Diocesan News11 Apr 04

Bishop Richard Clarke's Easter sermon

EASTER DAY SERMON 2004

by the Bishop of Meath and Kildare
the Most Revd Dr. Richard Clarke

at

St. Brigid's Cathedral, Kildare
Easter Day, 11th April 2004

Revelation 3.8 ?I have set before you an open door which no one can shut?.

Is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead a good reason for being a Christian believer?

I would rather have thought so, but one of those religious surveys (conducted within the last couple of years) produces an interesting perspective on this precise question.

The vast majority of those who responded, and who would classify themselves as Christians, said that they believed in the resurrection of Christ as objective fact. So far, so good, but now comes the more surprising bit. This is that nearly a third of those who did not regard themselves as Christian believers nevertheless believed that the Resurrection had actually happened. Now that is surely less to be expected. If one can get one?s head around the Resurrection of Christ, surely the rest falls into place fairly quickly? A door opens into belief and faith. But is this in fact the case?

I suppose we have to say first that in the post-modern world in which we live, a world which is not only rather more credulous but also intellectually more disjointed than previous generations, something strange happening two thousand years ago is not necessarily seen as carrying any consequences for today. In addition, we might add that if one looks directly at the bible, it is clear that there are other resurrections (or at least other resuscitations) to be found there, and the fact of someone who had died re-appearing after death could be applied also to Lazarus, to Jairus? daughter, to the son of a widow in Nain, and also to sundry figures of the Old Testament. What then is it about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead which is so important, today as much as two thousand years ago? Does any door necessarily open?

The immediate thing to say is that if the event of Easter has no effect on us and on how we align our lives today, then indeed it might just as well never have happened as far as we are concerned. The appropriate response to the Resurrection might indeed be, ?So what??

But the biblical accounts are pointing us rather further than the resurrection as history (although they certainly see it as that). The Gospels are interested as much in the effects of the resurrection as in the actuality or the mechanics of the resurrection.

Some disciples are afraid and, it would seem, momentarily paralysed by the significance of what has happened.

Others immediately run to tell others about the empty tomb and what it might mean.

Others, such as those on the road to Emmaus, find a slow dawning of realisation and then a spur to action.

And there is, of course, that meltingly beautiful story of the encounter with Mary Magdalene in the garden.

The Gospels are of course certainly talking about the Resurrection as a real event, an event in human history. There is, as we know, a condescending and superior approach to the whole matter which suggests that the Gospel writers were speaking of a symbolic resurrection, that Jesus remained very much dead, and that what we call Easter was merely a realisation on the part of the disciples that this man Jesus Christ was possibly on the right lines after all. His resurrection was in their heads and in their imagination, but nowhere else. This is, it seems to me, staggeringly patronising - patronising about the Gospel writers who would have known perfectly well how to make it clear if they were writing metaphor, patronising about generation upon generation of great Christian thinkers and writers who were in fact not gullible idiots, patronising about us who don?t like to think of ourselves either as fools or as fantasists. It?s actually patronising about God as well. As the American writer and poet John Updike puts it so neatly, in one of his Seven Stanzas at Easter,

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door.

The question accordingly becomes a matter, not only of the objective reality of Resurrection, but also of the impact on the lives of disciples. disciples of the twenty-first century as of the first century - of how disciples walk through this door of which both the writer of the Book of Revelation and John Updike speak to us. The question becomes, ?What effect does the resurrection of Jesus Christ have on our lives?? ?What door now stands open??

* The Resurrection means first that, as individuals, we must look at Christ in a different way. Mary Magdalene who had loved and admired him before, now finds herself utterly transformed by him. She becomes different, because everything falls into place. All that he had said and had done were no longer the words and actions of a good man, even the best man there had ever been, it had all been given an eternal reality for her which could not be contradicted or ever destroyed. No matter how often we are told that it will not do to patronise Christ, and to treat him as an amiable carpenter with a good line in stories (who would however not have survived for very long in any real grown-up world), we still do it. The resurrection is the playing of the trump card which tells us that if we not treat him with the utmost seriousness and with total reverence, it is we who are the buffoons.

* It means also that we cannot look at others in the same way. Most of the resurrection stories are stories of Christ?s friends meeting together ? in a room, in a boat, on a beach, walking to a village. The Easter event is about sharing faith, being part of a community which celebrates the presence of Jesus Christ. We are pushed again and again in the Easter stories to realise that Christ is real and present with us in the Eucharist, the meal of the Church, as he shares food in a village room, as he asks for food on a shore, as he eats with his disciples in a room in Jerusalem. The risen Christ joins with his followers as they meet together. This is why it is so immensely foolish to imagine that we are somehow doing God a favour when we turn up in church for a service. Worship should never be seen as anything other than an immense privilege to be treated with the greatest humility and reverence, as the God who created us, who keeps us in being and who has smashed through the dreadfulness of death ahead of us, is ready to join us as companion and friend. Christian worship, Christian community and Christian fellowship become Easter gifts to be prized and revered, and for which we should be ever and profoundly thankful to God.

* It means that we can face ourselves in a new way. What are we as individuals without the resurrection? A moderately sophisticated organism which, simply because it has a thing called a ?mind?, gets ideas far above its station, but which nevertheless ceases to exist after a few brief spins of a grubby little planet around the nearest, rather insignificant star. It is God in Christ, God in the risen Christ, who gives us a real dignity and a true purpose. This is not the bogus dignity we so readily give ourselves. This is the dignity of being a child of God, given a function and given a purpose to bring others into loving fellowship with him. I have no doubts that the value of our earthly life will be measured in the context of eternity, neither by how much we accumulated for ourselves, nor by how much others feared us or envied us, but by how much more Christian this world became, because we lived in it. And this conviction, if you think about it, only makes any sense in the light of Easter.

Easter is of course far, far more than a good reason for being a Christian. This is why we must never trivialise it, or reduce it to a happy ending or a pious parable. It is an open door to faith, to hope, to love, and thus to the fullness of eternal life.

?I have set before you an open door which no one can shut?.