A Sunday Talk for Easter Day

It is Sunday, the first day of the week; early morning, with the new sun sparkling on the white stones of the great temple in Jerusalem, and on the funeral monuments in the Kidron valley below.  The Sabbath, not just any Sabbath, but the Sabbath of the Passover has been observed, and, for all the tension of this season, with the people itching for freedom and longing for a new King David to seize the throne, things have passed off without too much in the way of problems.

It’s good to make an example at such a tense time, it helps to keep the unruly elements in check. Three men were therefore crucified on the Friday of Passover. No-one much will be talking much about that this morning, though; such crucifixions have become something of a routine event under Roman occupation.  It reminds the people who’s in charge, and is a useful show of strength.

Perhaps Pontius Pilate will still have been anxious. This year Passover had looked like being especially tense. If so, he’ll have been pleased at the reports of his officers around the city.  The garrison troops had been carefully active through the festival, and they’d have made sure their strength was noticed.  It had all passed off more peacefully than at one time they might have feared, and before long the pilgrims would be heading home, and this crazy city could return to what passed for normal here. People could breathe easy again.  There hadn’t, after all, been too many hitches.

Gnarled olive trees stand among the spring flowers in a garden outside the city walls.  It’s here that one of the crucified men Jesus has been laid.  One Jesus, a pilgrim from Nazareth, who seems to have claimed the title of King of the Jews. That’s what was inscribed on his cross, anyway.

The body had been wound around in its grave clothes, and then carefully placed in a new tomb cut out of the cliff face. So he lay in a stone coffin in a stone cave, with a great stone rolled into place to close off the entrance.  Probably Pontius Pilate will have known the place, having given the order that the body might be released into the care of Joseph of Arimathea. This Joseph was a member of the Jewish council no less, and this was the tomb he’d provided for his own future burial. Pontius Pilate had thought it prudent to place one or two of his own men on guard, though; there’d been some popular support for this one, and the Jewish leaders had seemed especially concerned.

But on this Sunday morning those who held power in Jerusalem had retained their grasp on that power: the controllers were still in control.  That’s how the world is, nothing ever really changes.  Just a few short days ago, pilgrims coming into town from the North, from Galilee had been shouting ‘Hosanna’ and acclaiming a new king. This sort of thing happened a lot at Passover; it was after all the festival that marked Jewish independence as a people. These Galileans had cut down palm branches, and strewn them on the road - because they’d found someone different, they’d found a teacher whose words so burned like fire in their hearts, that they were sure this was the one God was calling and sending, the one who would restore the kingdom, the one who would change their world. But on this Sunday morning they were packing for home. The world hadn’t changed after all. The system had won again, as the system always does.

It’s misty and mysterious, and the dew is still fresh, as women make their way through the garden.  Gnarled trunks of old olives look strange and unworldly, and the air is sharp and cold.

Mary and the others with her are anxiously wondering how they’re going to get into the tomb to anoint the body, which is what they are there to do.  How can they roll away that huge stone without help?  All of a sudden, they see the tomb through the mist, and it’s not as they expected to see it. The stone has already been rolled away.  They must have been struck with horror to see that. The only thing they could imagine would have been that something awful had happened, desecration, one more awful thing to add to the awfulness of their grief. A final sad ending at the close of what had already become for them a crushingly sad story.

That’s how it was in the early morning. But by day's end these women and other friends of Jesus will be beginning to realise that they stand not at the end of a story but at its beginning. In the early morning, they’ll have been thinking, “This is how it ends.” By day’s end, though, they’ll begin to understand the greatest event in history has happened, and the man whose final breaths they witnessed, and who they knew was dead, is alive.  He has been dead, and now he is alive.  And as their hardly believing minds grasp this, so they now live in a different world.  They now live in the Easter world, the Sunday world.

There’s a Saturday world and there’s a Sunday world.  The women in the garden and those to whom they ran to tell the news are now Sunday people, Easter people, and we are too.  That’s why we choose to meet on the first day of the week. Sunday by Sunday we affirm and celebrate Easter, and that on the first day of the week long ago in Jerusalem, the world changed forever.  We affirm that here and now we are citizens of a new world in which the old system no longer wins, and death itself has died.

But in the calendars and traditions of the Church Easter is not one but forty days; all those days would be needed for this great mystery to be discerned, rejoiced in, lodged in the hearts of the friends of Jesus, as they move on from their initial delight: “our Lord lives!” to understand what that means for themselves, what it will mean for the world. Easter is not the miraculous escape of one man from death.  We don’t meet on a Sunday to celebrate Jesus the escapologist. Nor has  Jesus survived anything, or returned from anywhere.  Jesus did not come back to life on Easter morning, he went forward into life, into a life he calls us to share. This is something new. 

We may be entertained by illusionists and escapologists, and we may marvel at how a magician manages to escape from what looks an impossible situation.  But illusion is what that is. As we go home at the end of the show we’re still in the same old world with the same laws of physics - and politics - in control. Easter is different from that. There is no illusion here;  this is real.

Similarly, we like to hear stories of survival against the odds told by or about explorers, solo yachtsmen, arctic travellers, people lost in the jungle.  If Easter was an escape like that, it would still be a story worth telling - but a story set in the old world, where the system always wins, and death still gets you in the end, however many cat's lives you might use up in the meantime, and however cleverly you may wave the magic wand.

This isn’t that story.  Jesus has not escaped from death, death really happened to him, he died, he was dead.  But then on Easter morning he broke through, changed the rules, and left the Saturday world behind, shaking off the chains of death for himself and for the world. 

In the days before Jesus came to Jerusalem, there was another death, and another raising from the dead, as St John tells the story in his Gospel. Lazarus died, friend of Jesus and brother of Mary and Martha. Jesus arrived on the scene too late to save him, and yet he still does save him. Lazarus emerges from the tomb  and the people are amazed who look on. But when Lazarus is led out of his tomb, he is still dressed in his grave clothes, he saved from one death to one day still die another.  Now, on the first Easter morning, those rules have been changed. The tomb is empty when the disciples arrive, Peter and John, but the grave clothes are left behind, they find them lying in the tomb.  Jesus has no need of them; death has no more power. He calls us to be Sunday people now, to be Sunday people, Easter people, even when the world about us is till a Saturday world, whose people are still in thrall to the old order of sin and death. 

It may look like the system still wins, we watch the news and see the old power games are still up and running. Easter morning found Pontius Pilate a relieved and happy man, glad to be still in charge, happy the Passover was done with, and things had stayed the same as always. Only they hadn’t. Not many people knew yet, but those few people would tell the world. The world has turned upside down, to turn a cross into a royal throne, and to reveal the love the man who died there showed and preached as stronger than death.

Let me close with some famous words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu:  “Good is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, through him who loves us.”  There is the truth of the Sunday world.