Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter, 8:00am service

admin | 21 April 2013

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church, concentrated for us in the Great Thanksgiving Prayer at Holy Communion. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues, in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

What do we mean by the disordered world? We can no longer deceive ourselves about being “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes IV), it seems to me. We live in the ruins of a revolution. We live certainly in the failure and collapse of certain assumptions about material prosperity and about scientific progress. We are beset by the prophets of apocalyptic doom and, no, they are not religious fanatics so much as doomsday environmentalists. And yet, even that is being challenged. In short, without giving a full blown chronicle of the contradictions, confusions and complexities of our contemporary world, disordered seems to fit the bill rather nicely and to capture our sense of uncertainty and unease.

How to deal with it? I think this is where an openness to what we have forgotten and dismissed and even denied is required. What is it? Simply what we are being given to see in these remarkable lessons which belong to the season of Easter. They offer nothing less than a new and radical way of looking at our humanity. The doctrine of the Resurrection, I wish to argue, speaks wonderfully and profoundly to the disorders of our world and day.

The Gospel readings for the next three Sundays are all taken from what is sometimes called ‘the farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. Profoundly theological, they emphasise the importance and the centrality of John’s Gospel for our understanding of the most significant Christian doctrines; in this case, the doctrine of the Resurrection and its completion in the Ascension of Christ. What does John teach us? Well this morning it is about the resurrection as accomplishing a radical transformation of our humanity. “Your sorrow shall be turned into joy” even though “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me,” remarks that perplex and bewilder and yet are explained in the mystery of revelation that lies at the heart of human redemption. It is “because I go to the Father.” Jesus is teaching us about the fundamental reality of the life of God, the self-giving nature of the divine life made visible in his sacrifice on the Cross which opens us out to the inner life of God himself. It belongs to the strong Christian message captured in last week’s image of Christ the Good Shepherd: the message that God alone can make something good out of human evil, and that the power of the good always outweighs the power of evil which remains always perversely derivative and destructive. Evil has no power, no truth in itself. It remains entirely dependent upon what already is and which is said, and this can only be said philosophically and theologically, to be good, indeed, very good. The Resurrection is about the redemption of our humanity and of creation itself from the folly of the Fall, our disorder.

It is precisely this insight that allows us to forebear and persevere and to will the good in whatever situation we are in. It means exactly all the things that 1^st Peter mentions under the concept of “submit[ting ourselves] to every ordinance of man” but doing so “for the Lord’s sake,” knowing only too well the follies and failings of all of us but knowing, too, the greater power of God that is at work in and through and in spite of the vagaries of political power and machination. There is no earthly power that in some sense or other does not come from God. The misuse of power, of course, rests upon the heads of those who abuse what has been given to them. God’s power and truth always remain greater by definition.

It is in this way that we can find, if not answers, then at least a way of thinking about the questions of good and evil that are so manifestly before us in our disordered world whether it is the sad story of Rehtaeh Parsons or the mad carnage of the Boston Marathon bombings. Jesus speaks directly to the human reality of sin and sorrow, of grief and loss, and more profoundly, of evil and destruction. All of it – and this is the radical message of Easter – has been borne already in the Crucifixion of Christ. All of it – and this is the radical message of Easter – has been overcome in the Resurrection of Christ. We have only to live it which means to let Christ’s life and love triumph in us over and against the terror of our fears and desires for revenge. The radical teaching of the Gospel is that we have a way to face the harshest and the hardest things; sorrow and joy are intermingled and mixed in this vale of tears, but joy will triumph over sorrow and good over evil, always.