9 April 2023 Easter Day
Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. Happy Easter.
So, what does ‘risen’ look like, what do we mean when we affirm Christ as ‘risen’. Debate has raged for 10’s of years (if not longer) about this issue. Clearly it is not ‘resuscitation’, in the way Lazarus; the son of the widow of Nairn; and Jairus’ daughter; were ‘resuscitated’ and lived longer lives, but still eventually died in the same way as the rest of humanity. Jesus, while fully human, was not resuscitated, he was resurrected. And resurrection, as Rowan Williams writes, is ‘a state of affairs in which the material world we know is rendered irreversibly transparent to the eternal act of God.”
So what does that all mean. When we speak of Easter, of the event where Jesus, the Christ, broke the bonds of death and rose victorious from the grave, we speak of an event unlike any other event in history. And, this morning, we proclaim that this event is both irrevocable and transformative, and our lives have been and are shaped by this event. Easter names the Christ event, those occurrences where Jesus of Nazareth was judged, crucified, buried, raised from the dead, appeared to his disciples, and ascended into heaven. And in our declaration ‘Christ is risen’ we affirm that these occurrences are an act of God and our lives are fundamentally altered by our recognition of this.
But proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection is not a matter of ‘proving’ a fact of history by submitting evidence. Many have tried, and failed. As Theologian Sarah Coakley suggests, both the efforts for and against the historicity of the Resurrection are misguided. Because they assume that it is a regular fact, among the many other historical facts, that are available for all to observe. But, Coakley suggests, encountering the fact of the Resurrection and its reality requires a change in me, in you. As we see in our Scripture, when Jesus appears to his disciples, and others, some recognise him and others only do ‘in hindsight’. John tells us that when Jesus appeared to Mary, she mistook him for the gardener, until he called her by name. Matthew tells us, when the women who were at the tomb encounter Jesus on their way back to the disciples, they hold onto his feet and worship him. The angel has already told them he is risen, their minds are already prepared and transformed to encounter him. And Jesus then tells them to ‘prepare the disciple’s minds’ so that when they encounter him in Galilee, they too will see him.
But what about us. We will not see him like the women or the disciples. But Rowan Williams contends that we encounter the resurrected Christ whenever the sacrament of the Eucharist is fully realised. In the same way as the material body of Jesus was used by God at the resurrection, so the bread and wine of Eucharist become, for us, the Body and Blood of Jesus. We encounter the Resurrected Christ in the words of Scripture; and we can witness the Resurrected Jesus in the faces of our brothers and sisters, in the personhood of the stranger, the outcast, the refugee, the disposed. We can see the Resurrected Christ in every person we encounter, if we are willing and ready to see it.
When we gather for this celebration, and the great 50 days of Eastertide, we come together to rejoice in the Resurrection, not as an historical event, but as a living reality to which we bear witness for the sake of a broken, hurting world. Jesus says to us ‘There you will see me’, in the Eucharist; in the Word of God; in the Church gathered; in the least among us. This Easter, let us gather to see the Resurrected Christ together, and as we do, take hold of his feet, and worship him.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia, Alleluia!