Easter Day 2025 - The Very Revd Dr Anthony Cane
I was half listening to a radio programme, and I heard someone saying the old world order, with all its assumptions and certainties, is crumbling before our eyes. I made the assumption this was about President Trump, and when I paid more attention, so it proved to be. It struck me, however, that what I’d heard could just as easily – and more truthfully – have been referring to what we are celebrating here today: the resurrection of our risen Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The collect for Easter Day says this: ‘Lord of all life and power, who through the mighty resurrection of your Son, overcame the old order of sin and death, to make all things new in him.’
Customary ways of doing things and understanding the world, in the places and amongst the people we know, give a sense of security that most of us welcome – even if at times we find habitual ways and conventions a little constraining. Going to visit another country, where things are done differently, can be both exciting and uncomfortable. But what is really terrifying, as well as potentially exhilarating, is when your whole frame of reference is completely disrupted; and something utterly other seems to be happening.
If this applies to the impact of President Trump, it is far more profoundly true of the risen Christ, in ways that radically contrast with contemporary events: events in which we see what the ‘old order of sin and death’ really means in terms of human destructiveness and suffering.
I’m a child of the nineteen sixties, born just sixteen years after the end of the second world war. For my whole life America has been seen as the leader of the free world, helping to create a Europe without armed conflict. With a culture shaped by Christianity, America and its Western allies proclaimed the unique value of every human life, opposed oppressive regimes, and worked to improve living standards for all. Eighty years ago, in April 1945, delegates of fifty countries met in San Francisco to draft the Charter of the United Nations, which now has 193 members and its Headquarters in New York. The purpose was and is to create international peace, security and co-operation.
A lot of this now seems to be contested and unravelling. What is happening in Ukraine and Gaza signal a demolishing of the old post war consensus. A European country, sharing borders with Poland, Hungary and Romania, has been invaded, and defence spending is going up across the West. And in Gaza, last week’s missile attacks on an Anglican-run hospital seems to have hardly been noticed. The Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem has urged ‘all governments and people of goodwill to intervene to stop all kind of attacks on medical and humanitarian institutions’. This feels to me, very sadly, as an appeal less likely to be heard than in the past, precisely because the old world order being demolished to make way for ‘America First’. Even here in the UK the understandable increase in defence spending is being funded by reducing our international aid budget and our support to the world’s poorest.
In Gaza, around fourteen thousand children have been killed in the current conflict. There is also terrible suffering in Sudan. And yet the huge power and influence of America and the West has not been marshalled to bring these terrible conflicts to an end. Is it because we have all stopped caring? Or is it because we are losing touch with the story that fuelled and fired western democracies with a conviction that all are created equal and that everyone really matters, not just the powerful?
When Christianity became a worldwide faith, it brought with it a new and revolutionary worldview. Every mother’s child is born in the image and likeness of God. Our life is to be shaped by love of God and neighbour. Violence against others is a blasphemy. Our model for how to live is to be found in Jesus Christ, who embodied the ultimate disruptive, terrifying yet exhilarating event: the resurrection.
Everyone knows that when a person is executed for the public good, that is the end of the matter. Except that here, as we heard this morning in Luke’s Gospel, it wasn’t. In ways they struggled to comprehend – look at how the male disciples patronisingly dismiss the witness of the women as an ‘idle tale’ – the first followers of Christ were reinvigorated by the inexplicable yet very real presence of the risen Christ.
This presence, this resurrection, is a reality that changes everything. A whole new way of seeing the world is revealed, and previous assumptions demolished. For example, when the risen Christ appeared to his disciples in an upper room, he came to a demoralised group haunted by their failure. Peter, their leader, had denied Jesus three times. Everyone had deserted Jesus and fled in his hour of need. And yet he comes with unexpected words of peace, forgiveness and commissioning.
Throughout human history, when someone is unjustly killed, either they are simply forgotten, or the call is for revenge. Sometimes the killing is rationalised by the powerful as necessary and right. Any memory of the dead is suppressed and silenced. Or the call for revenge goes out, and violence is met by more violence.
None of this happens here. Even through death, the life of Jesus cannot be suppressed or silenced. And when he returns, he comes with those words of peace.
History it is said, it is written by the winners. And so it is – except here. In the Gospels we hear something uniquely powerful: the voice of the innocent victim. Jesus reveals to us the unjust violence and victimisation at the heart of so much of human life, and shows us a better way – if only we and the wider world are paying attention. I say, ‘reveals to us’ because for most of the time we conceal from ourselves the uncomfortable truth that exclusion and violence are ever present realities in our lives. In her first address on Good Friday, our Holy Week preacher Jane Hedges spoke about human nature as revealed in patterns of behaviour we can all recognise from early in our lives. I was about twelve or thirteen when it occurred to me to wonder why there always had to be, it seemed, at least one person in my class who was picked on and bullied. About five years ago somebody from my year group died in an accident. He had been badly affected by this sort of thing, and nearly a half century on there was both denial and regret expressed by members of that group on an email round robin. I was particularly struck by this contribution: ‘Some of us, including myself, tortured the poor guy for years. Of the many wrong and stupid things I have done in my life, that is one of which I am the most ashamed.’
At the time, the bullied person was considered a ‘weirdo’ and a bit of a freak because of his earnest intellectualism. And what happened was that youngsters who would otherwise have been rivals, found a unity in their persecution of another who was a bit different. And so it is in so many areas of life: having a victim, a common enemy, becomes a source of social cohesion. It can and does happen in families, communities, cities, and nations. Societies maintain peace by uniting against a common enemy. We saw it in this country when crowds surrounded and attacked hostels housing asylum seekers. It is happening right now in Israel and Gaza, as Members of the Board of Deputies, the largest body representing British Jews, have pointed out this week. They movingly say they can no longer ‘turn a blind or be remain silent’ and that ‘Israel’s soul is being ripped out’.
This is not remotely to forget the horrific actions of Hamas, but it is to point out that for all that you have badly wronged, the level of death and destruction currently being meted out cannot be justified. One consequence is getting locked into a hopeless cycle of violence without any discernible end.
Christ’s resurrection exposes and demolishes the illusion that true peace can be achieved through exclusion and violence, or picking on the inconvenient other.
Christ’s resurrection inaugurates a new kind of community, no longer built on exclusion, but on reconciliation.
Christ’s resurrection is the ultimate ‘no’; to violence and scapegoating, and the ultimate ‘yes’ to God’s kingdom, founded on peace and mercy.
Who knows what the outcome of President Trump’s policies will be? The kind of demolishing going on there, however, does not feel born of a generosity of spirit, or offer much hope for the future of the wider world. What the risen Jesus overturns, however, is a worldview in which bullying and victimisation are inevitable, and accepted as the horrible cost of social cohesion. The new world Jesus opens up for is exhilaratingly different from that, so full of hope and creative possibility. This is the good news story our society and world needs to remember, and build on for the future, beginning with us gathered here this morning. In Christ we are offered peace and mercy, and sent out to build the new world of God’s Kingdom.
Alleluia. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!