Easter Day, 11.00am Sung Eucharist, 9 April 2023

I wonder if the reference to a ‘great earthquake’ in today’s Easter Gospel made you think of the devasting events in Turkey and Syria back in February, when so many died following two powerful earthquakes within a fortnight of each other?   When the ground beneath our feet shakes like this, it is a terrifying.   No wonder those guarding the tomb of the recently crucified Jesus ‘shook like dead men’ in their fear.   Indeed, that gospel reading mentions fear and being afraid four times, with just a single reference to ‘great joy’. 

For us gathered here this morning, this emphasis on fear may seem strange, as Easter Day is rightly full of joyful hope and thanksgiving.  For many of those who first heard ‘Christ is risen!’, however, this claim – if taken seriously – would have been frightening rather than consoling.   If you were a Roman, part of the occupying force in Palestine, then for you the dead, if they continued at all, lived a sort of shadowy half-life of sadness and longing.   The idea of them returning in any way would have seemed grotesque and wrong; the proper boundaries between life and death had to be respected.   As for the ancient Hebrews, who first made resurrection a positive idea, they saw resurrection as something happening at the end of time.   The idea of resurrection now, in the present, was deeply disturbing: for both Roman and Hebrew an earthquake shattering the established order. 

There is a further element to the terror and amazement found in the Gospel accounts.   When the dead appeared in dreams and visions in the ancient world, it was often to denounce their killers.   The Roman empire, for all its sophistication, was built on mass slaughter and what were seen as expendable human lives.   Those who died through imperial force could be relied upon to simply disappear and be forgotten.  

But what if they didn’t?   What if an executed criminal was raised from the dead, and his friends are to speak in his name to his killers, as Peter does in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles?   And what’s more, this risen one was only the first.   In the power of Christ’s resurrection life, no human life will now simply be obliterated or forgotten.   Death does not end the relationship between people and God, for each life is infinitely precious.

The idea that every single human life really matters may seem obvious, but this was not the case throughout human history.   It is easy to forget what the Christian faith, built on the death and resurrection of Christ, brought into the world – the seismic conviction that no human life is expendable or unimportant, but of supreme value to God.   Christianity has all too often failed to live up to its own vision, but nonetheless it brought about a revolution in human culture: no life is simply extinguished by death, no-one is forgotten or disregarded.   And it all began because a man who been through the dehumanizing process of a Roman state execution, designed to humiliate and obliterate, is raised by God from the dead: and it is through this man Jesus Christ that God offers us a new vision of transformed human life.

After some of the horrors of the twentieth century, amongst them the mass killings of two world wars, the gulags in the Soviet Union and the revolutionary years in China, we might justifiably hope to live in a world where no human life is expendable.   And yet there are far too many places where this is not the case, with Ukraine the most obvious example. Consider the ongoing battle for Bakhmut, where Russia is estimated to have suffered casualties of between twenty to thirty thousand, large numbers of them former prisoners who have been promised freedom if they survive for a certain period of time.   And it is these prisoner soldiers who have mown down in huge numbers in an attritional campaign designed to wear down the Ukrainian defences, whatever the cost. 

Into a world where such things happen, the earthquake of the resurrection comes with a note of sharp judgement, as well as of hope.  Judgement not only on President Putin and the other warmongers of our world, for all of us might rightly feel the reproach of the risen Christ, at the fact that the body of a medical secretary named Sheila could lie undiscovered in a Peckham flat for two years, or that there are others in our society who die alone and unloved.   But Easter invites to be glad that God does not forget them, and that their dignity and value is affirmed by the God who made them and loves them always. 

But just because God will never lose sight of the lost and needy, is no kind of excuse for us: rather a reminder of our calling and responsibility to look out for those most likely to be forgotten. 

In recent days much has been made of the twenty fifth anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.   And while the peace in Northern Ireland is certainly imperfect, it nonetheless worth celebrating that thousands of people are alive now who would otherwise have added to the terrible death toll of more than 3,500 people killed during the thirty years of the Troubles.   How appropriate it was that the exhausted peacemakers finally got their deal across the line on Good Friday 1998, giving the Easter celebrations of new life, and reconciliation achieved through suffering, particular poignancy that year. 

And yet how terrible that the parallel peace process of the same year, between Israelis and Palestinians, never reached the same point, which calamitous consequences for both sides.

Back in 1998, different futures beckoned for both Northern Ireland and Israel.   Both places reached a fork in the road, with very different results.   And if there are any in Ireland tempted to turn back the clock, they might do well to look at what is currently happening in the land where Jesus lived and loved, died, and rose again. 

I said that for the people of the Holy Land, resurrection was something expected at the end of time, not in the present.    And it is true that the raising of Jesus from death is a sign and a foretaste of all that God is preparing for us.   Our second reading, from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, had mysterious words about our lives now being hidden with Christ in God, until some future time when all would be revealed.  Our Holy Week preacher, Canon Roly Riem, spoke of a George Herbert poem in which the poet reflects on the experience of being criticised, by others and by his own self-critical voice.   His answer is that his critics cannot know, any more than he can, what the sum of his life will amount to, for it is not yet complete; what the rest of his life will be is still hidden with Christ in God. 

This applies to each one of us, of course, whatever our age, and it applies to nations and societies.   We do not know how things will pan out in Ukraine, or Israel, or Northern Ireland, just as we do not know how the rest of our lives will go.  What we do know, by the power of the risen Christ, is that transformation and new life is possible.   What we do know is that our life, and the lives of everyone else on this planet, are of ultimate value and significance. What we do know is that there are forks in the road for us as individuals as well as nations, and that when they come it is worth giving our all to walk the better path, in striving for the future of peace and reconciliation God is preparing for us.  

Walking with the risen Christ, praying for his grace and guidance, fullness of life can be for us a present reality as well as a future promise.  On this Easter Day, let us affirm and celebrate that even in the darkest times, we are never forgotten.   And as we celebrate the presence of the risen Christ, let us pray that keeping his company will inspire and enable us to see every person on our planet as loved and treasured, until God’s glory shines through every aspect of our lives and our world.

‘Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!’