Sermon on Easter Sunday -
Clarendon Team Easter Eucharist during Coronvirus Lockdown – Sunday 12th March 2020
May the words of my mouth, and the
meditation of all our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord.
Amen
Today, of course, is the most important day for us in the year. It is the celebration of the rising of Jesus
from the dead. It is the beginning of a
whole new way of looking at life and we, as Christians, look upon life no
longer through our eyes, but through the eyes of the One who broke through the
terror of death and into a new way of being.
Perhaps, in the present
situation in which we find ourselves this has never been so applicable as we
have been grappling with seeing our world in a new light, having to adapt our
usual ways of doing things during this period of lockdown in order to deal with
our changed circumstance. Easter seems so strange this year as we have no
longer been able to celebrate it in our churches and in physical communion with one another – yet the messages remain
the same and we can take heart from them.
The first one, of course,
is that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, and His Son so loved
his Father and the world that he suffered such a grievous and terrible ordeal
as he passed through death into new life.
And we must remember this
: that nowhere in the world can we say
of God that He is short of love. For Jesus, on the cross, at the moment when
his whole world collapsed, when everything that he believed in and trusted
seemed to fall about his ears, when he said to his Father, “Father, why have
you forsaken me?” he turned to the screaming mob in front of him and he said,
“Father, forgive them.”
This is when he became
our Messiah, not when he does all the miracles all the healing, all the things
that he said and preached, it only comes when everything is taken away from him
and he is on the edges of despair, and he turns to his Father and says, “I do
this for you. I have only one request: that you hold back your arm of justice
and, from now on, only forgiveness.” As
the Bishop said in his homily on Maundy Thursday – God through Jesus therefore
expects only three things of us – to love justly, to act kindly to others and
to walk humbly with him.
And that’s the first
great lesson of today, because he is asking us to do this. We, who are
followers of Jesus, must hold back justice and offer forgiveness. And, in this
way, the world turns around. It is no longer an eye for an eye, tooth for a
tooth, what is right and what is wrong. There is only love, forgiveness,
caring. And this is how we enter into the new life, following in the footsteps
of Jesus, our Lord. We all need to remember this as the times ahead during this
current crisis possibly worsen.
When the disciples went
to the tomb, they didn’t find anything. The tomb was empty, completely gone, an
empty tomb. And what are we to think of that?
We are to think, “Where
is Jesus?” They didn’t take him away. We know that that was impossible. Did his
disciples hide him? They were there. They were amazed. They saw the cloth
neatly folded. Where did he go? Did he hide?
And, of course, we know
the answer. He passed from death into new life. And he did not do it for
himself, for Jesus never did anything for himself, he did it for us.
And so when he faces the
ordeals of his life, with all its difficulties, he accepts them, forgiving
those who have made such an outrage possible.
He passes through death and gives us a share in the new life that he
himself now lives.
The question then, of
course, is, if we enter into the tomb, have we really died? For now we are in
another way of being.
When we pass through the
death of Jesus, we pass through and turn our backs on selfishness, on hurting
others, on judging, on making the place that God has created to be a place of
great wonder and joy and happiness into a place where many people do not have
enough to eat, where many people feel their hopes are dashed each day by the
injustices that they have to confront, where many people forget that they were
created to walk in this life as children, children free and full of joy.
And so it is when we
enter into the tomb, we, as Christians, are asked to leave all these things
behind and, in the process, we are learning how to love, the way Jesus loved:
to forgive, to care, to reach out to all those around us, perhaps as never
before. And then we, too, experience what Jesus says. He has given us new life.
The new life is his life. In his life, there is only forgiveness. And so we
must take that with us on our journey.
As we reflect upon these
words I would like to end with reading a poem by D H Lawrence, entitled “Be
Still”:
BE STILL
The only thing
to be done, now,
now that the
waves of our undoing have begun to strike on us,
is to contain
ourselves.
To keep still,
and let the wreckage of ourselves go,
let everything
go, as the wave smashes us
yet keep
still, and hold
the tiny grain
of something that no wave can wash away,
not even the
most massive wave of destiny.
Among all the
smashed debris of myself
keep quiet,
and wait.
For the word
is Resurrection.
And even the
sea of seas will have to give up its dead.
D H Lawrence
Amen
148/10042020
