Easter 2007

A favourite technique of fiction writers is to employ the reversal. We see it throughout the history of literature. Take Shakespeare’s King Lear. The all powerful and feared monarch who is reduced to vagrancy and madness; or Victor Hugo’s hero of Les Miserables, the ex-convict Jean Valjean who struggles to redeem himself morally and to find acceptance in a society that rejects him as a former criminal; or just about any and every main character of Charles Dickens. There’s something in the notion of bad fortune made good, or good fortune turned bad which fascinates. I suppose because it represents for us at one level our deepest hopes, and at the other our darkest fears.

The story of Jesus offers us a stark image of reversal. The anticipation of his coming into the world is highlighted for us by the Gospel writers. The angel speaking to Mary. The miraculous and portentous nature of the events around his birth. His singular childhood. And then his baptism, when God announces to the assembly, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

He bursts onto the world stage in a ministry of stunning and confronting effect. He teaches and heals and lives with a sovereign abandon which amazes. He ignores religious and social boundaries. He heals on the Sabbath, the day of rest of holy obligation; he associates with the ritually unclean, with lepers, criminals, social outcasts and women. He claims the unique and intimate relationship with God of son with father, and he reinterprets the law of God at will. ‘‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times,’ he tells them pointing to the law of Moses, ‘“You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement.’

But I say to you. What outrageous arrogance! Who does he think he is? Or maybe, just maybe he is who he claims to be.

In a public ministry of no more than three years, Jesus turned the world upside down. People were drawn to him. He offered hope to the hopeless, forgiveness to the sinner, healing to the sick in body and spirit, life to the lifeless, welcome to the outcast. Simon Peter identifies his deep appeal when he tells him, ‘You have the words of eternal life.’

But is all comes undone. A great reversal takes place. We have journeyed with Jesus through the reversal as we moved through holy week. We began on Palm Sunday standing amongst the crowd, screaming in adulation. Hosanna to the Son of David. And we end on Good Friday, screaming with the same crowd, crucify him, crucify him.

The sovereign boundary rider who rode roughshod over religious and social taboos, now falls victim to those self-same boundaries. The one who presumed to rewrite the law falls under the full weight of the law’s power. From Gethsemane to Calvary, Jesus said almost nothing, and suffered almost everything. And there on Good Friday at Golgotha, the place of a skull, he hangs lifeless on a cross – death’s dupe.

If the story of Jesus were to end there, then it would be at best tragedy. A tale of a fine and noble man who despite his best efforts can’t change the world in which he lives. At worst it would be farce – another deluded megalomaniac whose extravagant claims proved in the end to be so much hot air.

But here’s the surprise. Today, Easter Day, represents the great reversal of the reversal. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s great YES to the claim made by Jesus through his life and witness. All that he did and all that he stood for, all that seemed to have been negated by his death on the cross, is now affirmed by the God who raises Jesus from the dead.

A great cosmic battle has taken place. On the cross all the evil of the world, all that alienates men and women from themselves and each other and from God, all of the hatred and violence, all of the injustice and suffering, all of the forces which destroy human bodies and unravel human souls, all this has been focussed upon this perfect man who suffers and dies for the whole of humankind. The cross shows God taking responsibility for God’s world in all its glorious wonder and all its violent disability. God in Christ takes the fight right up to the heart of darkness that lowers in the breast of creation. And strikes that dark heart with the sword of love, piercing it to its depths with the fatal wound of life.

In the resurrection God establishes, once and for all, that all which kills and diminishes and belittles is taken up by that which enlivens and strengthens and affirms. Even that last enemy of humankind, death itself cannot hold captive the Prince of Life. He dies on the cross on Good Friday, and lies three days in the tomb, but on Easter day, he breaks open even this last prison and emerges victorious. Life has conquered death. Truth is stronger than a lie. God in Christ is all in all, and two millennia later we still proclaim his victory.

Resurrection faith is at the heart of the Christian Gospel. St Paul writes to the church at Corinth ‘If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.’

And we see the fingerprints of God, the evidence of resurrection throughout the cosmos. This year is the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of the UK Parliament. What had seemed like an economic miracle when examined through the lens of shared humanity in God was seen as sin and condemned. New life, resurrection life, flowed and God’s children, and our brothers and sisters were freed from their old life of misery and degredation.

On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison, and from that moment the days of the evil of apartheid in South Africa were numbered. Here is resurrection.

Following years of bitter sectarian violence in Ireland, on March 26th of this year Ian Paisley, leader of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party sat side by side with Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army as they announced that they had agreed jointly to govern the British province beginning May 8. Then on April 4th, there occurred another important milestone on the road to peace in Northern Ireland: Paisley travelled to Dublin and for the first time ever, in public, shook the hand of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. This is resurrection.

And resurrection happens in small ways in our own lives. The intentional act of charity or forgiveness. The making of peace rather than continuing a fight. Self sacrifice rather than selfishness. Extravagant love and absurd generosity. All this points to the power of resurrection to renew and recreate, over against the power of sin to undermine and undo.

May we this Easter give ourselves fresh permission to expect the power of resurrection in our lives. And may we commit ourselves to living in that power for the good of God’s world, so that by our witness other may experience the new life which is God’s promise to all.

For Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!