Sermon for Easter Day
admin | 21 April 2019“What mean ye by this service?”
This has been our text throughout the Passion of Christ and one which now carries us into this day and to the proclamation of this day: Christ is risen, Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia! Alleluia! Now that’s a greeting! And one to be shouted out. It says a bit more than “Happy Easter” which might just as well mean, “May the bunny be with you!” Maybe even a chocolate bunny. Just saying. The great and ancient Easter greeting on this day is the proclamation of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. Alleluia! Alleluia!
And yet, the real meaning of this day, paradoxically it might seem, is that we are dead! For if we are not dead, then we shall not be alive. “You have died,” Paul tells us, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.” What this means is sacrifice in its deepest and truest meaning. Holy Week is about the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity but only so as to bring us to this day, the day of Resurrection, itself the fruit of the Passion and thus utterly meaningless without the solemn events of Holy Week and especially Good Friday. There can be no Resurrection without the Passion.
Bronwyn’s baptism is our Easter joy. Her baptism is a reminder of our vocation and calling, a reminder of the realities of death and life, a reminder of the radical new life of the Resurrection precisely through our dying to ourselves in order to live for God and for one another. She died and now she lives. And all because of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. That is the meaning of this service. We are dead so that we may live. Our life is not in ourselves. It is all Christ and all Christ in us. His sacrifice is love, a love made visible on the Cross and in his Resurrection.
The Resurrection is radical new life because it grounds us in the only life there is, the life of God in Christ. The Resurrection is the new and greater creation, the making of life and joy out of the nothingness of human sin and evil and of suffering and death. That is its radical meaning. God and God alone makes out of nothing both in creation and in redemption. The Resurrection is the greater creatio ex nihilo, the greater act of making new. The Crucifixion is not a gothic horror tale, a Stephen King shocker. It is graphic, to be sure, but it is the graphic portrayal of the nature of all sin and evil. We kill God. At least that is what all sin attempts, the attempt to deny the very principle of life upon which our being, our knowing and our loving completely and utterly depend. The Crucifixion makes that reality visible even as the Resurrection makes visible the overcoming of all sin. Both are the graphic lessons of love. Such is a new beginning just as Bronwyn’s baptism marks a new beginning, a new life, one made visible to us in the act of baptism.
But only in and through Christ’s Resurrection. It shows us compellingly and tellingly that our humanity is more though not less than our bodies, more though not less than our embodied experiences and lives, more though not less than our sufferings and deaths. It is about the radical redemption of our humanity to a life with Christ. We only live in him by his living in us.
Such are the sacramental realities of this day signalled in baptism and communion. Both are understood to flow out of the wounded and dead body of Christ hanging on the Cross. Christ on the Cross is pierced and out of his dead side flow blood and water. Those inclined to an empirical approach to all things might note that this suggests a broken heart. To be sure, it does. The heart of Christ is broken for us. His life is poured out for us so that his life can live in us. Such is the meaning of the sacraments.
God and God alone can conquer sin and death. Christ is God and Man and in that mystery lies the redemption of our humanity. We are restored to fellowship with God through the sacrifice of Christ. The deep meaning of that sacrifice is love. The love of God in himself as Trinity is poured out to become our life in God and with one another.
That we are embodied beings capable of grasping meaning and truth also means that we are capable of the betrayals of meaning and truth. Yet we cannot live a negative, a lie. Christ’s death is the death of death; his Resurrection changes death utterly. Death is no longer “mighty and dreadful,” as Donne puts it. It is no longer the end of the story, a terminus. It has become a transitus, a means to the true end of our lives with Christ and in Christ both now and hereafter. What we celebrate is this radical new life born out of the sacrifice of Christ, born out of the descent into Hell, born out of the deep love of God who in thinking and loving himself thinks and loves all things. Nowhere is that more dramatically shown than in the Resurrection.
It changes everything. The whole of Holy Week is only possible through the Resurrection. It belongs to our good to contemplate our unloveliness but only so as to make us new and lovely. For so we are in Christ.
There is a deep honesty to the accounts of the Resurrection that complements the accounts of the Passion. We are shown the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples about the radical meaning of who Christ is and what that means for us. Like Mary Magdalene, we come to the tomb seeking Christ’s body only to find he is not there. In running and telling Simon Peter and “the other disciple whom Jesus loved,” she is the first witness to the beginning of our learning about the Resurrection. The first clue is the empty tomb with the stone rolled away. Simon Peter and John confirm what she is said. It is a wonderful moment. Both run together. John, here described as the other disciple, “did outrun Peter” and gets to the sepulchre first but does not enter. Peter following him gets there and immediately enters. What does this mean? Simply mere description? Or does it suggest something about the differences of character and different ways of knowing that belong to each?
John Scotus Eriugena, John the Scot from Ireland, an outstanding ninth century theologian, saw in this story the relationship between faith and reason. Faith enters first and then reason. Anselm built on this with the famous phrase: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In a way, the whole of Easter and Eastertide is about how we come to learn and know the Resurrection and in ways that complement each of our individual ways of knowing. We grasp it each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold. No one shows that better than John in his accounts of the Resurrection.
The point is that there a sequence, a process of learning, of coming to know what is actually a whole new way of thinking about life and about ourselves. It means seeing things in a whole new light, what Paul talks about in terms of “seek[ing] those things that are above,” the things which Christ in his Passion and Resurrection has “made manifest.” We are more than death and sorrow, more than suffering and sin. Yet through those realities we are made new. Not through the ignoring of the things of the past but through the redemption of Christ.
Sacrifice means more though not necessarily less than death. It means above all else living for God and for one another. Our bodies are not everything but neither are they nothing. In Christ they become the vessels of a new way of being, a way of living for God and with God in Christ.
We live in Christ but only if we are dead to ourselves. This is our joy in the transition from the “Hosannas” of Palm Sunday to the heart-rending cries of “Crucify” and now to the joyous “Alleluias” of the Resurrection. Christ is risen, Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia! Alleluia! It is what we mean by this service.
“What mean ye by this service?”
Fr. David Curry,
Easter 2019
(Baptism of Bronwyn Emma Kate Appleby)