Sermon for Monday in Easter Week
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s response to God at the Annunciation informs our learning about the Resurrection, too. The actual feast day of the Annunciation more often than not coincides with Lent and Passiontide but occasionally, the 25th of March can be Easter Day itself and whenever that happens or when the Annunciation coincides with days of Holy Week, the commemoration is transferred to Eastertide. There is a wonderful sense in which Mary’s word belongs to the lessons of the Resurrection, especially when it is the Risen Christ who teaches the most and most clearly about the Resurrection.
One of the most powerful lessons about the Resurrection appears in the Gospel for Easter Monday. It is Luke’s marvelous account of the events on the Road to Emmaus. It is an extraordinary scene and one which ultimately focusses on the interpretation of the Scriptures and even more poignantly on the complementariety of the Word spoken and explained and the Word enacted and performed. It is Christ who teaches. Christ is the exegete of the Scriptures of the Old Testament that reveal the meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. We are opened out to a new and radical understanding of our life with God in Jesus Christ.
The Risen Christ runs out after the disciples who are fleeing from Jerusalem in fear, their hopes and expectations having been utterly destroyed by Christ’s crucifixion and death. They had “trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel,” they say. Such words say a lot about their expectations and their understanding of the nature of redemption. Christ is the redeemer of the world, the redeemer of Israel in a new and radically transforming way, not in a political or social way, but spiritually and theologically. There is a radical transformation of the understanding of redemption. It can no longer be confined to the hopes and expectations of politics and power.
