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.

 

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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.

The Lamb who Comes

Preached at Croydon Minster on Maundy Thursday: Exodus 12.1-4, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11.23-26; John 13.1-17,31b-35

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13.1)

 

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The Christian Gospel is a proclamation, that is to be lived out day by day, of liberation from all that enslaves, obscures our vision and restricts our lives.

 

The purpose of this Gospel is that we are free to gain clarity of sight and to be alive to the ways and purposes of God so that, in Christ, we are delivered into the very heart of God.

 

That is the golden thread that runs through, and holds together, tonight, Good Friday and Easter.

 

This is the Passover of the Lord; the Paschal Mystery.

 

To this day – in fact this week - God’s first-chosen people the Jews, annually celebrate Pesach - the Passover. They celebrate Israel’s long, hard liberation from Egypt, with its false starts and trials, its bitter herbs and laments, as a pattern of all liberation and God’s enduring relationship with them through the observance of Torah.

 

For Christians we find that the symbols and promise of the Passover is fulfilled and made known in Christ, who now opens to all nations what Israel has already tasted and anticipates.

 

This we taste and see as we celebrate the Eucharist. This was handed on to St Paul and it is handed on in turn to us.

 

The Eucharist has echoes of Passover: unleavened bread; wine; remembrance; blood; accounts of God’s liberating love in the scriptures.

 

The one thing apparently missing is a Passover lamb. In Genesis Isaac asks Abraham, ‘where is the lamb for the sacrifice?’ To which Abraham replies, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice, my son’ (Genesis 22.7,8).

 

God has provided. As John the Baptist declares on seeing Jesus: ‘Behold, look, see: the Lamb of God’ (John 1.29).

 

In the scriptures the Lamb is the sacrificial offering which makes right Israel’s relationship with God. In the Eucharist, given to us by Christ at the Last Supper – on the night that he was betrayed – he takes the place of the Lamb: he is the victim and he is the priest who makes the offering.

 

The whole cosmos, the created order, our lives: all is God’s gift, God’s offering. In Christ, God is the offerer and the offering.

 

This cosmic reality has a divine and human face. It is the face of the kneeling Jesus who looks up from the feet of his disciples into their eyes and says, you can have no part in me, no part in my mission and life, if you do not let me serve you.

 

What an extraordinary thing! Christ asks no more of the disciples than that they should allow him to serve them, so that they in turn might serve him in one another, and love as he loves us: the New Commandment.

 

As our gospel reading began:

 

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13.1)

 

‘Love to the end’ is what the liberating Gospel is. Hence the traditional Maundy Thursday anthem at the washing of feet: Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est ‘Where charity and love is found, there is God’.

 

Christ, in the form of God and form of man, takes the form of a slave, humbles himself and is obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2.6,7,8).

 

Isaac had taken wood for the sacrifice of a Lamb; the wood of the cross is the place of sacrifice of the Lamb of God. And that sacrifice is presented to us afresh in the immediacy of broken bread and poured out wine: ‘far as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11.26).

 

This is the foretaste and reality of the banquet of the Lamb, around whose throne all nations gather and to whom salvation belongs. Of this Lamb we read:

 

the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd,

   and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Revelation 7.17)

 

Tonight from the eyes of Peter and Judas tears of denial and betrayal will flow; tomorrow the tears of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, will flow; on Easter morning the tears of Mary Magdalene will obscure her sight of Christ.

 

Tears are real. Just as Christ washes and wipes feet, our tears too will be wiped away, our sins will be wiped away.

 

O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world: have mercy upon us.

 

Ash Wednesday: Taking Hold of Life

A sermon first preached at Croydon Minster on Ash Wednesday 6th March 2019.

‘Take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19)

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The season of Lent is, at its heart, a journey into Easter.

And that means it is a journey into

the mystery of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection:

what is known as the Paschal Mystery.

And that takes us to the very heart of the mystery of faith:

            Christ has died,

            Christ is risen,

            Christ will come again.

The Paschal mystery shapes

            and defines

who we are as Christians.

Created out of dust,

like all humanity,

- of whom Adam is the representative figure -

God’s life, has been breathed

into our nostrils.

This breath,

            in Hebrew nephesh,

is the life breath that animates us

and gives us life

in Adam.

It is the Holy Spirit

breathed into us in the sacraments

            – baptism, Eucharist, confirmation and penance among them –

that gives us life in the New Adam,

Jesus Christ.

As St Paul says,

in a verse of the first letter to the Corinthians,

a verse we know as an ‘Easter Anthem’,

‘In Adam all die: even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ 1 Corinthians 15.22

‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return’.

            Those are words said in the Liturgy of Ash Wednesday,

            as the sign of the cross in ash is made on our foreheads.

‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return’.

We are not left in dust and ashes

– ‘turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’ –

but rather in the dust and ashes

of human existence and awareness of mortality,

God’s breath gives life,

as he breathed over the Valley of Bones

            in Ezekiel’s vision

and animated them,

and brought them to life.

We are not left in dust and ashes,

            but given a new and glorious body

            within Christ’s body, the Church.

This is a journey, then, that confronts mortality,

            and faces it down.

Lent takes us from dust and ashes to new life in Christ.

This Lent here at this church we will spend some time in the company of the prophet Jonah.

Jonah is a deeply human character,

and the book of Jonah is a short and whimsical read of his ups and downs.

We might recognise parts,

of ourselves in Jonah.

Jonah is called by, but runs away

            from God.

In that flight

            Jonah is caught up in the storms

                        of life.

Jonah knows what life is like at rock bottom:

            ‘the waters closed in over me;

the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around my head’. (Jonah 2.5)

But Jonah knows redemption,

            scooped up by the great fish,

            in whose belly he was for three days.

Even after that miracle,

            he experiences bewilderment and anger

            when his own expectations

            and machinations of missionary zeal

            go awry.

In the end he finds shelter from God,

            a bush,

which then withers away

and Jonah is again angry

with God.

There is no neat resolution to Jonah’s story,

            and neither is there to ours.

Yet in the Gospels

Jesus speaks

            of the ‘sign of Jonah’ (Matthew 12.39; 16.4; Luke 11.29-30).

It is that sign that we have an opportunity to explore this Lent.

At risk of giving spoilers… this sign of Jonah

is about the call to repentance and amendment of life;

this sign is about hearing God’s call and claim on our lives;

this sign is about understanding mission

            to be God’s task

            in which we participate

not manufactured by ourselves;

this sign is about knowing how to navigate the depths of our experience;

this sign is about knowing our utter dependence

            on the mercy and grace of God.

St Paul says:

            ‘take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19).

The sign of Jonah

points us to God’s capacity

            in Christ

to scoop us up, die with him and be raised with him

in the waters of baptism and new life

so that we can

‘take hold of the life that really is life’

The sign of Jonah points us to a challenge.

The challenge is this

that we do not go through

and then end Lent

in dust and ashes,

like Jonah, grumpy and resentful,

but prepared, expectant and alert

to the purposes of God

            in our lives and in our world.

The Church,

in her great wisdom,

discerns that through

‘self-examination and repentance;

by prayer, fasting and self-denial;

and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’

(Common Worship: Times and Seasons, The Liturgy of Ash Wednesday)

we can rise to this challenge

and come to celebrate Eastertide

by ‘taking hold of the life that really is life’

            in Christ:

our incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord,

to whom be all honour, glory, and power

to the ages of ages.

Amen.