SERMON PREACHED
AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
EASTER DAY (April 3rd) 1988
It happened
just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high speed flying
to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of a dive from seven
thousand feet … When a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his
path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at
something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.
It was, for him,
as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear
and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange, strange sky,
forgetting, remembering, forgetting …
Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston
Seagull.
(Pan: London: 1970. 85-86)
There can be no new life without
death. It is that tension that we must hold in our faith each year, and
particularly as each Easter comes around. And, in an attempt to maintain that
truth-tension some of you have, over the past forty days of Lent, journeyed
with Jesus towards the cross. If you have been following Richard Holloway’s
book[[1]]
you will have paused at the Stations of the Cross, dwelling at each station on
the cost to Jesus of our salvation. If you have observed during Lent some form
of abstinence, it will have served to remind you that there can be no salvation
without cost. But whatever our discipline has been, we must be reminded again
and again of the cost to our Lord of the glorious festival that we celebrate
today.
Jesus turned and set his face
resolutely towards Jerusalem. He knew something of what lay ahead for him
there. He spoke to his followers of the pain he was soon to face, and of the
death that awaited him. His disciples were puzzled for here was the one who was
to be their king speaking to them of suffering and death. Judas was so confused
by this seeming contradiction that he eventually realized that the only way he
could continue the revolutionary energy Jesus had originally generated would be
to betray him. This talk of suffering and death seemed to Judas to be
contradictory to the cause of liberation and freedom. I suspect there is
something of Judas in each of us. Judas
simply wished to reap the benefits that he saw the Messiah Jesus to be
offering, without recognising the cost.
Peter was no different. When Jesus
first foretold the suffering that lay ahead of him, Peter rebukes him. Yet “Get
behind me, Satan” (Mark. 8:33) was the harsh response of Jesus.
Why? So often I have struggled with
that passage. Why is Jesus so harsh, so rude, to one of his closest followers? Yet
the answer is staringly obvious: there can be no joy without sorrow, there can
be no hope without despair, no resurrection without the crucifixion. We long
for easy answers to the questions of life, and especially to the question of
death. But Christianity offers no easy, cheap answer. Jesus, even before his
arrest in the Garden, knew clearly that there could be no easy answer. So he
journeys resolutely on towards his death, knowing that only in death can life
be made meaningful, that only in suffering can new life be offered.
How we would love to sidestepped
that scandal of death. We live in a society that pleads to remain forever
young. Yet two and a half centuries ago the biting satirist Jonathan Swift exposed
that lame hope for the con that it is. In the acerbic satire Gulliver's Travels
the hero, Gulliver, encounters a race amongst whom dwell a mutant form of
human being, whose mutation expresses itself with the curse of immortality. The
curse of immortality? Gulliver, too, poses that question, only to discover that
such immortality is a curse because it is death that the mutant Struldbuggs sidestep,
not the ravages of ageing. Says Gulliver, with masterful understatement,
the reader will easily believe … my keen
appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated.
Life and death are, and must be, inseparable.
Sadly, so many religious
enthusiasts claimed to provide an easy answer to the seemingly tragic fact of
death. So many, like Judas, like Peter, want to acquire the blessings of Easter,
the resurrection, without first experiencing the horrors of Good Friday. We as
Christians so often open ourselves to the criticisms of the great atheists that
we cling to our piety, our faith, only in order to avoid the bleak fact that we
are mortal, that each of us shall die. For even Fletcher Lynd Seagull, in my
opening quotation, had to pass through the granite wall of death in order to
pass on to new life.
And that is perhaps the tragedy of
the chocolate Easter egg and the Easter Bunny. We have allowed these two quite
profound symbols of the mystery of the resurrection to be raped by commerce, to
be turned into a tragic parody, to be turned into trivia. The egg should be a
powerful symbol of new life, a reminder of the potential of humanity in Christ
to burst out of the shackles of the grave into resurrection life. And even the
rabbit: rabbits’ habits unknown only too well. The rabbit therefore can stand
as a symbol of the regeneration that the Easter hope provides us. Yet we have
allowed these symbols to become symbols of life without first taking to heart
the significance of the cross on the hot cross buns we ate on Friday. There can
be no regeneration, there can be no bursting out of the grave, without first
undergoing the scandal of death. If we are not to lose altogether the
significance of our commercialized symbols of Easter then we must baptize them,
proclaimed them as significant only in the whole context of the Christian
gospel. For the hope of the Resurrection there is the terrible cost of death.
The Resurrection is never an evasion
of death, it is consequent upon death, it only comes when we have plumbed the
depths.
(Richard
Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 118).
The Easter egg can have no meaning
unless its shell is destroyed. There is no new life unless the beauty of the
egg is shattered. Or, to use another traditional Christian symbol, there can be
no bright morning star until we have passed through the darkness of the night.
In the end there can be no proof of
the Christian truth-claim that Jesus is risen. We were not there to stand
alongside the women at the unexpectedly empty tomb and to hear the declaration,
“He is not there, he is risen.” Tennyson, the great English poet, echoes these
words in his mammoth work “In Memoriam,” in which he mourns the death of his close
friend Arthur Halem.
He is not here; but far away
The
noise of life begins again,
And
ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bold street breaks the bleak day.
“In
Memoriam”, vii.
But the resurrection message of
Easter is more even than the knowledge that our lives go on despite the loss of
those we love, or that the causes for which Jesus lived and died can be
continued in successive communities. Those, too, are truths, but hardly the
gospel.
For there is good news. It can
never and must never be proved, but for me I find in Easter the great hope that
enables me to attend and to officiate at funerals, to minister to the bereaved
and to the dying, and to face my own inevitable death with greater confidence
than would otherwise be possible. For in the message of Easter I hear the good
news that we have a God who loves us, and who has created for us an existence
far greater than that we presently experience. Who, in the Resurrection of his
Son, opens for us a way to experience that internal awareness of his love
beyond the limitations of our future grave. In Easter there is no way out of
death, but the hope for a beyond.
I am ascending to my Father and to your
Father, to my God and your God.
(John 20:17)
In the light then of this glorious
morning I can face life. I can face suffering, I can face tragedy, I can face
death. For, while Jesus does not remove from us the tragedy of death, he
transforms that tragedy into a symbol of hope. Christian faith must never side
steps suffering and death, but reveals God in the very heart of tragedy and
leads us on into inexpressible ecstasy.
And so this Easter let us join with
Paul in that glorious hymn,
O death, where is your victory,
O
death where is your sting?
Thanks be to God who gives us the
victory,
through
our Lord Jesus.
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