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The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day
Almighty God, who through thine only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by thy life-giving Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day
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Scripture citation(s): 1 Corinthians 1:23-25
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
1 Corinthians 1:23-25
✛
Sermon for Easter Day 2024
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audio_file: 363779
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
Each Christmas I buy the staff and the faculty a small personal gift. Last Christmas, I decided to give everyone a copy of the book ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse’ by the illustrator Charlie Mackesey. If you do not know it, I highly commend it to you. It is a most reflective and poignant of books and its author even leaves the accidental stain of a tea cup on an original illustration in the printed book. Speaking about the curious characters and their conversations, Mackesey says this:
“All four characters represent different parts of the same person,” he explained, “the inquisitive boy, the mole who’s enthusiastic but a bit greedy, the fox who’s been hurt so is withdrawn from life, slow to trust but wants to be part of things, and the horse who’s the wisest bit, the deepest part of you, the soul.”
At the beginning, sitting on a branch in a tree, the mole asks the boy, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Kind” said the boy. In return, the boy asks the mole, “What do you think success is?” “To love,” said the mole. And one of my favorite moments in the book is when the boy and the mole and the fox meet a huge horse. “What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?” asks the boy. “Help,” said the horse. “When have you been at your strongest?” asks the boy. “When I have dared to show my weakness.”
Writing to the Corinthian Church, Paul reminded them that the Good News of Jesus was not what the world expected, and that the message of the cross and Resurrection was seen as folly. Paul says, “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-25)
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.
“When have you been at your strongest?”
“When I have dared to show my weakness.”
When we enter into the mystery of God’s foolishness as perceived by so many people even today, we begin to face the reality of our own fears; the reality of our own lives with all their banality, and pettiness, and even prejudice. When we enter into the mystery of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, we begin to face our fears and even our own mortality.
We humans are creatures of habit and ritual. We may think that we are more spontaneous and surprising than anything in the animal kingdom, but the fact remains that so many of us are bound up in the cycle of time and seasons, of nights and days, of anniversaries and days to remember. Why do I think about my mum and dad at Christmas – Dad’s been dead 25 years now; mum 15 years – because remembering is part of being human. Richard Holloway suggests that we do more than just remember; in our acts of remembrance, for example, we could actually be called remembrancers for we participate in the memory. He says: “We would be remembrancers even if we lived for ever, but it seems to be the presence of death that provokes the keenest remembrance. The living we can revisit, but the dead we can only remember. And we do: sometimes in little glimpses, like the credit flashbacks at the end of a film; sometimes in more elaborate sequences, in which we reconstitute as much about a person as we can. It is death that makes us look back in sorrow, makes us remembrancers. But it is also death that makes us look forward in dread.” [1]
And that is why before we can celebrate this Easter Day, each year, we must remember the passion and death of Jesus Christ. We do so, of course, knowing how the story ends, but we don’t ignore the story – we enter into it fully. We need to be at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday and witness the washing of the feet, and receive the bread and wine like those first disciples; we need to walk with him to dark Gethsemane and hear of his betrayal and arrest and false trials. We need to venerate the cross on Good Friday, and enter into the abandonment of Jesus who cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” For it is only by so doing that we can enter fully into the joy of his Resurrection.
When Mary Magdalene met the Risen Lord – the first of the followers of Jesus to do so – she did not recognize him. This is not simply because her mind could not comprehend what had happened – after all, corpses that have been buried do not revive two days later! She did not recognize him because she was weeping and her eyes were filled with tears. So often we, too, cannot see the reality of what is before us through our own tears. In those moments, we need to listen for the voice of the Lord who calls our name through the sadness and despair of our lives.
“What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?”
“Help.”
What we celebrate today is God turning the tables on sin and death; removing the monotony and the predictability of our lives. So often, we find ourselves saying “Is this it? Is this going to be the sum of my life?” particularly when we compare our lives to the lives of others, and in so doing we forget that the Lord has been there himself and experienced abandonment on the cross, but that he also said “It is finished.”
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The resurrection of Jesus is not a dogma to be understood or reasoned with or argued about. It is fact of life. He was dead and he is now alive in a body unlike our own mortal bodies, and that should give us hope. The resurrection of Jesus affects our understanding of death itself precisely because Jesus really died. And since his death was real, bloody, agonizing, and torturous, his resurrection was equally real, transformative, hopeful, and all-embracing. The disciples do not meet a ghost – the resurrected Jesus eats a fish; he can be handled; he has flesh and bones; he lights a fire and cooks breakfast; he breaks the bread. In all the wonder of the Resurrected Jesus appearing and disappearing at will and entering through closed doors, we must never forget the fact that the disciples experienced life with the real Jesus after his resurrection; the wounds of love still fresh enough for Thomas to place his fingers and hands in them. And it is the eternal freshness of the wounds of Christ that points us to the reality of God’s sovereignty over broken humanity.
Some words of Rowan Williams:
“That is why the resurrection is good news for those in the midst of what seems to be incurable, intractable pain or failure, in the middle of a world or an experience where, practically speaking, there seems so little hope. It’s not that the risen Christ appears saying, ‘By magic I will take away your history and I will smooth out your faces’; but that the risen Christ says, ‘In the depth of this reality I will speak, I will be present and I will transform’.” [2]
Yes, we know the end of his story, but now we know the hopeful end of our own stories. The question is not “Is this it?” but, rather, “When will it be?”
Alleluia! The Lord is risen!
The End
by Mark Strand
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
