Early in the morning Mary
Magdalene, Peter and John come to the tomb. They have seen their Lord and
Saviour betrayed, falsely accused, flogged, and killed. We can scarcely
imagine what’s going through their minds: grief, anguish, bitterness, Peter’s
regret at having denied Jesus, of not being brave enough to say that he was a
follower of Jesus, Mary and John who stood by the Cross, just want to be close
to him in death as in life. They can’t take in what has happened: a week ago he
was hailed as the Messiah, God’s anointed, the successor of David, now he has
been cast aside: all his words of God’s love have fallen on deaf ears, he has
been cast aside, ignored, a failure, a madman who wanted to change the world.
Mary sees the stone rolled away, in the darkness, she
doesn’t understand but says to Simon Peter ‘they have taken away the Lord out
of the sepulchre and we know not where they have laid him’ her concern is for
the dead body of Jesus. She does not know, she does not believe. As Mary has
run away from the tomb, John and Simon Peter run towards it. John sees the
cloths but does not go in. Peter goes in first and sees everything. Then John
sees and believes: God has raised Jesus from the dead. It is his love for Our
Lord and Saviour which allows him to see with the eyes of faith, to make sense
of the impossible, the incomprehensible.
As Christians we need to be like the Beloved Disciple: to love
Our Lord and Saviour above all else, to see and believe like him, and through
this to let God work in our lives. For what happened on that hillside nearly
two thousand years ago, early in the morning, on the first day of the week is
either nothing at all: a delusion of foolish people, a non-event of no
consequence or interest, something the world can safely ignore or laugh at,
mocking our credulity in the impossible, childish fools that we are, or
it is something else: an event of such importance that the world will never be
the same again.
In dying and rising again, Jesus has changed history; he
has changed our relationship with God, and with one another. He has broken down
the gates of Hell to lead souls to Heaven, restoring humanity to the loving
embrace of God, to open the way to heaven for all humanity, where we may share
in the outpouring of God’s love, which is the life of the Trinity. His death
means that our death is not the end, that we have an eternal destiny, a joy and
bliss beyond our experience or understanding: to share in the life and love of God
forever – this is what God does for us, for love of us, who nailed him to a tree,
and still do with our dismissals or half-hearted grudging acceptance, done for propriety’s
sake.
There can be no luke-warm responses to this; there is no
place for a polite smile and blithely to carry on regardless as though nothing
much has happened. Otherwise, we can ask ourselves: why are we here? Why do
Christians come together on the first day of the week to listen to the
Scriptures, to pray to God, to ask forgiveness for our manifold sins, to be fed
by Christ, with Christ: his true body and his blood, for Christ: to be his
mystical body, the Church in the world?
We are to be something different, something out of this
world, living by different standards and in different ways, living lives of love
not selfishness, self-satisfaction and sin. In baptism we died with Christ and
were raised to new life with him, we are to live this life, and to share it
with others: ours is a gift far too precious to be kept to ourselves, it is to
be shared with the whole world, every last human soul, that they too may
believe, perfecting creation, and bringing all of prodigal humanity into the embrace
of a loving Father, filled with His Spirit, conformed to the pattern of His
Son. This is our life, our calling, to have the singularity of purpose of those
first disciples, who saw and believed, who let God in Christ change their lives
and share this great free gift of God’s love.
So let
our hearts be filled with joy, having died with Christ and raised to new life
with him. Let us take that new life, and live it, in our thoughts, our words,
and deeds, and share that life with others that the world may believe, that
what happened outside a city two thousand years ago has changed all of human history
and is still changing lives today. Christ died and is alive so that we and all
the earth may have life and have it to the full, sharing in the life and love of
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is
most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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