Easter Sunday
See Commentary on John 20:1-9 in John 20:1-10 or Mark 16:1-7 in Mark 16:1-8
Homily 1 – 2005
You are looking for Jesus who was crucified. Crucified – why? - because he spoke of a society, culture, religion, where people interacted on the basis of mutual respect, care, compassion, trust, welcome and love – in freedom – because they are loved essentially by God. In Jesus’ day such a message was subversive. Social, cultural and religious interactions were based on coercive power, relative wealth, class distinction, clout. Not unlike our present world!
Jesus’ difference aroused violence - violence is always simmering close to the surface in the human herd, and is quickly contagious. They eliminated him. Even traditional enemies colluded in his execution, the powerful and the powerless. Crucifixion seemed quite an effective final solution.
Jesus had been different alright. His opposition to oppression, injustice and violence had been different too. Not just from entrenched interests but from most opponents of entrenched interests: He had opposed oppression clearly and determinedly but without hatred, violence or exclusion.
He was different not only in life, but different in death, too. He had approached the incredible violence of crucifixion not as helpless victim, but freely - with eyes wide open – as the price of believing in and acting consistently with respect, compassion, trust, forgiveness, welcome and love.
Yet on the Sunday morning, the few faithful ones, a group of women, went looking for Jesus, the one people had once and for all crucified. He wasn’t there! He was different too in the aftermath of death. The angel, the voice that leads us into mystery – proclaimed: he is risen. Not risen and removed, not risen and detached, but risen and in Galilee. He will meet you back in Galilee, the heartland, where you are at home. And you will see him, and you will see him with clarity, and his Spirit will transform your spirit and your hearts will burn with the same vision, the same commitment, the same courage.
He has risen! What does that mean? Not like Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter: brought back to life, to business a usual. Because he has risen (full stop!), he can rise again in me, in you, in even the hardest heart. We can catch his Spirit. We can commune with him – friends united in a common vision and a common mission, with a common energy .
As Paul said in tonight’s second reading: You must consider yourselves alive for God in Christ Jesus. In Christ Jesus! Alive in Christ Jesus! That’s Easter!
Homily 2 – 2008
It’s a great story. The women came to the tomb; the dead man inside – apparently – the burly guards outside. The reality: there was no dead man inside, and outside, guards so shaken, so frightened, that they were like dead men.
Two women were the first to see the risen Jesus. They were the women, courageous enough, to have been present at his crucifixion, contemplative enough to visit the tomb as soon as they could. Unlike the male disciples, absent from the crucifixion, paralysed with fear and burdened with guilt.
And the risen Jesus said to the women: Greetings! - hardly does justice to the occasion. It seems so casual! Then he added: Go! be apostles to the ones who should have been apostles – and tell my brothers that they must leave for Galilee. They will see me there.
Tell my brothers. This is the only time in the whole Gospel that Jesus calls the disciples Brothers – and one of them had denied ever knowing him and the others had cleared out on him. Under pressure, cowardice had completely overwhelmed their love and loyalty. Tell my brothers to meet me.
The abandoned, betrayed, disowned and crucified Jesus said not a word of recrimination or blame or criticism. Just reconciliation – before ever a word even of sorrow or repentance on their part. Just the unadorned, spontaneous offer of friendship. That’s how he saved the world:
It’s possible to fail, to be authentic, to love, to forgive. Not only is it possible. It’s the only way, ultimately, to make human life really liveable. It’s not a command. It’s the revelation of a possibility.
If people would forgive (not excuse, but forgive) without recrimination, blame or criticism, there would eventually be no Palestinian conflict, no Iraq, no Kosovo, no Afghanistan. There would be nothing really to talk about on the TV news!
They killed him, but they could not stop him forgiving the world that killed him.
It sort of takes the point out of killing – eventually. With which thought, I wish you all a Happy Easter.
Homily 3 - 2011
Remember the conversation between Martha and Jesus in John’s Gospel two weeks ago: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died… Your brother will rise again… I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day… And, then, Jesus’ enigmatic response: I am the resurrection, and the life. I am the resurrection. There’s only one. When we rise again, somehow, it must be a sharing in Jesus’ resurrection, an undergoing whatever happened to him.
My sense of things like love, truth, justice, perhaps, in some shape – [the things that make us human] – all call out for fulfillment, for transcendence, beyond the stage where I’ll have got to before I die. The way I see it, if life does not continue, somehow, after death, then there is something deceptive, something sour, in my deepest and most precious human yearnings.
Whatever about that, resurrection is not just about life after death. It is not just about immortality. Resurrection is more – inconceivably more. What happened to Jesus when he was raised by the Father?
It’s interesting to take a closer look at the Creed: Talking, firstly, about the Son of God, it says: for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.. by the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. Then the Creed goes on: .. [The one who became man] suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. It is not just that the Son of God who came down from heaven now ascends into heaven. Something had happened in between. He who is divine, the Son of God, the Word, had become human. The one who rises and ascends into heaven is human – the Jesus who was born over in Palestine, lived there for thirty years, and who died.
What is the Creed trying to say when it says: he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father? The imagery is down and up, and beside. But all language about divine things is analogical [sort of metaphorical]. Heaven is not place, and the Father does not have a right hand. We are talking of the realm of God. What was human becomes divinized. With the incarnation, divine became human in Jesus; with resurrection, human becomes divine. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus, the human Jesus, speaks of being in the Father, being one with the Father, drawing life from the Father.
All this is wonderful in itself – and it is what we celebrate this morning. But there’s more. That is what we are destined to share in – in the experience of the now risen Jesus. John’s Gospel again: Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you. The Epistle of Peter refers to us disciples as sharers in the divine nature. Whatever that means, that is what our being raised involves.
What will that be like? Our thinking can’t help us. Our imagining gets in the way. But, take a deep breath, because that is what is on offer! And that is why we can all have a … Happy Easter!
Homily 4 - 2014
Did you notice how the risen Jesus referred to his disciples? to that group of profoundly frightened men, all of whom had deserted him in his time of profound need, and one of whom, when questioned by a slave-girl, had denied even having ever known him. He called them brothers. Go and tell my brothers that they must leave for Galilee; they will see me there.
It is only recently that the power of that word has struck me. It says two things to me particularly. Firstly, Brothers speaks of friendship, of lovely close friendship. In the context of how the disciples had abysmally failed, it speaks also of forgiveness. And what forgiveness! before they had any chance to say sorry; before, probably, they even felt sorry. Forgiveness before repentance; forgiveness without conditions.
And the one offering it was the risen Jesus – the perfect human expression of God. That is what God is like. The risen Jesus has revealed to us the essential, the only, face of God. The first thing that Jesus said to the women was, Do not be afraid! Do not be afraid of Jesus! Do not be afraid of God! For some reason it is hard not to be afraid of God. Perhaps, unfortunately, that is how we have been taught. We certainly pick it up somewhere. But why fear God? God will do nothing to us that we do not choose – with one exception. God loves us before we ever choose, and keeps on loving us irrespective of whatever we choose.
[Then what about Hell? Hell is not God’s doing. Hell is simply the stark reality of our own choices to make our interests the driving focus of our lives, the centre of our world. We manage to ignore the frightening reality of that choice by distraction, by psychological denial, and by our cultural and personal illusions. We get little touches of it only occasionally – when the evasions stop working. There is no need to be afraid of God; though there is every reason to be afraid of ourselves.]
Now my second point. Tell my brothers … Brothers says something else to me. Jesus had never referred to the disciples as his brothers while he was living with them. I think that the simple reason was because they weren’t. Brothers share the same life. Resurrection is something that happened to Jesus; but it is more than that. Somehow we can all share in his resurrection. Remember the Sunday Gospel two weeks ago when Jesus said to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, I am the resurrection … and the life… Whoever believes in me will never die. Life that will never die, eternal life, is life proper to God. Through believing in the risen Jesus, through entrusting ourselves and surrendering to him, we become one with him in his reality as risen Lord.
Tell my brothers … but not just the first disciples. Tell the world that they can all be my brothers and sisters. The way we ritually say yes to that reality is through baptism; and, for those of us baptised and Christed as infants, through living out that baptismal surrender to him across life.
That is what we celebrate today. Happy Easter!