Sermon for the Octave Day of Easter
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s word opens us out, quite literally, to the words of the Incarnate Christ, “the word made flesh,” but most especially and, perhaps, most tellingly to the words of the Risen Christ. It is not too much to say that the words of the Risen Christ inaugurate the most dramatic change in human outlook and understanding that there has ever been. The effect of the presence and words of the Risen Christ on the disciples leads to the intense recollection of all the details of the Passion of Christ and, by extension, to the accounts as well of all the other words and deeds of Christ including his nativity that comprise the Gospels and, then, the other writings that make up the New Testament.
In other words, there is something dramatic and compelling about the Resurrection. Death and Resurrection are two of the foundational themes and principles of Christianity, though not entirely unique to Christianity. There is, in late Judaism, the idea of the resurrection and resurrection, too, is a feature of the Islamic religion. But for Christians the focus is on Christ, on his death and resurrection. And Christ is the primary teacher of the Resurrection.
What is that teaching? That we are more though not less than our bodies, which is probably good news for some of us. That we are not the “slave[s] to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,” as John Donne puts it, the mere pathetic victims of the fatalistic determinisms of our social, economic, political and therapeutic culture. No. We are freed to God in whom we find the very truth of our being and life, the God in whom we become who we are truly called to be and in whom we are more and not less than ourselves.
This is, I think, pretty amazing and quite profound. It is the case historically and theologically that the Resurrection effected the greatest sea-change in human culture imaginable. It quite literally changed the world. And it changed the world because it changes our outlook. It changes our minds and it changes our thinking.
