Sermon Sunday Before Last
Easter 2.11am
Scenes of exhilaration did a great deal to cheer the nation – indeed, the whole world, last Friday. Those of us who were able to share the event here, with our big screen and sumptuous fashions, felt that sense of occasion enormously – the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ on seeing the bride’s dress, the charming attendants, and those shared disapprovals of one or two millenary catastrophes. At practically every stage a good deal has been said in the media about the ‘Diana’ factor – the sad absence of the young groom’s mother – herself, once upon a time, a fairy tale princess to an audience of millions, too. What a different occasion this royal wedding might have been had she not been so tragically taken from her two young sons all those years ago. She would have been proud – no doubt – but there again, such a sentiment is one which any number of our families will have known. Only once did I ever hear my mother voice the grief of one who had herself been widowed very young – and that was the morning of my brother’s wedding when she confided, sotto voce, ‘I wish Hugh was here’.
For the young Duke and Duchess of Cambridge the roar of the crowds will already have given way to their intimate and personal routine – a delayed honeymoon, too – so very much the practice nowadays. But when Prince William’s parents were married the then Archbishop of Canterbury referred to the occasion as a fairytale. That description has been largely forgotten all these years on. But in any case, the tendency for us to enter the realms of fantasy on these occasions can be disturbing. We now know that the former wedding was, in a sense, a pastiche, in that the then young couple really hardly knew one another. The ensuing history of their marriage was to be a sad one – and history will set it all down in intrusive detail, no doubt. But that same history will serve to remind us not to describe things in such fantastical terms, any more than we might be tempted to do with last Friday’s service. For whatever the poetic quality of 17th century language, whatever the echo of history in one of the world’s most important churches, the dedication of two young people to one another was not then, and never can be, about fantasy and make believe. It may be deeply moving, mystical and even transcending, but it is about the reality of two people who come together in love and, in Christian terms, at least, become one.
I’m not sure what the two billion people will have made about the underlying religious and spiritual purpose – although few can have remained unimpressed by the really exquisite reading of the scriptures, and the memorable voices of both Archbishop Rowan and the Bishop of London. Many of us hope that it might touch more young people’s lives, enhancing a resolve to make that marital commitment before God and a congregation, rather than civilly.
But whenever people come to Church to seek God’s blessing on their marriage, to have their children christened, or even to bury their loved ones, in behoves us to speak of the reality of a God who enters into our experience, our live and our destiny.
The problem is that Christian people, themselves, are not always best able to persuade people of that ‘entering in’, that reality. In too many circumstances we involve ourselves in the structures of religious observance without allowing the day-to-day aspects of our lives to be transformed. In that regard we are no different to those who have gone before us. Memorably, the disciples themselves had enormous difficulties in embracing the challenge of their teacher, their Master and their friend. How many times they misread what Jesus was about! How many times they allowed the fantasies of their minds to take over! How many times they judged what he was saying by their own criteria! Do you remember Peter haranguing Jesus and ridiculing Jesus’ prophecy of his destiny? ‘Surely, Lord, this will NEVER happen to you!’; or James and John, preoccupied with the prospect of becoming well established princes in some temporal arrangement, sat on thrones, either side of the new king? Even when Jesus comes to wash their feet, to break the bread and to give the cup of the new covenant to them, on that fateful evening, they simply do not embrace that reality.
When Mary Magdalene comes running from the garden to say she has seen the Lord, they don’t believe her. This, they think, is fantastical nonsense. But irony of ironies, it is their perception which has now become fantastical; it is their blocked minds that leave them in the old dispensation. And, as we see today, Thomas, absorbed, no doubt with some absurd practicality, misses the whole event, and, as if to make matters worse, refuses to heed the testimony of his long term and most reliable friends, until he sees and touches the wounds of the claimed risen Christ. From this blinkered experience comes the expression, seeing is believing, of course. Thomas concludes that the testimony of the other disciples is ridiculous hogwash – a fantasy, an hallucination, make believe. In fact, he refuses to open himself to the spiritual breath of the new order, the gift of Jesus, his friend and theirs, to those who are to be his witnesses in all the world. He treats their claims as unbelievable and doesn’t imagine for one moment the possibility of being challenged by reality. But there it is, in the darkest moment of doubt and unbelief, Jesus appears, wounds and all!
How strange that all these years on a sceptical world continues to have no difficulties with the details of a history which brought a young rabbi from Galilee to Jerusalem, whose teaching inspired the world and who died on a cross. That same sceptical world treats the story of Mary and the Angel as improbable, and the account of Jesus’ birth as pretty, yet unlikely.
As for the Easter story, that, too, strikes our modern world as make believe – the fantasy and misguided hopes of an ancient community whose only way of coming to terms with Calvary was in this contrived and absurd tale. This same modern world, endued with centuries of experience, of philosophical and political acumen, believes that it really has the wherewithal to address the world’s dilemmas and difficulties with only superficial reference to the Christian story.
Yet, that same world’s management of affairs might strike us as being the real absurdity with its ever collapsing rationale and arrangement. The world looks for signs of truth, of evolution, of beginnings and ends. It contrives to develop systems and strategies. It consigns trillions of dollars to weaponry and lavishness, and deceives the world’s population by suggesting that fulfilment, happiness and destiny is to be discovered in wealth and possessions.
And all along, such beliefs and perceptions are paradox. For there remains only one truth, and that is what the Gospel faith is. Whether in the birth of the child in Bethlehem, in the curing of withered arms, the embracing of lepers, in the feeding of five thousand, in the calming of storms, in the supper of eternity, in the agony of the garden, or the pounding heart of the cross, God is love. And that love sweeps from the cross to the grave. This is no fantasy, no make believe. He descended to hell – and he rises from the dead, never to die again. Like Thomas, we may well not have been in the garden. But we are here, where his resurrection love continues to act, to speak, and to move. Like Thomas, we may not have been in the Upper room, but Jesus comes to us every time we witness the Gospel, every time we embrace one another in peace, and every time we break bread together. Like Thomas, we may hold that ‘seeing’ is ‘believing’. We may want incontrovertible evidence that Christ is risen from the dead – and the sceptical world is all for evidence, evidence, evidence.
But when we banish the works of darkness, when we pledge our love to one another, when we cross the road to help the victim, when we receive the Spirit of life, when we live in faith and harmony one with another, behold, he lives, he really lives!