Sermon for the Octave Day of Easter
“Jesus came and stood in the midst”
“April is the cruellest month,” the poet, T.S. Eliot, notes in The Wasteland. He must have had a Maritime spring in mind, a kind of April’s Fools Day joke that never ends! And yet there is a counter to the misery and the cruelty of the Maritime spring in April. It is the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is not a static event. It is the dynamic truth “that God hath given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”. We behold the Risen Christ. We are set in motion by what we see. The Church does not simply stand upon the doctrine of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is the running life of the Church. It means that there are always breakthroughs in our understanding; resurrections of the understanding, we might say. They belong to the dynamic reality of the Resurrection.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more dramatically illustrated than on The Octave Day of Easter. “On the same day at evening, being the first day of the week”, John tells us, the disciples were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the day of Easter, to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day”, the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive to his presence or dead in ourselves.
“Jesus came and stood in the midst”. They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety, not unlike many of us today, perhaps. The world of their hopes and expectations had been utterly shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to be knit together into something new and strange. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.
