04.04.2012
Sermon Preached by the Archbishop of Dublin on Easter Sunday
Easter Day 08.04.2012 Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
Sermon preached by the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Reverend Michael Jackson
Readings: Isaiah 25:6–9; 1 Corinthians 15:1–11; St John 20:1–18
Isaiah 25:8 and 9: It will be said on that day … This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Waiting is not something which comes naturally to many of us. We might be stuck at traffic lights, when we want to make a difficult right turn. We might be in a shopping centre when, just before our chance seems to be coming at a check–out, the assistant tells us that this check–out is closing and we have to join the back of another and different queue. It may, of course, be in deeper emotional circumstances, as for example when we are waiting for the outcome of exploratory tests regarding the health and wellbeing of someone we love or the return of the body of someone whom we love who is missing, presumed lost. The very act of waiting sweeps up into itself both impatience and anxiety in ways which are invasive and deceptive. But there are other types and forms of waiting and as children of the resurrection we ought to be able to see them and enjoy them. There is the waiting at the tomb, there is the waiting for news back in Jerusalem, there is the waiting for fresh meeting with the Lord Risen but not yet Ascended. All lie ahead of us as they lay ahead of the first disciples.
Isaiah’s prophecy, as so often, takes us far beyond where our own limitations, worries and self–pity leave us once we have let them, time after time, exhaust and diminish us. Isaiah speaks fulsomely of the Banquet of the Lord. The Banquet of the Lord is not an exercise in misused expenses nor again in rank self–indulgence. It is the unfolding of salvation. Isaiah is very clear in using the language he does. It is deliberate and it speaks of replacing death with life and with taking away the shroud of mourning, like this:
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. (Isaiah 25:7)
What follows is equally precise and illuminating. The Lord God will wipe away not only the tears but the disgrace of his people. Disgrace is an important and complex word in a spiritual context. It has, in many ways wrongly, been over–moralized and therefore been shrivelled in its usage. Disgrace in this context, I suggest, means primarily the absence of grace in one’s bearing, in one’s self understanding and in one’s proper self–importance. It is the absence of a proper self–love. And so, the waiting brings that essential Easter gift of restoration of dignity, of a self–understanding which is confident without being cocky. St John speaks eloquently and often of love as vital in the Christian inheritance. Yet we have to wait until we meet St Augustine of Hippo some centuries later for a proper exploration of self–love as a Christian virtue. Excessive moralising about personal sinfulness, undue invasion of the privacy of others, that death–dealing ecclesiastical instinct to correct people who are living a life of faith in the midst of complex everyday lives erode the dignity of their self–worth. Many people find themselves alienated from the church and from God simply and solely because you or I think they ought to be doing better according to our criteria of behaviour. This, in many ways, pulls the shroud of Isaiah back over the people to whom God has already restored grace in its fullest measure, those from whom God has removed dis–grace. We need to be very careful about this type of attitude on the day of resurrection.
In the account of the resurrection in St John’s Gospel, we move forward rather rapidly into new territory as the narrative gains pace. Waiting joins forces with excitement and even a degree of Godly impatience. This is important as we move forward within the story of salvation. The God who came to dwell among us and to be one of us on Christmas Day calls us forward through the gate of death to live a life of grace here and now. This God also gives us the type of recognition which only the using of our own name can afford: Jesus said to her, Mary! These are precious moments of new life. These are the seeds of the gladness and the rejoicing which are the early fruit of salvation. These precious gifts are freely given to Peter, John and Mary Magdalene. As these individuals formed the community of waiting at the foot of the cross, so they now form the community of response at the empty tomb. Community changes, community moves forward, community becomes a place of new life.
For many inside the church, these narratives are incidental to the real work of salvation. The statistical work of gathering the body of the elect ahead of the General Resurrection consumes the spiritual energy of too many to the detriment of the freedom of God to give to whomever God chooses whatever God wills. Christianity is not a product or a commodity. It is a series of relationships in which we are drawn into the excitement of the unknown through the revelation of God to us and to all creation. Salvation is not a product or a commodity either. It is a free gift of the God who is always much freer to give than we are to receive. We are called to re–present God to those who are God’s children and who have failed to recognize that God lives the new life of resurrection in them and to present for the first time God to those who have never yet encountered God in loving ways.
As I meet people day after day, I get a sense that for many the excitement of compassionate graciousness has ebbed from religion as they know and experience it. Too many are questing for something which seems not to be there in any recognisable shape or form. We should always remember that there are at least two invitations offered in Holy Scripture by Jesus to discipleship: Follow me and Come and see. Too easily does the former: Follow me collapse into an invitation to dogmatic conformism. Too easily does the latter: Come and see shrink away in a blush of personal unworthiness. We are called in our generation to draw and to hold both of these together, not to play them off against one another. If the church of God does not invite people to follow Jesus and to come and see for themselves, if it does not combine transformation and generosity, then it may be doing little more than clutching at statistics to convince itself that its doors are still open.
Easter Day shows us the defeat of death as a definition of personality and identity. In other words, we are called out into the open by God to live the life of salvation as God’s friends. The complexities of our time do not resolve themselves. They tend, as do most complexities, to spawn further complexities. Truth and clarity are not, by easy definition, the same thing in Christ. Truth and love more obviously are and the witness of the New Testament points us in such a direction. The self–understanding of St Paul in what he says to the Corinthians is a timely reminder of the grace of resurrection. After he rehearses the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, he adds something personal which rightly gives us cause to rejoice on this day of grace:
By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.
(1 Corinthians 15:11)