Easter Day 2006
There are two questions I ask every Easter. What really happened that first Easter morning? And what does it mean? You don’t have to be an investigative journalist to think along those lines. For each one of us in the Cathedral today they show that the outside world means business in its scrutiny of everything – and that includes what some of us get up to around this time, year in and year out.
What really happened? If you look at the Gospels, all four of them, the answer is that it is very hard to tell. Groups of devoted friends of this wandering preacher from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Nazareth appear at his tomb in order to anoint his body. But his death isn’t the end, not by nay means. From a small community crushed by the public execution of their leader for blasphemy and edition, they became a force still to be reckoned with over two thousand years later. Women play a prominent part in those gospel-scenes, and it’s clear that they were on to something big before the men arrived. But what did happen? One strand of the narratives keeps referring to Jesus ‘appearing’ to them, whether by the tomb, or in other places, and on the way to various destinations. Sometimes they include special meals, whether at the lakeside for breakfast, or food at the end of a journey, as at an unknown place called Emmaus. The evidence, if there is verifiable evidence at all, lies not so much in what exactly happened to Jesus as in the creation of this new community, apparently out of nothing. After all, the disciples fled when Jesus was arrested, and only one or two (again with women) bothered to turn up as he hung on the cross, dying a slow and disgraceful death. That makes us part of this Easter community.
But can we probe further? For many people (but not everyone), that empty tomb provides another kind of evidence. It’s not exactly scientific evidence, because nothing like this had happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. But in what way? Well, for a start, there are no signs of the disciples wanting to form a cult around the grave of Jesus, which would have been an understandable thing to do in the circumstances – and there are many examples of exactly that happening with other ‘cult-figures’, even in our own time. And then there is another ingredient in the puzzle of Easter morning: no opponent of Jesus or of the Christian faith was able to produce his body. They surely tried, and seemed to have failed. Had anyone managed to do that, then the whole business of the Easter faith would have been shown to be false, no more than a con-trick.
That leads to the second question: what does it all mean? Here we are on surer ground, because we have more to go on, which is our experience, as a community down two thousand years. According to one of the gospels, the Risen Christ greets his followers with peace, and commissions them to forgive sins – which, next to death, is the most limiting, negative feature of the human race. ‘Sin and death’ are linked, because they are both consequences of our mortality. The meaning of Easter is about hope of new life here and now. Everyone who encounters Jesus, in whatever way, has the chance to look at their lives in a new way.
Since I preached at Easter last year, my life has been given back to me, through the wonders of medical science, and the prayers of many people. I now have the chance to be thankful for being alive when I awake each morning in a way that I didn’t before. It makes me see what and who I am in a completely different way: I can’t walk around the way I do now as if the past year had never happened. Sin and death remain daily realities to me. But their contours, their impact, are of a different kind now. I stare sin straight in the eyes as a fact of life, but that is offset by the knowledge and experience of humanity at its highest and best – the miracle of chemotherapy, and the miracle of prayer. And I have stared death in the face, but even that is offset by having been there, and realizing that there is nothing to fear, not least because I have been able to walk back from it again into new life, surrounded by love, and strength, confidence and hope, reconciliation and peace.
What really happened? The answer is that we don’t really know, because it can’t be put into words. But it was big – and quite beyond us. What does it all mean? The answer to that question is less mystifying, but not without its severest challenges: every time life is fully lived, every time truth conquers falsehood, every time hope is brought into darkness, every time the blind are given their sight, every time the lame are enabled to walk. Easter is about a world cleansed of fear, and soaked in love, a broken world made new.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
