AJM, Holy Trinity, 11 April 2004 am – Reading John 20.1-25

 

Introduction

 

Good morning. Or, God morning, perhaps. As I was thinking about what to say this morning my mind was taken back to one Easter Sunday about 8 years ago. I was finding life quite tough, quite demanding. I was finding being a Christian quite tough and quite demanding, too. So I decided to do something I’d not done before. I got up at 4 in the morning and drove out to Beacon Hill, the highest point in Leicestershire. And from the top of Beacon Hill I watched the sun come up, and with a bunch of other Christians and a curious press photographer we celebrated the dawn of Easter morning, remembering that this was a God morning, the anniversary of the morning Jesus Christ rose from the dead. *

 

This is what the 1^st century Pope Clement wrote to the Corinthians:

Let us look at the resurrection which happens regularly. Day and night show us a resurrection; night goes to sleep, day rises: day departs, night arrives. It’s a good thought, isn’t it; night and day, dusk and dawn formed the framework for the events of that first Easter, and we have a daily anniversary of those events in the rising sun. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the risen Jesus as we stand here this morning. 2000 years ago, Jesus Christ rose from the dead. What does that mean to you?....

 

Well, 3 years after that I stood on another hill, this time in Zambia, and again I watched the sun rise over the horizon. It was the last day of our trip. We’d seen so much and felt so much, witnessing at first hand the powerlessness and yet the hope of people struggling with pain, disease, death and hardship. We watched the sun come up. It was enormous, round and red. For some reason I decided to time it. It took 3 minutes. And the words that came into my head were these, from the same John whose words we have just heard:

 

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

 

And I could see it. The sun was the colour of blood, the colour of the blood Jesus shed on the cross, and there it was, not sinking but rising, rising to look again at the world he had died for, dripping light into the world. The light was shining in the darkness, and the darkness had not overcome it. And as I watched, I knew that God was saying to me, this is my world, and I care about it. I want to shine my light into its darkness; and I want you to be part of that. It was as if instead of standing there and looking at the rising sun, for a moment I was the rising sun, looking at the darkened world. I’ve been trying to be obedient to that moment ever since.

 

As I thought back to these two occasions, something occurred to me. It was this. When we think about Easter, this is how we usually think about it. We look at Jesus, and we think about the resurrection and what it means to us, just as we look at the rising sun and think about the light it sheds into the world. But what if we do it the other way round, and do it as God did it to me that day on the hill in Zambia? What if instead of asking ourselves what Easter means to us, we ask ourselves, what did it mean to Jesus? What if instead of looking at the sun, we think what it would be like to be the sun? What would the world look like then? What did the world look like to Jesus as he emerged from the tomb on that first Easter morning? Did he feel the same about it as he had three days earlier? Traumatic experiences change the way you feel about things, don’t they. So how did he feel about the world now? He had been through agony at the hands of the men who ruled this world, and yet here he was again, looking at that world once more, rising above the horizon to shed his light into its darkness. How did he feel? How did he see the task ahead? Where did he put the pain? What was the hope? Did his dawn look like the one we just saw, beautiful and peaceful? Or did it look different from that? Instead of thinking about our perspective this Easter morning, let’s ask ourselves for a moment, what was his? Let’s take another moment to reflect. But this time, do it the other way round. Don’t look at the sun and see Jesus; be the sun, and see the world. What do you see? What does it feel like?... *

 

So, what must Jesus have been thinking? What was his perspective on the world, the other side of the crucifixion? What did the world look like, as he came out the other side, abandoned and then raised? Because if we can grasp that, we can understand something of the purposes of God, and our part in his heart and his plans. It can’t have been without pain, can it. Pain; death, the defeat of death and the power of death; and a work just begun. A work that will be continuous, a resurrection that will take place every day in people’s hearts, a resurrection that they will try to express to one another, a resurrection that will begin to take shape in the world. A resurrection that will take place not just on one day, but which will echo through history. The beginning of a new era, a new relationship, a new world order.

 

And then I thought, what about the disciples? What was their perspective as they woke that morning? For if Jesus’s world had changed, so had theirs. Their perspective was no longer one of confidence that they were following the author and saviour of the world, the man long expected who was going to rule a new kingdom. Their perspective was now one of failure, of despair, loss of guidance, loss of solution. They hadn’t found an answer, they had lost one, they’d lost the answer to the world’s needs as it had been promised in the scriptures. They were suffering from the biggest bereavement the world had ever known – bereavement not just of the man they had given up everything to follow, but of the whole meaning of life. They were separated from Jesus just as he, two nights before, had been separated from God.

 

And yet during this day, this first Easter day, their perspective was to change too. That morning, 11 dispirited followers of Jesus woke up. By nightfall, they saw the world in a different light. Within a few weeks, people were becoming Christians in Jerusalem. Within a century there were Christians in every province of the Roman empire. Within three centuries the Roman emperor himself was a Christian. Today, for example, 164m people call themselves Christians in Brazil, 77m in the Philippines, maybe 50m in China. Something happened that day, that first Easter day, that filled them with enough confidence to begin to change the world and the way we experience it. What was it, exactly?

 

Easter today

 

*Before we answer that, let’s jump forward 2000 years. What does Easter mean today? I did some research. This is what I found:

 

       We call it Easter after the Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess Ostre, whose festival was celebrated in April

       We give each other eggs because they symbolise new life

       We like Easter bunnies because they are a traditional symbol of fertility

       The date moves because we celebrate it on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox, which is March 21^st

       It’s dangerous to ask too many questions about the date – this has been such a contentious issue that the death penalty was imposed in Egypt in 382 for celebrating Easter on the wrong day

       But basically it’s linked to the date of the Jewish Passover festival, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt and release from slavery of the Hebrew people, and which took place the week that Jesus died.

 

Then I found this news report.

 

*Astronomers pinpoint time and date of crucifixion and resurrection

 

Two Romanian astronomers say their research shows Christ died at 3pm on a Friday, and rose again at 4am on a Sunday.

Liviu Mircea and Tiberiu Oproiu claim to have pinpointed the exact time and date of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.

The pair, from the Astronomic Observatory Institute in Cluj, Romania, say Jesus died at 3pm on Friday, April 3, 33 AD, and rose again at 4am on Sunday, April 5. They used a computer programme to check biblical references against historical astronomical data. They said the New Testament stated that Jesus died the day after the first night with a full moon, after the vernal equinox. Using data gathered on the stars between 26 and 35 AD they established that in those nine years, the first full moon after the vernal equinox was registered twice - on Friday, April 7, 30 AD, and on Friday, April 3, 33 AD.

They were convinced the date of the crucifixion was 33 AD, and not 30 AD, because records showed that a solar eclipse, as depicted in the Bible at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, occurred in Jerusalem that year.

 

Mircea and Oproiu have got it right. This is the key date in history. According to their researches it occurred on Friday April 3^rd in the year 33 AD. But did it? Did it occur at all, or is it just a story? When I first asked myself whether Christianity could be true, this was the question I started by investigating. It was Easter then too, Easter 1983, and I had a friend who was dying. She was a Christian, and she believed that just as Jesus had died and been raised again, so would she be. Her attitude blew my mind, and so I set out to find out why she believed it. I had no Christian background, and I had to start from the beginning. I read a survey recently which found that almost half of young adults in this country do not now believe that Jesus existed as a historical person. I had no idea whether he did or didn’t. So I tried to find out. I read and read and read, everything I could find, from the gospels onwards. I read about other religions, I read up on the occult and the paranormal to see if they offered any evidence for a life after death, I read about prophecy and reincarnation, and I looked at the authenticity of the New Testament documents. I read other contemporary sources. I discovered that the evidence for Jesus’ existence is so strong that no historian doubts it; and that the evidence for the resurrection having happened is far stronger than any other possible explanation. I ended up writing a book about it. It’s called What happens when we die?. I don’t want to go over that evidence this morning; I get bored if I keep repeating myself. But the book’s on the bookstall [or available from me by post].

 

So what happened at Easter is that Jesus was raised from the dead. It’s good to know that. But is it enough? I was talking to my daughter Katy the other week. Katy is 9, and she was complaining to me about the way the Easter story is taught to the children at school. She said ‘they tell us what happened – but they never say what it means. They tell us the story, but they don’t tell us why it matters – and lots of the children don’t know.’ Katy has to be right. It isn’t enough to know the story. You have to know what the story means, what difference it makes. It is not enough to say, even to believe, that Jesus rose from the dead. If it happened at all, it has to mean something.

 

So, what does it mean?

 

The first Easter day

 

To find that out we have to go back to Mary and the disciples. We started with the first chapter of John’s gospel. Let’s move to the last chapter, chapter 20.

 

*Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him’.

 

So Mary arrives before Peter and John himself, breathless and panting. They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, she gasps. They follow her back. It was as she said: no body. Nothing if not logical, they ascertained the facts – she was right – and went back home. But Mary stayed, not satisfied with the facts, wanting an explanation, wanting to know not just what had happened, but what it meant. And then she met Jesus. Later that day, the disciples met him too:

 

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

 

Within a few days these disciples were looking at the world a different way. Something had changed. They were different, and the world was beginning to be different too. What happens when hungry, isolated people wake up in pain and respond to Christ? Something does – and it isn’t the promise of economics or success. It’s something to do with life itself, with knowing what it means to be alive. No other religion is comparable. No other religion has at its heart a man who rose from the dead. No other religion has been established after the death of its founder starting with a group of 11 discouraged men and a small number of devastated women. By the time the prophet Mohammed died, he was the most powerful man in Arabia, and almost the whole peninsula had been converted to Islam. By the time the Buddha died, he had become a famous and much respected figure, with followers scattered over a wide geographical area; he was buried in the manner of a king. But Jesus died the death of a common criminal, leaving only 11 discouraged disciples and none of the organisational structures which sustained Buddhism and Islam after the death of their founders. And yet now there are about 2 billion Christians on all 5 continents; the Christian faith is growing faster than any other, in more cultures than any other. It changes the life of western university graduates, of remote Maasai tribesmen, and of Hong Kong drug addicts. It does so because Jesus rose on Easter Sunday and appeared to Mary and the disciples.

 

There’s a moment in the film The Passion, at the end, when they show the resurrection. But they don’t show Jesus. They show the gravecloths lying on a stone slab, still in the solid shape of a man. As you watch, the clothes gradually crumple and sink flat onto the surface of the stone – as if the life is going out of them. Then the camera turns, and you find yourself looking from the inside at the door of the tomb. You realise that you aren’t going to see Jesus; you are Jesus. You are looking through his eyes, walking towards the stone which plugs the door. It rolls aside, and the light begins to flood into the tomb. You step out into the sunlight. And there the film ends.

 

So: what I’d like us to do now is to take it from that point and go on into the day. When Jesus rolled aside the stone and stepped out of the tomb, what did the world look like? How did he see it? And once he had appeared to the disciples, what did the world look like to them? How did they see it, and their place in it?

 

Meeting Mary

 

*When Mary met Jesus she didn’t recognise him. She thought he was the gardener. Don’t touch me, he said, I haven’t yet ascended to the Father - this is a different kind of body. It was the same later when he appeared to the disciples. They didn’t recognise him till he showed them his hands and his side. Luke says they thought he was a ghost, until he ate some fish.*

 

So the risen Jesus didn’t quite look like the human Jesus. Why not? When Lazarus was raised from the dead no one had any hesitation in recognising him as the man who had been buried three days earlier. What was different about Jesus? I think it must lie in what had happened between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Jesus died, racked with pain, a human being crying out that God had abandoned him. He rose, the Son of God full of the life of the Father, his humanity completed, the life within him not just now the physical life we all share as human beings, but the spiritual life of the Creator himself. The risen Jesus is more than the crucified Jesus come back to life; he is the carrier of life itself.

 

The breath of the Spirit

 

Then he does something. It’s in a verse we don’t often look at – verse 22.

 

*Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

 

He breathed on them, and the breath that he breathed was the Holy Spirit. Think back to Genesis, and the creation of Adam. Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Once again, God breathes his life into human beings. John knew Genesis, and he began his gospel with the same words, the words in the beginning. And here as he writes of how Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of life, once again, John knows that human life has changed. A whole era has ended, the era when man was separated from God and subject to death. In this gesture of breathing on the disciples, Jesus breathes the life of the Father back into the human race.

 

And then he says something else. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. That’s not a mandate for ecclesiastical power, it’s a mandate for ministry. These disciples now have the life of God within them. And they are to offer that life to others.

 

Looking at the world with new eyes

 

So here we are, 2000 years later. Let’s think back to where we started. Let’s not look through our own eyes at Jesus, as we usually do on Easter Sunday. Let’s turn it on its head and try to look through his eyes at us. What does he see? How did he see the world that first Easter, on his first morning as the risen, Spirit-filled Christ, as the incarnation of life itself?

His disciple John, who was there at the time, leaves us in this chapter with two thoughts.

 

1. He sees us as alive. Be alive. Receive his breath, the breath of the Holy Spirit, and know that the life which lives within you is the life which sustains the universe itself, the life that comes from Jesus the carrier of life.

 

2. He sees the world in darkness, a darkness which is waiting for the dawn of the rising sun. That darkness is to be dispelled by us. We are to breathe out the life that is now within us, and the life or death of others will depend on us as we do so. The dawn is a new beginning, it ushers in a new day. Jesus’s earthly work is done. The new life-givers are you and me.                                                                                                          

*Amen.