Sermon for Easter Day
“Turn unto the Lord your God”
The words of the Prophet Joel provided the critical matrix through which to ponder the mystery of the Passion in Holy Week. They equally carry us into the mystery of the Resurrection at Easter. Why? Because neither the Passion nor the Resurrection can be thought about without each other. The accounts of the Passion can only be written and can only be considered because of the Resurrection. Easter, in a way, signals the great turning of God to us. Only so can there be our turning to him.
The Resurrection is radical new life. The turning is about the hope of transformation, a change in outlook and understanding, a change from death to life. Easter signals the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil. And that is all God in his eternal turning and all God in his turning to us. Christ goes into darkness of death and death is changed for evermore. “For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” And this changes everything for us. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above”.
We are no longer to be defined by the dust of death and by our turning to the ground and to the emptiness of ourselves. We are turned to the Risen Christ and find in him the new and radical truth of our humanity. We are turned to God and only then are we alive. Death is swallowed up in life, the Life that has overcome death, which is to say that everything is not nothingness. Nihilism is the philosophy of nothingness, the sense of meaninglessness and the absence of purpose, the philosophy of despair and disappointment. The Resurrection of Christ counters the nihilisms of our world and day. It is all about the turning, the circling around and around of God to God in our humanity and our humanity in God.
We turn to the grave, like Mary Magdalene, seeking a corpse, a dead body, only to find “the stone taken away from the sepulchre”. The empty tomb marks the beginning of a change. She turns and runs to Peter and John with the report that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” She assumes however that he is dead. It is merely a question of where the body is. Yet she has been set in motion to the other disciples who in turn run to the sepulchre and find it empty. It marks the beginning of a resurrection of the understanding, a new understanding about our humanity.
