Sermon by Marjorie Brown for Easter Sunday, April 12th 2009

Let’s be honest, there is a problem with Easter. It is by far the biggest and most important festival in the Christian year, but it celebrates something many people feel very unsure about.

We don’t have the same problem with Christmas. People may not understand or believe that God chose to become a human being, but everyone can celebrate the birth of a baby in difficult and mysterious circumstances. It is easy to draw lessons from it about caring for those in need, even if we don’t see the connection with how God cared for us in our need of a Saviour.

And Good Friday, although it is puzzling and disturbing, can also be comprehended at a human level. There are many Good Fridays in the world today. Just this week we have seen gut-wrenching photos of collapsed buildings in Italy burying their inhabitants alive. Day by day the news reminds us that women die unnecessarily in childbirth, families are orphaned by AIDS, children are taught to be soldiers. In today’s world to be a Tamil or a Palestinian, a Darfuri or a Rwandan, is to be someone who needs no reminders of the reality of hatred, persecution and the murder of the innocent. So we can commemorate with compassion the death by torture of Jesus Christ, even if we find it hard to relate that death to our own relationship with God.

But when we come to Easter morning, the resemblance to everyday life ends. The story is a powerful and dramatic one, and it does start with the familiar. Grieving friends are drawn to visit the tomb of their loved one – many of us know the pull of that need. But then everything turns upside down. Instead of coming to terms with their loss, moving through the usual stages of mourning and seeking closure, as we are taught to expect with our own bereavements, these friends meet their dead rabbi, no longer a corpse but a strangely transformed and elusive living person.

I have spent quite a bit of time with bereaved people, and I know how often they say, in some alarm, “I was sure I saw him sitting in his old chair” or “I heard her step in the hall” or “I could have sworn he was calling me”. Grief makes us hyper-aware of memories and puts us in very close touch with our deep desire to see and hear again the person we have lost. But in time those odd experiences fade.

With Jesus, something rather different is reported. It’s not a strong memory or even a ghost that the disciples claim to have experienced. And it’s not the familiarity of Jesus that is so sharply felt but the very strangeness of his new existence. It’s so strange, indeed, that in almost every meeting his dearest friends have trouble at first in recognising him.

Again and again, the resurrection stories tell us that the recognition of the risen Lord breaks through, not because of his well-known voice or appearance, but in the interaction that he has with his friends. It is when he calls Mary Magdalene by name, when he tackles Thomas’s doubts and Peter’s shame, when he breaks bread with the travellers to Emmaus, that they know him as their Lord. The risen Christ does not walk the streets of Jerusalem to terrify the high priests and show Pilate what’s what. There is no record of those who hated and feared him meeting him after Easter.

It is those who loved him, even though they let him down, denied him and ran away, who were privileged to meet the risen Jesus. Only they, perhaps, would make any sense of such a meeting.

But we return to the difficulty of Easter. We are not Mary Magadane, Peter, Thomas or the disciples on the road to Emmaus. We try to know, love and follow Jesus, but if we have heard the risen Lord calling us by name, we are in a very tiny minority in our generation. And yet we proclaim the victory over death of someone we cannot see, hear or touch. How can we believe and understand this?

It isn’t just a problem for us. The second generation of Christians, those who had not been witnesses of the Resurrection, had the same difficulty. And indeed, even those disciples who had met Christ risen from the tomb had to struggle with the fact that very soon after that first Easter, he was no longer with them in any tangible way. Some of you will be very tired by now of hearing me refer to our Lent book by Timothy Radcliffe, but I must quote one final observation that he makes. The problem that the early Christians had to deal with was the physical absence of the Lord. Yes, they believed the resurrection stories, and some of them were even eyewitnesses. But life went on and Jesus was no longer around to be seen and heard and touched.

Today’s gospel reading makes a very strong reference to this absence. Mary Magdalene looks into an empty tomb. Well, it’s not quite empty. She sees an angel sitting at each end of the bench where Jesus’ body had been laid, but there is nothing in between them. Any Jewish reader, and most of the first Christians of course were Jews, would immediately recognise the reference to the Ark of the Covenant. This box had a carved angel at each end, and it was placed in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the Temple which only the High Priest was allowed to enter and even he on only day a year, the Day of Atonement. But the box was empty. The tablets of the covenant that Moses received from God had long ago disappeared.

The Jewish Christians for whom John’s gospel was written would remember this when they read about the angels guarding Jesus’ empty grave. Mark’s gospel draws an even close parallel, when it says that at the moment of Jesus’ death, the veil in the Temple hiding the Holy of Holies from the sight of worshippers was torn in two from top to bottom.

Timothy Radcliffe says that “the empty tomb is the new holy space of God’s presence. It is a place of absence, for the body is not there. But it is also a place of presence, the open throne of God.” The Jewish worshippers in the Temple believed that the divine presence, the shekina, hovered above the empty Ark, but could not be contained within it. And the earliest Jewish Christians would make the link that the empty tomb of Christ was a place of encounter with the Lord who could not be contained there, but could now be encountered anywhere.

This may sound like an easy religious answer – you can’t see or hear or touch the risen Christ, but he is in your heart. For many people this isn’t very convincing. I have a good friend who many years ago went through some very bitter and lonely times. When I tried feebly to talk to her about God’s love for her, she protested, “But I want to be loved by someone with skin on!”

And that brings us to the real heart of the Easter message. We all need to be loved by someone with skin on. And that is exactly what the risen Christ provides. By sending his Spirit, his divine presence, to be in all the places where he could not be in one human body, he creates a family, the Church, in which his presence is embodied.

There is plenty of skin in the Christian community. We take each other by the hand in sharing the Peace. We embrace each other in joy and sorrow. We lay hands on one another in prayer for healing or in a simple comforting pat. On Thursday night we knelt and washed one another’s feet.

And week by week, we celebrate Easter every Sunday of the year by breaking bread and in that action recognising the Lord who gave himself to be broken for us. The bread we eat, the wine we drink, are meaningful signs rather than just calories, but they are also real food and drink that we put into each other’s hands.

Our faith is not an airy-fairy spiritual abstraction. It is not some make-believe in our own minds. It is not “what is true for me”. The Christian faith, the gospel of Easter, says that God loves this real material world and all of us flawed human beings so much that he put skin on for our sake, died at our hands and came back to tell us that death does not have the last word because he has defeated it once and for all.

We can greet him daily in the people we meet, especially those who are in most need. We can receive the sacrament of his body, which is also our body, the Body of Christ which is the Church. And we can see the light of the risen Lord in the eyes of every fellow believer with whom we exchange the Easter greeting, saying Alleluia, Christ is risen!