The Easter Sunday
Preacher: The Revd John Chynchen
First of all, may I wish you
all a very blessed and glorious Eastertide. Christ is risen, he is risen indeed…and, really, that is where this
sermon should stop…but I've decided to disappoint you and carry on for a bit!
Today—the Queen of Seasons or the Queen of Feasts…as it's been variously
called—follows only two days after Jesus sacrificed himself…going to his
crucifixion with his eyes open. He was the sacrifice willingly offered by the
victim in the glory of the Trinity. We shall never understand what transaction
went on between Father, Son and Holy spirit in that
extraordinary moment of crucifixion. We shall never understand it, but then we
are not asked to understand. We are asked to love; we are asked to take it on
trust in faith and to produce charity…produce love — and that is what the Cross
did. Jesus is sacrificed for us and he appeared alive to his disciples and
every time he appeared it had the same effect on them. They were filled with
joy.
On that Thursday night at the
Last Supper, Jesus said, rather mysteriously, This is my body, and pouring the
wine into the cup, This is my blood, and the disciples didn't understand what
he meant…but they did the next day, on the Friday, when they saw his body
broken on the Cross like the loaf of bread had been broken…when they saw the
blood pouring from his wounds like the wine into the chalice. Then they realised that this man had set up the Holy Communion – the
Eucharist – in place of the sacrifice of the lamb.
No longer was there a need for
a lamb to be sacrificed…that was a relic of ancient days when the gods had to
be placated.
Jesus Christ was the Lamb of
God that takes away the sins of the world. He was the one who had now left the
signs of bread and wine to be his presence with us for ever. And the disciples
were joyful; again the scriptures tell us that at every single appearance they
were filled with joy…so we too , at this Eastertide,
should be filled with joy…filled with love of the Lord.
The resurrection and mysteries
of our faith are not totally understandable but they produce a love of God;
they produce in our hearts gratitude to God for freeing us — not from the
Egyptians — but from sin…a far worse form of servitude and slavery than the
Israelites had ever been under. They free us to a life that is open to God and
open to our neighbour — because our greatest joy
comes in serving our neighbour. Our greatest joy, our
greatest hope, our greatest faith comes when we exercise charity towards our neighbours. There is no other way to show our love for God.
Christ did not appear to Pilate, he didn't call on Herod or the Roman soldier.
He didn't appear to the High Priest. He appeared to his loved ones…starting
with Mary Magdalene…because they already loved him and love is the first
condition of believing.
“Mary went and told the
disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord,' and she told them all the things he had said
to her."
It took courage for Mary to go
back to the tomb. It took even more courage for her to let go of Jesus. But in
doing so, she gives birth to the Church. By her witness, by her testimony, the
history of the world is changed, made new, transformed. Her words to his
friends are the first Easter sermon ever preached! Because of her testimony, we
are here today! Mary continues to run through the ages to this very day,
gathering us all to be a community of Christ's people, his beloved disciples.
Like those first disciples she
calls, we all race to the tomb and stoop over to see for ourselves. Like Simon
Peter, Mary and the beloved disciple, we do not all see the same things, we do
not hear the same voices. Except the one voice that calls us each by name.
He calls us today. He calls us
by name. He calls us to be his beloved disciples. He calls us to follow him so
that we may do something beautiful with our lives and bear much fruit.
Like Mary, he also calls us to
let go of him. We can shut him up in tombs of our own making, or we can be like
Mary, let go and venture forth to tell others about our Risen Lord. In letting
go, like Mary, we will find that we are more fully embraced by him, by his love
and by his God than we could ever imagine.
The American Trappist monk and mystic, Thomas Merton, had this to say
about Resurrection:
“Christianity may or may not
make sense to you but, perhaps, resurrection can make sense. It is a process of
being reborn, moment-to-moment, in a freedom that is wise in its sensitivity to
the interconnectedness of all things, compassionate in its empathy for all
living beings, and centred in the very mystery of
God. We understand resurrection when we taste a freedom and freshness that lies
in the very depths of our lives. From my perspective as a Christian, this
freedom and freshness is the living Christ, the resurrected One. ‘He' does not
have a body that is located in space and time. ‘He' is more like the wind, or
our own breathing, or the sky. The resurrected One is the very freshness of God,
the very freedom of Holy Wisdom, as a centre that is within us and beyond us,
ever-present yet ever-new. There is a freshness and freedom in the very centre
of things. In this freshness and freedom, we find our roots and wings.”
You do not believe in Jesus
Christ unless you love him. And they — Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and the
disciple he loved — already loved him. They may have thought it had all been a
terrible disaster but when he appeared their love for him, which had never
died, sprang back and they were full of joy. So, on this Easter Feast…this
Queen of Feasts…I wish you the joy of Eastertide. Alleluia, Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Alleluia!