Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After Easter, 8:00am service

admin | 22 May 2011

“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away.”

There is a great fearfulness in our own age and culture. It goes beyond the ceaseless spectacle of a world of wars that is constantly before us in such things as the unrest in the Middle East or in the parade of natural catastrophes such as floods in Manitoba and fires in northern Alberta. It concerns the emptiness within the soul of a culture when it can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when it can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

When we can no longer say what makes life worth living for, then there is certainly nothing worth dying for either. There is nothing to give your life to. There is only the emptiness within, a darkness inside, out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence, death and self-destruction that have become a regular feature of our world. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the meaninglessness of contemporary life. As the philosopher, Peter Kreeft, has noted, the fear for our culture is not the fear of death as it was for the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, nor is it the fear of Hell as it was for the mediaeval cultures – Christian, Jewish and Islamic; no, it is the fear of meaninglessness itself. There is no objective truth to which we should conform ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. This is our fearfulness, the fearfulness we have to confront and overcome.

We confront it in the Gospels. Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid”. Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

His presence is the counter to their fears and ours. The fear of death and the greater fear of the empty nothingness of life itself are countered by the Risen Christ. He shows us his hands and his side. He makes visible his victory over our death and the ways of death that we choose in our will to nothingness. The meaning of death has been changed and we have only to will what we have been given to see in the witness of the Resurrection. And we can only do that by the same means as it has been accomplished – by grace.

The Resurrection sets us in motion to God and to one another. It makes life worth living – to know that we have an end in God and that his life in us is the measure and the truth of our own lives and our freedom. We can only live for one another when we live to God. At issue is not simply “what is it right to do” but more importantly “what is it good to be”. The epistle of St. James’ reminds us: “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of all his creation”. The Resurrection is new birth, new birth in us, dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. Without that we are dead in ourselves, closed up in the tombs of our souls, paralysed in our fears and unable to reach out in care and concern for one another.

Our morality becomes an empty morality – after all, “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” – without this deeper and religious sense of identity. Throughout these Sundays in Eastertide, Jesus is at pains to counter our fearfulness by preparing the disciples for the fullness of the meaning of the Resurrection. His going from us is the condition of his being with us. He is preparing them for the radical truth of his Resurrection. It is this. He is going to the Father.

“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season. Everything is gathered into the motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the Holy Spirit. The whole life of the Son, eternally and incarnate, we might say, is toward the Father. By virtue of his death and resurrection, we have been drawn into the motions of that perfect love. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit, the bond of love of the Father and the Son bestowed upon us by the promises of the Father and the Son. All the comings and goings of our lives find their place and their meaning in the comings and goings of the Son to the Father through the Holy Spirit.

This constitutes a challenge to our world and to us. The world, today’s Gospel tells us, is “reproved” or convicted of “sin”, that is to say, for acting as if there is no God, such is our worldliness, “because ye believe not on me”; “reproved” or convicted of “righteousness”, meaning that what is right and true is only to be found in the spiritual relation and identity of the Father and the Son, captured in the phrase “because I go to the Father”; and “reproved” or convicted of “judgment”, because all that would stand against God and his will is shown to be ultimately empty and futile, “the prince of this world is judged”, and found wanting.

“The Spirit of truth,” Jesus says, “will guide you into all truth.” There is truth and we are to walk in its paths. We only live when we live for God and for one another.

The Risen Christ is the counter to all our fears. He is in our midst. He would not leave us comfortless. He would not leave us empty but filled, filled with his love, the love that sets us in motion in lives of service and sacrifice. Christ has entered into the depths of our humanity to bring us into the fullness of his joy and life. Such is his death and resurrection for us. It is the counter to all our fearfulness, come what may in the ups and downs of our lives.