Easter Morning

Easter Morning Cathedral Sung Eucharist, 2008

I am reliably informed that the last time Easter came on March 23rd was in 1913, and that the next time will be in 2160. Neither of these dates is obviously of much concern to us. 1913 has gone, and we certainly shan’t be around in 2160. We know roughly what life was like last time round. But I expect the mere thought of the twenty-second century brings on a feeling of giddiness.

But much more important than when Easter comes is the meaning of what we’re actually celebrating. Since moving to Portsmouth over ten years ago, I’ve been struck by two main undercurrents, one physical, the other spiritual. The physical undercurrent is the noticeable fact that the climate is changing. Oh yes, we read about this in the newspapers, and our politicians are trying to show how green they are, but is there a real difference? The answer must be ‘yes.’ Rain comes more suddenly and with greater intensity than it used to. Hot spells roast us more than they did. And there are warnings of Portsmouth being just a little bit vulnerable to flooding in the not too distant future. And so on.

What, then, of the spiritual changes? Well, I won’t go as far as to say there is a religious revival on the way. But God is back on the map of the world today. And I mean ‘today’ – not the day before yesterday, when religious conversation was all about the triumph of secularism, that we are all going to get richer and happier if we follow the gods of materialism, and religion gets consigned to history, or bumbles along as an option for a shrinking minority.

But religious faith is back on the agenda. Parents want their children to go to faith schools – not least Church of England Schools, as we know in Portsmouth with the Muslim community. More and more students at schools are opting to take courses in Religious Studies. Bishops continue to be taken seriously in the House of Lords, even if they aren’t always taken seriously in the Church! Local clergy and their congregations are increasingly stretched to care not just for those who roll up on Sundays mornings but for many others as well. It is often the Churches to whom the rest of the community looks for inter-faith dialogue, so important at the moment. 9/11 and its aftermath is a sign of this sea-change, which many secularists don’t quite know how to handle. Many, many people do look at life religiously. They may not be very articulate about it, their faith may not be well-formed, they may even be quite vague in their quest for spirituality of some kind - but they’re not to be dismissed or written off.

What are we to say to this changing climate and this altered religious scene on an Easter morning?  We mustn’t bury our heads in the sands of the past – we need to wake up to what is happening around us, and listen the heart of this religious quest beating in a new way. That first Easter morning was about transformation – of the environment, with the removal of the stone before the tomb, and it was about transformation of people, with Mary Magdalene turned from forgiven sinner into founder of the new community, the Church.

You cannot internalise the Easter message, so that it is all about my feelings, my doubts, my fears. Of course it is, but that’s not the whole story. The Easter message is about a fragile, stormy environment, as well as a fragile, stormy community. And it is about hope, suddenly and undeservedly poured into situations and relationships of darkness. Easter is therefore more than about going green – though that would help to reinvigorate our relationship with the rest of creation. It is about recognising the hand of the living God, whom we keep rediscovering still has life, life that he wants to share with us.

But God does not depend for his existence on the number of people who believe in him. The Easter message is not some kind of contrived happy ending, a take-it-or-leave-it add-on for God. Easter shows us the most complete picture of God we shall have in this world – it is about the kind of God we can now believe in. Easter is therefore not about forgetting but absorbing the tragedies and troubles of our lives, whether in the form of a natural disaster or a serious illness. If I can put it in horticultural terms, the Jesus of the Easter garden, standing by the empty tomb, renewing and rebuilding Mary Magdalene’s faith, is the same Jesus who was arrested in another garden, and prayed his way through agonies about the future, with fears, doubts, anxieties about what it would hold. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot have one garden, the garden of resurrection, without the other garden, the garden of agony.

So into this fragile, stormy world comes the Easter faith - without a perfect weather forecast, and without a promise that everything is going to be easy or immediately satisfactory. God is in charge, in his own way, on his own terms, and try as we might to dispel him into the mists of materialism, there is still life in him yet, as the dawn breaks and hope enters our lives!

+ Kenneth Portsmouth: