Easter Morning at St Thomas's Cathedral
11.15a.m. Sunday 27th March 2005
Gospel Reading: John 20:11-18
Resurrection, Recognition and Repentance
Like a piece of music, it is impossible to describe a painting. Otherwise why try to put into sound or sight what could be put into words? In any case, words have their limits, even in an age that over-uses them and at the same time mistrusts them profoundly: just think of the politicians’ words that are being thrown everywhere before a General Election has even been called! So what is there to say about the resurrection? Words keep proving inadequate, even for the shortest sermon, the briefest and most convenience-packed Thought for the Day. But there is still the need to use them, because even the plainest music, the simplest painting, and the most straight-forward poetry (a form of art in words) some kind of interpretation.
To preach on Easter Day is in many respects the most difficult task of the entire year: more challenging than the most tragic funeral address, where the main chord to strike is compassion and patience. For Easter confronts each one of us with our own vulnerability and brings our tragedies to the surface in a poignant and collective way – as individuals, as families, as communities, and as nations as well. To sing glorious music about the risen Christ is not a separate world from the destroyed civilisations in post-tsunami Asia, or the tensions in the Anglican Communion that are replicated, if with less candour, in other world-wide Christian communities, or the family problem that doesn’t seem to go away. Unless the risen Christ is seen to engage with those realities, one might almost say that all we are doing this morning is indulging ourselves in a piece of public ritual heritage, from which we can readily disengage afterwards, in order to carry on our lives just as if nothing had happened.
I haven’t been at the game of Christianity as long as some of you here this morning. But I don’t expect that life has knocked me around any more or less than the rest of you. All I can say is that each year, my journey from Good Friday to Easter morning is never easy. I think of the many people I have met and have been praying for, whether it is an event that has simply ‘happened’, like a fatal illness, or self-imposed consequences, like the recent parliamentary dead-lock over the terrorism bill. All the words about resurrection I have listened to, or used myself, begin to seem rather tired and worn out. The spiritual digestive system (as opposed to rank religious indigestion!) for me comes from elsewhere. This year it takes the form of a painting, Rembrandt’s ‘Resurrection’. It is very naturalistic and scenic, with not a shred of ecclesiastical symbolism in sight, but with light gently bearing in on Jesus, wearing a gardener’s hat, who is looking across to Mary Magdalene. Mary by contrast is looking straight at us, with eyes that have suddenly realised that someone is there, but not yet fully recognising that it really is Jesus.
Making the journey from Good Friday to Easter Morning is not a question of two episodes in some kind of divine soap-opera, nor even the same episode interrupted by Easter Eve as a commercial break in order to get the Cathedral decorated. Good Friday and Easter Day form together one single episode in the divine drama of God both confronting our folly and using it to form a new community, the community of faith.
Mary Magdalene realises that the gardener, who is presumably there only to get on with his job of weeding and tending his plants and shrubs, and therefore easily taken for granted, is in fact someone else. This is her first step to a new kind of faith – beyond what she can see and know. So often we have to realise as a first step before we can recognise. So often intuition comes before understanding; and when it does, we are all the more convinced that what we are dealing with is real, trust-worthy and true. Perhaps what triggered it off in her case was a basic familiarity with Jesus, of having spent time with him. For us that means not a fast-food, hit-and-run Easter morning, but patiently spending time, prayer and thought with him, and being with him around his table - without always expecting to be dazzled by some kind of glib, religious consumer-goods.
I cannot prove that God raised Jesus from the dead, although atheists have to accept that Jesus of Nazareth was executed; there is firm historical evidence from a Roman historian of his crucifixion. But Easter Day is meaningless without Good Friday, and Good Friday without Easter leaves us doing no more than gazing at another innocent young life coming to a meaningless and premature end. Easter Day is the logical outcome of God’s use of Jesus, for our benefit, our salvation, our forgiveness, our resurrection. But Easter Day is also for God’s own sake, to show us that he insists on coming back for more. Easter is more than an event in the gospels. It is about the transformation of Mary Magdalene from grief and dejection, through realisation, and then recognition, to a deepened faith, earthed in life, new life. Rembrandt’s apparently anonymous gardener-figure, in that curious straw hat, happens to be around not just for sinful, faithful Mary Magdalene, but for the whole human race.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
