So, first we need to let Easter confront our self-deception and recognise the truth about our life without God. There is no triumph of life over death.
But, of course Easter also has a message of Hope
The Hope of Easter
There is an extraordinary Hope in Easter.
Jesus did die, and he rose again. But he did not come back to life – much as we can speak of a bodily resurrection – Jesus rose to a new life.
The witnesses of his resurrection are clear; a real bodily resurrection with Jesus eating and being touched and felt, but much more than that, so locked doors did not keep him out. The truth is a mystery that we will not understand until we too actually die in these bodies. But what is clear is that it was a New Life. So Jesus described it and so also did the Apostles.
So, Easter, is not just about resurrection. It is something more.
Hope for the Cancer of Sin
Perhaps the best way to explain it is to see our predicament with sin as like a cancer in our lives, so intimately woven in all our living that no cells are left unaffected. The only treatment for cancer is to kill the cancerous cells and hope that the rest of the body survives. But what if every cell is affected. There is no cure, because the treatment is itself death.
But now Jesus has made a way for us to die, in him, so that every part of our contaminated life is truly put to death, but in a way that does not just end life. By dying and being resurrected to a new (eternal) life, Jesus has pioneered a new way:
- A way to die that is not the end
- A way to live that has no end; to live abundantly, in spite of suffering, overcoming the darkness in our world, and full of hope
As Jesus said – I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.
A New Promise
When Jesus spoke to Elijah and Moses in the Transfiguration, he spoke about the Exodus that he was about to do. Our reading from Isaiah, this morning, speaks of a new promised land. Though God’s people had escaped Egypt and journeyed to a promised land, they had not escaped the Egypt in themselves. But now Jesus has made a new Exodus and calls us to journey with him, through the wilderness of this world to a new promised land in which only goodness and love (righteousness) will live.
The Hope of Easter is not just, then, a cure for our sin, but the promise of a new life. Often it is called, in scripture, Eternal Life. People often assume that this is because it is life that never ends (i.e. eternal). This is true, but it is much better to see it as a life that is suited to eternity – i.e. a life that will be worth living for eternity.
It’s hard for us to imagine what this will be like, but the promises of God in his word (like this Isaiah one) begin to suggest enough for us to set our hopes on.
Through Faith in Jesus
Then, when Peter spoke to Cornelius and his household (in our second reading), he reminded them of what Jesus had been and done and proclaimed Jesus is the Judge (the judgement) on our life … and the one in whom forgiveness and life is finally possible; through faith in what Jesus has done, rather than and self-transformation.
Judgment and hope are what Good Friday and Easter are all about. But, in this passage, we see more clearly our way into them. It is through faith in Jesus Christ – Jesus who died for us and rose for us.
At the last supper before his crucifixion, Jesus shared bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood given for us at Easter. He described his blood as a New Covenant. With the old covenant, which seems based principally on our obedience to God’s commands, it was sealed by the blood of sacrificed animals. In the New Covenant it is sealed by Jesus own blood shed for us on the Cross.
The difference between the old and the new covenants is that the new one is not made with the sacrifice of animals (which represent our life offered to God), but with the sacrifice of Jesus (a human man like us). Its principal heart is not our obedience, but our faith – our faith in Jesus, what he has done, and the way he has made for us. So that, “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”.
An Empty Tomb
So, finally, we come to the Empty Tomb. The women (and eventually, the apostles) discovered that the tomb was empty; Jesus was alive.
Why, asked the angels, are you looking for the living among the dead. Why, we might say, do we look for life among the dead (in people like us who are in the same predicament as us) rather than in the one only who really lives.
But what does it mean to look for life in Jesus?
- It means to believe that he has died for your sin – paid the price, or absorbed all the deadly consequences, of the cancer of sin in our life. There is a real burden of guilt that comes with the way we live our lives without God … and on the cross, Jesus takes it away into himself as he dies for us.
- It means to believe that he has made a way for us to be cured of the cancer of sin in us. It is woven in every cell of our being, and their death is our only cure, but by rising to a new life Jesus has pioneered a way for us, through such a death to a new life
Faith calls for us to respond to both of these.
- To recognise our sinfulness, turn from it to want a new relationship with God in Jesus, and trust in his effective forgiveness for all our sin. And then …
- To follow him in the way he has made, by dying with him, so that we may rise again with him to a new life.
The Tomb is empty … and it is waiting for you!
Jesus calls us, as scripture records, to follow him, taking up your cross and receiving his Life.
- It is a way that will take the rest of your life, until your existing body finally dies, and you are given a new body in Jesus, fit for eternity.
- But in this life, it means a daily laying down of your life – entrusting all you are into his hands – as if that life is now dead – and seeking the foretaste of your new life, by the Spirit of Christ, which he will give to you.
All this takes real faith. Not blind faith, because this faith is based on what Jesus has actually done, a real historical crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection. But it takes real faith, both to recognise the utter helplessness of your sinfulness, and to bury that life in his tomb.