St Pauls Cathedral Easter Day 31st March 2024 Acts 10.34-43 and John 20. 1-18
Early in the morning on the first day of the week while it was still dark.
Alleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia
This morning, before dawn, while it was still dark, a hotch potch band of us gathered on the porch outside the West end doors of this cathedral, like groups of Christians across the world. From earliest times Christians have kept vigil through the night before Easter, to recall the story of God’s saving work, from creation through to the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Easter Vigil marks the end of the emptiness of Holy Saturday, and leads into the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
The ‘Alleluia’, which has been silent throughout Lent, returns. As John of Damascus (the Arab Christian monk) wrote:
Now the queen of seasons, bright
with the day of splendour,
with the royal feast of feasts,
comes its joy to render.
As we stood on the porch, candles were lit and there in the darkness the light began to shine. In the Revelation of St John, Jesus speaks of himself as the morning star – Venus, spinning in the opposite direction to earth, which shines its brightest at the darkest part of the night, just before dawn.
And early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. Early in the morning.
The theologian, Selina Stone, in her beautiful book called Tarry Awhile, writes about ‘God who specialises in working in the darkness’. She says:
‘God receives an offering and makes a covenant with Abram in the dark (Genesis 15:12–21). It is in the dark that Jacob wrestles with God and receives a blessing (Genesis 28:10–22). It is at night that Rahab negotiates safety for her whole family and earns her place in the genealogy of Jesus by hiding the spies (Joshua 2). Darkness represents deliverance for the children of Israel, separating them from the Egyptians who pursued them (Joshua 24:7). Deep darkness is one of the marks of God’s presence, the place from which God’s voice comes forth (Deuteronomy 4:11; 5:22–3). Darkness is the place and space of encounter with God.’
While it is still dark, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb. Early in the morning: that place of new creation and new beginnings. We hear echoes of the opening of John’s gospel – ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God’. In the beginning, God took the dust of the ground and breathed life into Adam’s nostrils. This very dust from which we were made, God redeems through Christ’s death and resurrection, restoring us to life, and life eternal.
Here in the garden – while it was still dark – Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus, and God is still at work. There is something here which refers us back to the wonder of that first creation. So it is not surprising that poets and painters have played with the idea that ‘Christ’s cross and Adam’s tree stood in one place’ (the words of John Donne in his poem ‘Hymn to God, My God, in My sickness’).
Yet when it was still dark, God was at work on Mary’s behalf. He was making a way where there was no way. And Jesus said to her: ‘Mary’.
Bishop Stephen Conway in his reflection[1] on what a good Easter looks like, suggests that the word which makes us live might be our own name in the mouth of God. Just as Jesus turns and calls Mary by her name. And, following Mary, having been seen and named by Christ, we are invited to see what being a new creation might mean. We are invited to catch up, in our imagination, on what the resurrection might mean for us.
And here in the garden Jesus has questions for Mary. As she stands weeping outside the empty tomb, his first words to her are ‘Woman why are you weeping: whom do you seek?’ (20:15)
At the beginning of his public life Jesus asks the disciples of John the Baptist, ‘What are you looking for?’ And the night before his death he asks those who come to arrest him ‘For whom are you looking?’ And here, at the first resurrection appearance, to Mary, he asks ‘Whom do you seek?’. Each of these crucial events opens up with a question about searching and desire.
As you sit here this morning, what is it that you seek?
These words guide us to a profound awareness of ourselves, our understanding of who we are and of our desires. They reach into the hope for joy that gives every human being identity and meaning. Saint John of the Cross said, “In the first place, it should be known that if anyone is seeking God, the Beloved is seeking that person much more”[2].
And who is the Christ we seek?
It can be easy for us to have an image of God as invincible, self-sufficient, and all powerful. In the words of that great hymn, we look for a God who is “Immortal, invisible, God only wise”. We want a God who shields us from our own vulnerability.
But the bible bears witness to another God, a God who hears the cries of the poor and defends the orphans, widows and immigrants. The God of the bible suffers with people, he comes among us as a vulnerable baby boy then is executed as a criminal, suffering a painful and humiliating death and being buried in a borrowed tomb. The transcendent one who has moved into our vulnerability, our guilt, our alienation, our suffering and death. The wisdom of the cross seems folly to the world. Wisdom that knows that it is by denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Christ that we will find life in all its fullness.
Rowan William suggests that the resurrection is the first experiment of forgiveness and healing which creates new patterns of life together and so reveals a fresh understanding of a social God, not tied to God’s physical presence but to the identity of the community in the power of God’s Spirit.
And it is the power of the resurrection which allows us to see the darkness of the world in its light.
Bishop Michael Marshall in his book ‘Lent with the Beloved Disciples’ quotes from CS Lewis: ‘I believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in the same way that I believed the sun rose this morning; not only because I can see it, but because I can see everything else in the light of it’.
Then there is the second question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
The resurrection changes the way everything is seen. How we see God and how we are seen. Mary Magdalene discovered that she no longer needed be defined as a person by her sins or any other people’s categories. She is accepted by the restoration of the inner beauty that is the birthright of the sons and daughters of Christ.
In her darkness Mary is ministered to, and Jesus calls her to ‘Go and tell’.
What was she to tell? That Jesus was alive. That the resurrection embodies, in flesh and blood, the truth. The truth that fear and terror are not the last words. That death is no more. That God works through the darkness to bring life, hope and purpose. She was to proclaim hope.
Let us pray this morning that we may see ourselves in the light of the resurrection and proclaim the hope which Mary encountered while it was still dark.
Alleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia
[1] Stephen Conway A Good Easter in ed Mark Oakley, A Good Year, SPCK, 2016
[2] St John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, 3.28