As I sat down on Good Friday evening to work on my text for today, I took a moment to scan my emails and was distressed to read that an old friend and colleague had passed away on Palm Sunday. It’s nearly four years since I last saw him (in the airport lounge in Dar es Salaam, as it happens), and I recall that he’d been ill then, but his illness was under control. I hadn’t heard that it had returned with a new vigour, so the news of his death came as a shock. But he was a man of firm faith, who will have passed from this life with the cross very much before his eyes, so today especially I can be sure that he has gained his share in the Resurrection of our Lord.
I had in fact just arrived home from visiting another recently bereaved family, and helping them to plan the funeral service which will happen in the week after Easter Week. They were not churchgoers, but neither were they without faith and hope. They shared with me their uncertainty about what happens after death, but also their faith that we are more than flesh and blood, and that what makes each of us who we are is not switched off or ended when our bodies die.
Let me turn from those two occasions of bereavement to the one that begins our story today, as the women journey to the garden tomb in which their friend and teacher Jesus has been laid. What beliefs did they take with them? What did they have still to hope for? They were keeping to the custom of the day, which was to visit the tomb for three days after a loved one had died. It was generally believed that the spirit of someone who had died remained close to the body for three days, but then would depart. But where did the spirit depart to? - this was less clear - perhaps into a sort of shadow world, but anyway out of our reach and reckoning.
So for as long as they could, these women who had served and supported Jesus were doing what they could for him, and keeping close to him. The day after his death had been the Sabbath, and to have gone then to the grave would have been to break the Jewish law. So they came as early as possible on the Sunday morning. Whatever their beliefs, and whatever they were managing to hope, these women were weighed down with a crushing load of grief. This man had changed their lives, had changed especially the life of Mary Magdalene; but now he was no more, leaving only memories and regrets.
The early morning is always a strange and mysterious time, shrouded in mist, and with our eyes still filled with sleep. The Easter stories as we have them are also mysterious and strange; it can be hard to harmonise the different gospel accounts. John mentions only Mary Magdalene’s journey to the tomb, while Matthew tells us she was accompanied by ‘the other Mary’. Luke tells us this other Mary was Mary the mother of James, and in his version of the story the two are accompanied by several other women, including Joanna. Mark in contrast says that the two Marys were accompanied by Salome, and, strangely, that they said nothing to anybody about what they had heard and seen.
Of course, none of this is mutually exclusive. John, for example, particularly wants to tell us the story of Mary Magdalene, so doesn’t feel the need to mention anyone else. Let’s concentrate for a moment on John’s account; there’s mystery enough just in that story, without needing to look at the other Gospels. Mary found an empty tomb; and when Peter and John came running they saw the same - and inside the grave they found the grave clothes just lying there. But none of them found what they were expecting, nor did they immediately believe and understand what they saw.
That sense of mystery continues. Jesus is encountered but not recognised - by Mary in the garden, by disciples on the road to Emmaus, by his closest friends in the room in which they hid, and then on the lake side. It took time to for them to overcome their grief and fear, and to realise that the cross had not been tragedy but triumph. But this truth persists throughout all these Easter stories: that what happened in that garden that day was real, and that as they began to understand, a band of defeated and fearful people were transformed, to become the apostles of a new movement that would in time sweep across the whole world.
If we ask what precisely happened on Easter Day, then maybe we can’t easily find an answer: the stories retain an air of mystery. Why did these people who had known him well not recognize Jesus? But for me it isn't about what precisely happened, as regards the order of events; the real Easter question is about what it means, for me, for you, for the world, to say “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, alleluia!” And I find the risen Christ proved and authenticated not in an analysis of events or an archaeological survey, but in this simple fact - that what happened changed people’s lives so much that today, two thousand years after a man died a shameful death on a cross, people all over the world are still saying “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, alleluia!”
Years ago, David Jenkins when he was bishop of Durham made the headlines with the phrase from his Easter address about 'a conjuring trick with bones'. I expect you’ll still recall that remark and the fuss it caused, but of course it was actually taken out of context and misused in the newspaper headlines. What David Jenkins actually said is that Easter is not just ‘a conjuring trick with bones’, and that if it was it wouldn’t be worth very much.
For Christ is risen, as St Paul tells us, not as a one-off, but as the first fruits. And, what’s even more important, the message of Easter Day isn’t just about our heavenly future, but also about our earthly here and now. Towards the end of his time with them, Jesus told his disciples that they were now his friends. They were no longer to think of themselves as servants or slaves, there to do what their master tells them without needing to know why. They were his friends, and indeed on Easter Day Jesus calls them his brothers. Friendship is about sharing things, working together, being committed to one another. Brothers share a parentage and a heritage. Jesus offers us this relationship with him - and on Easter Day that relationship is confirmed. Friendship with Jesus is friendship for ever, unbroken by death. Jesus offers us a love stronger than the tomb. That's the good news that claims us, and holds us, and sends us.
That’s what changed the hearts and minds of that defeated and hopeless little group of people, so that they became the genesis of a new movement that in turn would change the world. No longer would Mary and Peter and John and all the rest of them be hiding in the shadows, or timidly visiting a tomb to mourn a dead and tragic hero; they have no need to visit the tomb any more, for they know he is not there - today they are set free to go travelling through life in companionship with the eternally living Lord of the dance. David Hope the former Archbishop of York once told his people that their Church needed to become less an institution and more a band of pilgrims on the way. The mysterious events of that first Easter Day began just such a movement - so much so that the first Christians in Jerusalem were simply known as the 'followers of the way'. Another former Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright has said that people who believe in Jesus and in the resurrection must work 'to make that past event, and that future hope, real and effective in the present'.
With that in mind, here's a thought that occurs to me as I read the stories the various evangelists give us of the resurrection: in those stories, where is it that people meet with Jesus? They meet him in a garden, they meet him as they walk the dry and dusty road home and recognise him as he breaks bread in their home, they meet him while they are out fishing on the lake, and recognise him as he makes breakfast on the lake shore. The stories don’t show people meeting Jesus in temples, churches, synagogues or shrines, but in the varied settings of real life 'out in the world'.
In John Masefield's play 'The Trial of Jesus', the centurion who stood at the foot of the cross is asked what he saw, and what he believes. "He was all alone," says the centurion, "and he defied all the Jews and all the Romans, and when we had done with him, he was a poor broken down thing, dead on the cross." "Do you think he is dead?" asks the lady, Procula, who is questioning him. "No, lady, I don't," the centurion replies. "Then where is he?" "Let loose in all the world, lady, where neither Roman nor Jew can stop his truth."
For me, what lies behind the mystery of Easter's empty tomb and mist-shrouded garden is this: that we have a friend and brother who has died but is no longer dead. He is not sealed inside stone, nor is he bound into the pages of scripture or limited by the habits of tradition; he cannot be safely and stuffily enclosed within stained glass and carved stone. On Easter Day he is let loose in all the world, so that wherever his friends meet, there he will be among us, and wherever his friends travel, there he will be ahead of us; and whenever his friends dare to love and to give and to forgive, and wherever his friends are daring to confront the wrong things in our world, there he will be, standing alongside us.
This was the Easter news that changed a band of downhearted, grieving fishermen into apostles. Jesus Christ is risen today to change and transform us too - for the promise of Easter morning is that this man is our friend and brother, and he has made us here and now citizens of heaven, for whom not only this day but every new day will be the fresh and mysterious dawn of divine and triumphant love let loose in all the world; God’s saving love in which I, and you, amazingly, are given a share.
No comments:
Post a Comment