Sermon for Easter
So they ran both together
We are constantly being told that “we are in this together.” And so we are. We are all implicated in the global pandemic of Covid-19 if only because it reveals the assumptions of our global world and culture and challenges all our technocratic dependencies. It challenges us about the understanding of our humanity. But even more than this current crisis, we are implicated in the sufferings of our world in every age. For suffering belongs to the realities of our fallen humanity. Yet it is precisely the conditions of sin and evil, of suffering and death, that God addresses in the radical meaning of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. You see, the Passion and the Resurrection are utterly inseparable. You can’t have one without the other and that is simply, literally, historically, and theologically the case. Such are the deeper joys of Easter. They arise out of the Passion just as the Passion, paradoxically, arises out of the Resurrection.
“Herein is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” we heard (or read!) on Good Friday. Such words from 1 John are part of the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p. 173). And “herein is love,” too, in the wonderful motions of the Resurrection Gospel, the running of Mary Magdalene to Simon Peter and to John, and the running together of Simon Peter and John to the sepulchre, to the tomb where the stone had been taken away. It is empty. Everyone is set in motion. Such are the motions of love for love is motion towards another, towards God and towards each other.
It begins and ends with the divine love in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross; God’s love towards us for “while we yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5.8). It ends in death, yet love does not end and cannot end. “Never that which is shall die,” as Euripides observed so long ago. Love is ever in motion. Out of the Passion of Christ comes Resurrection because it is all about love. And love casts out fear. It changes everything. It changes us even in our current fears and anxieties. And love connects us even in our current isolation and separation. Not digitally except perhaps as a means to share thoughts and ideas but through the connecting power of prayer. For that is Christ in us, his love ruling and moving in us in our care for one another. Love is Resurrection, the life that death cannot overthrow.
