Bishop of Ely’s Easter Sermon 2013
Bishop Stephen Conway Recognising the Resurrection
I begin with an apology. I confess that I am one of those people who
can walk down the High Street here in Ely and walk straight past people I
know perfectly well without any acknowledgement. I am not proud of
this, or seeking to justify myself. I just know that I can be either or
both moving at speed or pre-occupied
with an idea or with my next appointment and fail entirely to recognise
people. Other people have done this to me, too. I remember the
embarrassment of meeting a senior clergyperson in a London street at
whom I beamed in a way that became increasingly ludicrous as he stared
right through me. He later apologised and indicated that he had not seen
me because it was totally out of context. If we had met on the street
in Durham or Newcastle he would have noticed me straightaway. I was
relieved because it would be hard to think of myself as being
transparent, even after having been poorly.
My immediate
reaction to Mary Magdalene’s situation in our reading from John’s Gospel
this morning is one of acute sympathy both for her anxiety and her
disorientation. When she came to the tomb where Jesus had been buried,
all she expected was a corpse. She had witnessed Jesus’s terrible death.
She may have held his body when it was brought down from the cross. She
was steeling herself for even deeper grief and loss as the bitter truth
of Jesus’s death was brought home by a stiff and stinking body which
religious law said they had not time to anoint properly immediately
after death. The empty tomb brings out her worst fears of political
machinations and body-snatching. If we think of the crimes of people
like the ‘Moors Murderers’, it is not just that they killed innocent
children; but that they never told the families where the bodies were
buried. People have tried to smear the new Pope by association with the
former Argentinian regime which snatched any dissenters and tortured and
killed them and never let their families know. This is going on in
Syria now, probably on both sides. Many people suffer that double loss
of the violent death of a loved one and no grave to mourn at. Mary
Magdalene stands for all of us who live daily with the reality of
crucifixion and suffering. She failed to recognise the Risen Jesus not
because he was somehow veiled from her sight: it was that death
completely filled her horizon.
Christians can rather blithely
make the point that you cannot have resurrection without death. But the
faith which we profess is rooted in the real death of the person who is
also the Son of God, Jesus Christ. We cannot do Easter without Good
Friday, as the Dean reminded us in his excellent and uncomfortable Good
Friday addresses. Mary Magdalene’s friend and Rabbi had been judicially
murdered. She had felt his cooling flesh. She had seen the vicious
wounds close up. She was not inclined to recognise her friend alive.
When we celebrate the Eucharist, we do so upon a table the empty space
below which signifies the tomb of Jesus. On the table we take bread and
wine to become the Body and Blood of Christ, sacrificed for us. It is
the crucified redeemer who takes on our death and hopelessness. His
heart breaks first so that our heart might beat in conformity with his.
I do not know about Mary Magdalene; but I do know about myself and
other people of my acquaintance that if the dead horses we flog were
real, we would be in very serious trouble with the RSPCA. Mary kept
peering into the tomb, welcoming the comfort and security of a confined
space and the darkness. We stick with our comfortingly familiar failings
and guilt and sadnesses and we hold onto ways of behaving and even of
believing and praying which do not serve us well anymore. My own recent
experience of a life-threatening illness exposed me eloquently to the
reality of existing rather than living, and left me ‘all shook up’, as
Elvis would say. I once went into a newsagent’s in a strange town and
asked for directions. The lady asked: ‘Where are you now?’ I was rather
disorientated by the question because I was standing right in front of
her. It does present the existential question, though, about the
direction of our life as individuals as the Church and as the world:
where are we heading? Perhaps the most intimate question is: do we even
recognise ourselves?
The intimate answer is that we are
completely recognised and loved by death-defeating love in the person of
Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. One of the most beautiful words
spoken in Scripture is when Jesus calls the Magdalene by her name,
‘Mary’. Through the resurrection, the Father determines that we should
share the intimacy that there has always been between Him and the Son in
the reality of the Spirit. The great Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner,
wrote in his Foundations of the Christian Faith that the death and
resurrection of Jesus are two aspects of a single event not to be
separated. The self-offering of Jesus on the cross without the
resurrection would still have been a great gift to humanity, in that God
came to share the tragedy of human life. By this death God could have
taken away our sins without the resurrection of Jesus. I know that there
are many people who cannot believe in the resurrection because they
cannot get away from the tragic aspects of our human life. What we
proclaim today, however, is that the resurrection is the complete
transformation of the tragedy. The Jesus who calls Mary – and you and me
– by name is not a revived corpse. He is the living proof of all that
he preached and lived for in his pre-Easter life. His total surrendering
of himself to death is vindicated as the Father recognises him as what
Rahner calls “the absolute saviour”. His death sweeps away our sin and
failure; but it is his resurrection which makes transformation and new
life possible for us, even in the most tragic of circumstances. In
Jesus’s new physical body which Mary instinctively wanted to hug and
which Thomas was allowed to touch, we recognise the tangible fulfilment
of our hope of life now and into eternity.
Optimism can easily
be read as a skirting over the facts of life. The difference between
optimism and hope is that hope takes the present really seriously and
believes that trust in the future which God promises brings life and
energy back into that present reality so that we and the world can
change in ways we never considered possible. I can only explain the
change in the disciples after the tragedy of Calvary by believing that
the resurrection of Jesus brought about the resurrection of the faith of
the disciples. They were afraid for their lives and had lost all hope.
Now hope was not only restored but taken to a whole new level. It was
this new hope for the future which gave them the courage and the energy
to carry the good news throughout the known world, whatever present
hardship they faced. This is the testimony of Peter that we have read in
the Acts of the Apostles.
It is, therefore, my job this
morning to ask myself and you how daring are we prepared to be on this
Easter Day? Mary Magdalene was a recovering mad woman. In her day, women
were not allowed to be witnesses in a court of law. Yet God chose her
to be the Apostle of the Apostles, the first witness to the greatest
event in human history. Helping people to recognise and live that event
was the defining principle of the rest of her life. As Paul says, we
would be the most to be pitied if the resurrection were not true and I
cannot prove it to you as a certainty. Hope is not about certainty; it
is about trust. Mary did not recognise Jesus at first; but she trusted
the voice of the friend who healed her and now saved her. The Risen
Christ calls us all by name. Do not be afraid. Trust and follow him.
Amen
Rt Revd Stephen Conway, Bishop of Ely
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