It
is early in the morning; the sun has not yet risen when 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: he believes that 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, of 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: just a delusion of foolish people, a
non-event of no consequence or interest, something which 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 very 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, to be fed with Christ: with his body and his blood, for Christ:
to be his mystical body, the Church in the world?
We are called 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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