Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne, 9th April 2023
Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8
Christianity is a very strange faith – if it were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Take Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. At first, she doesn’t recognise her close friend, whom she last saw just two days before; in fact, she thinks this stranger must be the graveyard’s gardener. It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognises that the impossible has happened; that the man whom she had watched being put to death is in fact alive. Yet there is something odd about his physical nature – He asks her not to cling to Him.
An icon from 16th Century Crete of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Christ in the Garden on the first Easter morning.
In our reading from Acts, another of the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, Peter, has been asked to visit a senior Roman solider who has had a mysterious vision of angels. Peter recounts his own encounters with Christ after the Resurrection. In these encounters, too, Jesus’ physical characteristics are very odd – He is sometimes not recognised until He speaks or acts in a particular way; He sometimes appears in the middle of locked rooms. Yet He also eats and drinks with His disciples, apparently normally; they can embrace Him and even poke their fingers in His crucifixion wounds.
Jesus has clearly not been simply brought back to life, miraculously healed, but instead has become somehow different than He was. Nor is He a ghost or an apparition – He has a definite, tangible, physicality. The new life of the Resurrection is clearly something different from the mundane life of mortal human beings.
Of course, this could all be a story made up by people who couldn’t cope with the death of their hero.
Denial can make people invent all sorts of strange events in their own mind: but if this were just a product of Jesus’ closest followers reinforcing one another’s delusions, we would expect to see at least an attempt to produce a coherent story when they came to write it down. When we look at the writings of modern, invented, religious like Scientology or Mormonism, great effort has gone into making them internally consistent.
With the stories of Jesus being raised from the dead, no such attempt has taken place. The Resurrection accounts of the four Gospels are all different in at least some important respects – having preached on Matthew’s version last night and now today on John’s, I am very conscious of that. Yet the Church has never tried to say that one Gospel is more authentic than any of the others; there has been no point in the last two thousand years when it has tried to declare a synthesis of the four Gospels as being the truly accurate account and suppress the originals. The inconsistencies between the Gospels are laid open for the sceptical to pick apart as they wish – and if we take seriously that God inspired Holy Scripture to be written as it is, then that must have been His intention.
Similarly, if the authors of the Gospels had made up a story and wanted people to believe it, they wouldn’t have had Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the risen Christ. After all – she was a woman! Not that I have a problem with that – but both the Jewish and Graeco-Roman cultures of the time were deeply patriarchal, and women were regarded as less reliable witnesses. There’s no way, if you were making up a story to convince others that your dead hero had come back to life, that you’d make a woman your star witness – let alone Mary Magdalene, with her openly acknowledged history of demonic possession.
Nobody has gone over the Gospels with a fine-toothed comb to make all the details consistent with one another. These stories have the roughness of authenticity.
So if it is true that Jesus, truly God, lived as a human being, died and rose from the dead: what was the point? Why does it matter to us? In our reading from Acts, St Peter says that one of Jesus’ tasks was “healing all who were oppressed by the devil”. We don’t talk about the devil much these days. As the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects put it: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The devil aims to convince us that we don’t need God; that we’re more than clever enough to determine our own destinies, to work out the difference between good and evil. We stopped believing in the devil when our scientific knowledge advanced and we thought we were too clever for the devil, and indeed for God.
Since becoming too clever for God and the devil, we’ve fought a number of wars destructive on a scale once unimaginable – the war in Ukraine is a reminder of how horrible a lengthy conventional war between two large and heavily armed states is. With our cleverness, we produced nuclear weapons on such a scale that at one stage we were capable of wiping out the human race several times over. It now seems we’re in danger of rendering the planet unfit for human life through something as simple as burning coal and oil. Do you reckon we really have the wisdom to handle the next generation of gene editing, and of artificial intelligence? Both are coming towards us with lightning speed. One has the capacity to redefine what being human is; the other has the capacity to remove us as the planet’s apex species.
We may be clever, but we aren’t very wise. We aren’t always good at working out the difference between good and evil either. It’s the sort of thing the devil loves, to convince us that our force of will and intellect and good intentions are enough.
It can get a bit depressing, until we remember that Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus came at the end of His successful mission. I said that Christianity is a very strange faith, and this is its core: God became a human being, one of us, as a carpenter’s son from a little town of no account in a remote region; although He sought no power, those in power saw Him as a threat and put Him to death; but this man was actually God, the source of life, and could not die. Somehow, mysteriously, in dying Jesus of Nazareth destroyed our death. Mary Magdalene, this outsider who had had her fair share of troubles, was the first to learn that the world had been changed forever, to be saved from the doom it had faced since time immemorial.
Yet Mary, as I noted at the start of this sermon, didn’t at first recognise God standing before her. It is easy to miss God at work even when He is right in front of us, to dismiss the evidence of God’s presence in our midst in favour of some mundane explanation – more credible in the eyes of our materialistic culture, yet also less true than the very strange Christian story. Never forget that God is working His purposes out, usually were few are expecting to see Him, often among those held of least account in the world. His purpose is to bring new life out of death: just look at how the Spring flowers emerge from last year’s compost.
So, amid the troubles of this world, be of good cheer, for Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead to destroy death. In taking on the sins of the whole world on the Cross, He opened the way to new and eternal life for you. This new life will not be a permanent continuation of our mortal lives, but something where we will be changed into something we cannot now understand and which seems very strange. But if were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
