Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 17 April 2022.
Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb (c. 1590s) by Annibale Carracci (Source)
• First Reading: Isaiah 65: 17-25 (God’s promise for the new Jerusalem – I will create a new heaven and a new earth)
• Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24
• Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15: 19-26 (For as in Adam all dies, so in Christ shall all be made alive)
• Gospel: John 20: 1-18 (Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, I am sending you. Receive the Holy Spirit)
I am not entirely sure when the mirage evaporated and the bubble burst. It may have been the banking crash of 2008, or the Brexit vote of 2016 or the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, or maybe the outbreak of war in Europe last month, but our easy sense of progress and gently rising standards of living and of care have now come to a halt.
What we have is that sense of unease, the uncertainty that whatever we had hoped and planned for might not work out as we intended.
After so many years of peace following the end of the cold war, recent events have been disturbing. They set us some probing questions: what is it all about? What do we really care about? What do we really believe?
Other generations have had their challenges and in our day these events test us.
Yet there is also a sense in which we can stop and look around. It is not as if these things are really unique and many peoples in other lands have faced far more pressing matters of survival against military and criminal violence; flood, drought and starvation, earthquakes and landslides.
But all of this unease is centred on us – none of it really starts with God and asks where He is leading us. It is not as if we were entitled to lives of unchallenged ease.
And our lesson from Isaiah starts with a promise and a new vision. God is speaking of a new beginning secured in His personal providence. It is His vision, and He wants His people to be brought into a new peace with Him and with one another and with the earth on which they live.
Written to exiles in Babylon yearning for a return to the way things were, this is a promise of how God wants to lead His people home and of the kind of home He wants to lead them into.
A place of peace and fertility, long life and secure living. God with His people so intimately that before they had asked He was already answering.
His mountain would be holy and nothing impure or corrupted would endure upon it.
Writing to the church in Corinth, Paul has a long section on life after death and the meaning of the resurrection. This chapter is 58 verses long but it is well worth spending some time on it.
His point in our lesson is that if there is no resurrection from the dead that any faith that hopes for it is hopelessly lost and indeed futile, even deluded.
If we are putting our faith in something that does not and cannot exist, then we might as well be joining the flat-earth society.
BUT: if there is life beyond death, then Jesus has indeed been the first to lead us into it. There have been various raisings from the dead in the bible – you might call them resuscitations – but in these all then died later on. These were never resurrected.
But Jesus is the first to come from the dead in a resurrected body – a body that is for ever and eternity. A body that is recognizable and which walks, talks, eats and can be touched.
What Jesus has done is to undo the damage inflicted on the human race by Adam, for just as in scripture Adam is the source of human mortality so Jesus is the fountain of everlasting life.
What is corruptible and partial finds its decay and disintegration in Adam. What is centred on self, and is wholly self-directed is of Adam. None of it can last.
But what is centred on Jesus finds itself renewed after death in Him. More than that, it Jesus’ defeat of the finality of death that created a new kind of vision and of hope. The old terrors of death are stripped away and no regime can use the fear of death to terrorize its people into submission.
And so Jesus came among His disciples. They were gathered but fearful.
His first words are to banish their fears – ‘Peace be with you.’ The peace of shalom, wholeness and completeness, fulfilment, plenty. It is personal and is for each of them in the depths of who and what they are.
But then there was more – much more. Having showed them His wounds, He gave them a commission. This is far more than a request to tidy up their rooms or do the washing up. It was a commission of the same kind that He had received from God. It was to carry on where He had left off.
If some have difficulty in believing in God, here was Jesus putting His full confidence in the disciples, and a pretty mixed bag they were. But for God, this was enough.
They would have the authority to carry His message of forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life in a world more comfortable with threat and intimidation, the fear of death and the use of guilt and condemnation to manipulate its people.
Whatever the world may throw at the disciples, it would never undo the power of Jesus’ resurrection. It may try to suppress it, it will certainly ridicule and abuse it, but it cannot acknowledge it without accepting it on Jesus’ terms and as He had brought it to the world.
Whatever the world may say and do to establish death as its working principle, the resurrection of Jesus is a message of life and life in its fulness.
