The Familiarity of the Resurrection

Sermon for Warblington: Easter Sunday 2008

For those of us brought up in the Church, the word Resurrection has an easy familiarity. But I think it may be helpful for us to understand how the story of the Resurrection would have been heard by the people of the time. For them, the separation between the world of the dead, and the world of the living, was absolute.

If they believed in any kind of resurrection, (and many, including the Sadducees, did not) it was only the resurrection of the dead who were to be judged at the end of time (as in the vision of Daniel). For Greeks and Romans, the dead, if they survived at all, lived in their own world, a shadowy place, where they were condemned to a sort of half-life of yearning and sadness.

So the news that someone had been raised from the dead, and had been walking around among the living, would have been profoundly disturbing. The idea created a rupture in all that the ancient world believed about life and death. This was an earthquake in the established order of things - and grasping that helps us to understand the element of the gospel stories that speak of terror and amazement - not least when St Matthew relates how at the moment of crucifixion the bodies of many holy people were raised to life, and of how they went into the city and appeared to many people.

But why might resurrection be such a problem? Well, to begin to grasp that we need to understand the value of life to the ancient world. Life was amazingly cheap. Ancient empires grew and survived by assuming that enormous quantities of human lives were expendable and unimportant; those who fell victim to the system just disappeared.

That was especially true for those who were crucified. Crucifixion victims were usually thrown out onto the city’s rubbish dump, to be consumed by wild animals. There was no sense of dignity in death - especially for those who had opposed the empire. This is very different to how we, today, dispose of the bodies of even the most horrific murderers. We still allow them the dignity of a proper burial.

We forget so readily what Christianity brought into the world; we are so used to it that we take it for granted. In the ancient world there was absolutely no assumption that every life is precious. Fathers had the right to kill their children in certain circumstances. Masters could kill their slaves at a whim. Crowds flocked to arenas to see prisoners of war, or criminals, slaughter each other in the name of entertainment. And when someone was dead, they were dead - few people, even philosophers, spent much time worrying about what happened next.

But the message of the resurrection overturned that world view - it challenged it to the core. Suddenly, God had demonstrated that death was not the end. This was no longer a theory, at the margins of philosophical debate - God, through Jesus, had demonstrated a reality. Jesus announced, by his resurrection, that every life is precious to God. There are no disposable people in the Kingdom of God. Physical death was not the end of our relationship with God, or with each other.

Thankfully, we here in England don’t live under the kind of Empire which treats life so cheaply. But we need to be on our guard. A quick survey of the last hundred years should tell us to watch out. The cheapness of life of the two world wars - on all sides. The mass killings of the Soviet Union, or the revolutionary years in China. We think of Rwanda, of Cambodia, and of the Irish 'troubles', the Balkans and Darfur. We see just how cheap life is to the suicide bomber, or, for that matter, the world powers who shrug their shoulders at what they so clinically call 'collateral damage'.

So the resurrection, as well as being a sign of hope, also stands in judgement over us. We must ask ourselves whether we too treat life with the same callous cheapness. We might think of those who die alone and unloved in our own society - the old person with no family (or forgotten by their family), the homeless addict, the mentally disturbed who are isolated from normal human contact. But the good news of Easter tells us to rejoice for such people too - for even if we forget them, God does not. His offer of New Life comes to all - as Peter discovered, to Gentile as well as Jew, to clean and unclean. Every life is valued by God.

In that gladness, the Easter message should stir us to turn our eyes and look for those likeliest to be forgotten - and to ask where our duty and service lies.

But there is another dimension of the Easter story I'd like us to consider. Each time we celebrate Holy Communion - as we shall this morning - we pray “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”. In doing so, we affirm our membership of the body of Christ throughout the ages - those now alive on earth, and those now in heaven - like the thief crucified with Jesus - awaiting the final resurrection and judgement - and the promise of life everlasting in a new heaven and a new earth.

In the days of the death squads in El Salvador, the churches there developed a very dramatic way of celebrating their faith, their hope in the resurrection, and their belief in the communion of saints. At the liturgy, someone would read out the names of those who had been killed, or ‘disappeared’, and for each name, someone would call out from the congregation - “Presente” - “Here”.

“With angels and archangels”... and with the butchered of Rwanda, or Iraq, or the Balkans or those lost in the Tsunami or Kashmiri earthquake; with the young woman dead under Southsea Pier after an overdose, and the childless widow with Alzheimers in the Springfield Nursing Home; and our own loved ones who have gone before us into heaven; all are “Presente” - with the whole company of heaven, those whom God longs to receive, in his mercy, and because of Christ.

“With angels and archangels”...and of course, with Christ our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, who leaves no human soul in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to all the dignity of a name and a presence. He is risen; he is not here; he is present everywhere and available to all. He is risen: “presente”!

So, in closing, what might this good news of Easter, and perhaps this re-awakened sense of the preciousness of life, have to say to us?

Let us rejoice that we belong to a God who holds us in his hands - who offers eternal life to each one of us which, in St Peter’s words will “turn to him and do what is right” (Acts 10).

Let us rejoice in the fellowship of all the saints - remembering that they too are ‘presente’.

Let us learn from their examples, and hear their judgement on the way we lead our lives.

Let us also, though, hear the judgement of Easter that we too should not hold any human life to be cheap.

Let us, in the words of the Peace, ‘pursue all that makes for peace and builds up our common life’.

Let us resist the dehumanising forces which are all around us - those that disregard the weak in our society, or who callously take the life of those who stand in the way of the expansion of empire. This is not the way of the Resurrection. Jesus said, “I have come so that you may have life, and have it to the full”.

Let us live as people who hear, receive, believe and live as Resurrection People!

Alleluiah! Christ is Risen!