Easter Day at Southwark

“While it was still dark.” The sun has not yet risen, but the Son of Man is risen. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.” Who are they? Not mischief-making soldiers, not friends stealing the body to pretend a resurrection, not even the demonic emissaries of death and hell. No. They are none other than the powers of the Eternal God, the powers of grace and truth laying claim on the One whom the grave could not hold. For “love is strong as death”, as it says in the Hebrew scriptures; “many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it”.

On Good Friday St John’s passion story ended in the garden where he was laid to rest. And now we are back there in the darkness and the grass is wet with dew and birds are still silent and the tomb is empty. It’s the first day of the week and like the disciples we are perplexed, maybe a little afraid in this sombre place of death. Would we have the courage to peer inside that rocky cave? And if we did, might we begin to glimpse what it could mean and find ourselves wondering what if…what if?

We mustn’t miss the symbolism of the garden and the first day of the week. It takes us back to the creation story in Genesis when in the picture language of ancient myth, God placed our first parents in the Garden of Eden and invited them to take care of it. In John’s story that we heard just now, it’s here in a garden that the risen Jesus appears to Mary, and she imagines him to be the gardener! On this first day of the week when God once said “let there be light” and now there is light, for the sun has risen and the Son of Righteousness has risen too. So this paradise, this garden (which is what the word literally means) is once again a place of creation. Here is where the new creation begins, the new heaven and the new earth, the promise that everything will be different now that this last Adam has come back from the dead and a new day has dawned over all the world.

But let’s stay with the half-light of breaking dawn. Night shadows still linger in the garden before the full light of day has dawned. That empty tomb and those what ifs? What if this deep magic is true? If only it could be! What a difference it would make to our lives. What a new perspective it would bring to the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a hope to live and die by? I think many of us are living in this twilit kind of world a lot of the time: puzzled, but open to what could happen; feeling for God in the dark, if only we knew where we might find him; not expecting too much of life yet wishing we could have hope and envying those who do. 

Easter is the answer to that search. It changes everything. I can’t prove to you that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead. But there is evidence that has touched the lives of people down the centuries, convinced them that the resurrection changes everything, that what happened in that garden matters more than any other event in human history. This has been going on ever since the days of Mary Magdalen and Peter and John who were the first to come to that garden before dawn on Easter Day. It has been happening across history in every place under the sun. It happens today. And it’s why I am here as a priest speaking to you about it on this Easter morning.

What evidence? I mean that the resurrection of Jesus touches lives and transforms them. It really does. I was brought up in London in the 1950s in an entirely secular family. I was a chorister and that played a key part in my formation. But I became a convinced Christian as a schoolboy because I saw the difference faith was making in my friends, a faith clearly rooted in the cross-and-resurrection of Jesus. It wasn’t just a matter of ideas and beliefs. It was being lived out in front of me with hope and love and real joy. I was profoundly moved by it. I still am as I look back more than half a century. That kind of evidence spoke for itself. And as I read the New Testament I saw that this was how the truth of the resurrection began to take hold on people across the world. In St John’s story, we can see it as a journey from darkness through twilight into the full light of day, from the grief and puzzlement of the disciples in the garden to the joyful meeting with the risen Jesus when he calls Mary by her name and she recognises him and acclaims him as her Lord. 

All of us are somewhere on this journey of faith and hope, somewhere between the shadow of death and the full light of resurrection. So let me say something specifically to those of you who are being baptised and confirmed this morning. In a sense, you are standing by the empty tomb where those disciples stood on the first Easter Day. Ahead of you lies a lifetime of discovery – finding in your own experience what it means to say that Jesus is Lord and to live by his light of life. At times, the light will be strong and steady, a sun high in the sky to brighten your days and strengthen you to travel well. At other times it will be more like a fragile candle flame, a precarious light amid the encircling gloom where we see just enough to put one step in front of the other on the rough steep path of faith and discipleship. What matters is your memory of today and the empty tomb  and your baptism in the risen Christ that change everything and remind us he is risen. Easter faith is his gift to you today, and a hope that I pray never dies. And because he loves you to the end, he will see you through to the end when travelling days are done and you will see him face to face.

Such small beginnings in that garden before dawn; such big truths for those first witnesses to grasp hold of and take to others; such great hopes welling up within us, such dreams that are dreams no more but the fulfilment of everything we have longed for. This is resurrection. This is Easter. This is what it means to be truly alive. Can there be any day but this? So let there be flowers and songs and feasting and fun, and most of all, alleluias without end. 

Southwark Cathedral, Easter Day 2019. John 20.1-18

Life Can Begin Again: a sermon on Easter Day

On Easter Monday 1917, in northern France, the British and Commonwealth forces launched the Easter Offensive against the German line. The Battle of Arras cost over 160,000 British. One of them was a soldier who was serving in the Artists’ Rifles. He was one of the great poets of his generation. Among his closest friends was Eleanor Farjeon who wrote the song ‘Morning has Broken’, a woman who was more than a little in love with him. As Holy Week began Edward, holed up in his trench, received an Easter gift. Eleanor’s poem tells the story. 

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You like to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said. 'I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning'. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve.
'Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon'.

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve,
There are three letters that you will not get.

Deceptively simple, it charms us until we get to the last line and realise what it conceals. That painted Easter egg (or was it chocolate?), kept for a week with such anticipation was possibly the last thing he ever ate. A few hours later on that Easter Monday Edward Thomas would be dead, struck down by a rogue shell as he was lighting his pipe.

There are three letters that you will not get. Think of the millions of letters those who fell in battle would never get. This is the first Easter of this Great War centenary that began last summer. I doubt if you came here wanting to be reminded of war on Easter morning. It was such a lovely morning Edward had written. Perhaps on a beautiful spring day in Picardy where, even in the desert of the front line a daffodil or two might dare to raise its head, perhaps Edward could forget the war for an instant. Maybe it’s possible as we keep this beautiful and holy feast in the Cathedral to forget the conflicts of our own time for an hour.  

Or so we think. But we must not leave those worries outside the church door. ‘Lest we forget’ matters just as as much on Easter Day as it does on Remembrance Sunday. Let me say why. Like the poem, St John’s Gospel takes us back to a garden. Peter and John come running to Jesus’ tomb. They find the stone rolled away, the cave empty. But someone else has been there all along, ever since before dawn: Mary Magdalen, the woman who had loved Jesus so intensely. When the two men go back she stays there, ‘weeping outside the tomb’. On that first Easter morning there are tears, just as there are tears today for so many in our world. But then comes the wonderful moment of recognition. She thinks the stranger is the gardener, wants to know where he has taken the body. ‘And Jesus said to her…’ But how do you possibly put into a word all that is conveyed as he calls her by her name. At that instant she understands, and believes. After the terrible ordeal of God Friday when she had stood close to the cross watching Jesus die, she has a rush of conviction, a surge of hope. Rabbouni! she exclaims.

This Easter garden is full of symbolism. Go and visit ours in the Galilee Chapel of this Cathedral. In one way it’s the beauty of spring time, the yearly marvel of nature’s renewal. ‘The winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.’ But it’s much more than that. This garden takes us back to creation when, said the ancient story, God planted a garden in Eden and placed Adam there to look after it. St John is saying to us: here is a new paradise, indeed, a new world, a new creation. And yes, Jesus is indeed the gardener, just as Adam was, for this Last Adam comes into his garden on the first day of the week to begin his great work of re-making the world as God wants it to be. Morning has broken, like the first day. The day after Jesus has finished what he came to do, and has kept the Sabbath and rested in the tomb, the week begins all over again with a sunrise of wonder that heralds a new dawn for the world. It brings a new hope to raise up broken spirits. And with it the promise that the risen Christ will one day make all things new.

At Easter in 1917, like first century Judaea and our own 21^st century, there are tears. They may be tears of personal grief and loss like Mary’s, like the bereaved who have lost cherished loved ones, with memories of Easters past that come flooding back this morning. This morning I am grieving a good colleague and friend I suddenly lost a week ago and trying to share the heartache his wife and children are going through. I am thinking of Jewish people keeping Passover this week like our ancestors, in fear of the future; thinking too of Christians under the iron fist of Islamic State who will celebrate Easter in terror; and Christian refugees far from home in Turkey and Jordan, and the families of the students in Kenya shot without mercy last week because they were Christians and not Muslims. Is it possible that human beings can be so cruel? If we have any feeling for humanity, our hearts break for the pain of the world. Just as God’s heart must break too as he weeps over us.

Yet Easter says to you, to me, to all of us, to the entire human family if only it would listen: do not lose heart. Do not be afraid. Reawaken the hope you once had. Or if you never had it, if hope has eluded you for a lifetime, go to the garden. Go to the empty tomb, go to the very place where it seems he is absent, and find that he is alive and present and among us. Find that as then, so now, he calls us by our name and invites us to step out of the shadows of the tomb into the marvellous light of resurrection.

Edward Thomas’s world was not very different from ours. Even on a beautiful spring day in Eastertime, death can stalk us as it did him. His widow’s memoir tells how he went to France deeply afraid, with an awful sense of foreboding. Yet his last letter to Eleanor recalling a hidden Easter egg still rises to the conviction that he will keep a day for praise. Like her poem, we sow seeds today, seeds of faith, of hope, and of overflowing love. What are they when the world is so dark and we protest ‘O God, why?’, when events baffle us and make us afraid, when our burdens and our planet’s feel just too heavy to bear? Faith and hope and love are everything. They give us back our disintegrated lives, put back together by the crucified and risen Lord. We glimpse how we can learn to trust once more, how life can begin again. The good news of Easter is that even at the grave, even when everything seems hopeless and we feel at our most helpless, we sing alleluia. Morning has broken! This is the day that the Lord has made. It’s a day for praise. He is risen.

Durham Cathedral, Easter Day 2015. John 20: 1-18