Walking into the new day: An Easter Homily

 Preached at Croydon Minster on Easter Day. Mark 16.1-8

‘This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

This is the day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118.24)

Alleluia.

 

+

 

The marking of the Sabbath – a day to be kept holy by commandment of God – gives completion to each week.

 

It evokes the seventh day of creation, the day on which the creative activity of God paused; the creation breathed and took stock. It is a day of silence. 

 

God had not run out of steam or felt tired that morning, but rather gifted to creation and to us, his creatures, the possibility and imperative of pausing, of rest and, supremely, to give a day a week to the one who gave us life in the first place.

 

The greatest Sabbath since the creation of the world is the day on which Christ rested in the tomb, known to us as Holy Saturday. It was yesterday. Holy Saturday is the Sabbath in which the stillness and silence of the tomb dominates. From that darkness and silence a new day is born. The sabbath is over; a new dawn has broken.

 

Our ancestors in the faith, the patristic writers, delighting in all of this, asked a question: the Sabbath was the seventh day of creation so, they asked, ‘when is the eighth day?’

 

It’s worth noting at this point that the Church Fathers were not biblical literalists, as the new atheists assume we all are. They saw scripture, as we do, divinely inspired  with patterns and pointers and meaning that lead us into deeper relationship with God.

 

They reasoned that if the Sabbath was the seventh day of creation, if, as St Paul says, Christ is the New Adam and ‘if anyone is in Christ they are a New Creation’ (1 Corinthians 5.17) - then the Day of the Resurrection of Christ is the eighth day of creation.

 

That’s why St Mark is careful to tell us, ‘when the Sabbath was over…’ (Mark 16.1) The Sabbath completed gives way to a new day, the first day of the Creation renewed in Christ.

 

‘This is the day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it’

 

In his gospel, St Mark sets the resurrection of Jesus in the purposes of creation. This is not a disruption in what God is about in the world, but the fulfilment of it. (It’s also why St John can say that Christ, the Word of God, was in the beginning and all things came into being through him).

 

The Sabbath is never empty, but is filled with God’s creative renewal and possibility.

 

So it is, after the Sabbath, three women – Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome – ‘very early on the first day of the week, as night was giving way to the new day, and the sun risen, went to the tomb’.

 

What they encounter is not the dead body of the crucified man they have come to anoint; but the message of life: ‘He has been raised; he is not here’.

 

It is the new resurrection morning, the eighth day of creation, that drives the mission of God. Those three women embrace that wholeheartedly and give testimony to the disciples, and to Peter, that Christ is risen, and that they will encounter him again in a new and vivid way.

 

We can over labour the Covid parallels, and I don’t want to diminish the undiluted message of the resurrection of Christ on this Easter Day, but perhaps this past year has also had a Holy Saturday or Sabbath feel. We have been locked in and locked down: much as the tomb had been.

 

Yet, throughout the lockdown the Church could be a people of hope. Not because we are naïve optimists or the types who say ‘it’ll all be okay’, but rather because our hope is rooted in the Crucified and Risen Lord who endures the trauma, the pain and coldness of death, so that, whilst we will still know them, we might see beyond those things into the coming future of God.

 

A new day will break for each of us because of the resurrection of Christ.

 

It is appropriate that it is in the Book of Lamentations, which is so full of expressions of bitter pain, that we also read these stirring words that surely were in the hearts of the myrrh bearing women that first Easter morning when the old sabbath day had died and they came to the tomb at dawn:

 

 

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

   his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

   great is your faithfulness.

‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul,

   ‘therefore I will hope in him.’ (Lamentations 3.22-24)

 

So let us walk together, as an Easter People, into that new day.

 

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Walking in step with the Crucified & Risen Lord

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral on Easter Day 2018 at Solemn Evensong & Procession.

Luke 24.13- 35 ‘The Walk to Emmaus’

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the delights and excitements of the English beach holiday – apart from guessing the weather – is going rock-pooling. And when you wear shoes a lot walking barefoot on rough ground brings you quickly to realise just how soft and pampered your feet are. I have childhood memories at the beginning of beach holidays treading through rock pools being scratched by barnacles, shivering in cold sea water, jabbed by rocks, burned by hot sand.

Tonight on the shiny floors of this cathedral there will be an Easter procession; not a journey of penitence but a journey of rejoicing. Holy Week and Easter is characterised by a surfeit of journeying – Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, the Way of the Cross; and just last night the confirmation candidates journeyed to the font to recall their baptism, echoing the journey of the people of Israel from their slavery in the darkness of Egypt, to freedom, light and liberty in the Promised Land. Led by incense and making our way to the Paschal Candle our procession deliberately evokes the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire that led the people of Israel from their slavery to freedom. All these journeys are an embodiment of a life metaphor.

So now a new day has dawned: Christ is risen! And still journeys. The journeys of the first Easter morning are of the myrrh bearing women, coming to anoint Jesus’ dead body, and of Mary Magdalene coming to weep at the tomb. From the empty tomb Mary begins the first Christian missionary journey as she goes to pass on the news of the resurrection to the Apostles, what we know now as the apostolic faith. Mary hands on that which reaches us today. Peter and John respond by racing to the tomb. Tonight’s Easter procession is a response in movement around the Cathedral: it is a rather more stately echo of the journeys of the women, of Mary Magdalene and of Peter and John - with no overtaking - to and from the tomb: we make their journey tonight.

Easter can seem like we have finally got it, we have arrived at our destination; journey’s end. And all too often the resurrection is told as simply the happy ending of a sad story. But the resurrection of Jesus is a junction not a terminus; it is a point of departure that takes us on and beyond our expectation. It recalibrates our vision and the possibilities of God; we are left asking ‘who is this Jesus? Where is this Jesus?’ and we see him and find him in the simplicity and depth of the breaking of bread; which is itself, day by day, a glimpse of resurrection and then we see him no more.

In his poem ‘Emmaus’ Archbishop Rowan Williams describes a stranger – Jesus - as completely out of step with our familiar world. Jesus walks to a different rhythm, padding in the gaps between our uncertain footsteps, across the terrain and contours over which we are called to walk, like the feet of the little boy who has removed his shoes to walk across the rock pools.

Before the Resurrection we were shod with the expectation that death is the final word, that we can live only for ourselves, that we are essentially alone. We take off those shoes to walk barefoot, walking the same terrain as before but, like with shoes off in the rock pools, with a more vibrant appreciation of God’s abundant life, our bonds with others, and that we live no longer for ourselves but for Christ. Tonight we begin resurrection walking again, tentatively and yet attentively, walking with him, step by step into his rhythm, he who is everything we are, and everything we are to become.

Those two dejected disciples walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus in the dimness of dusk and with uncertain footsteps. They walked into the dark night with the stranger who walks with them and breaks bread for them, as he has before, and now they walk on and into the light.  

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.