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Easter Day 2009
SERMON – 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 12th April 2009
Revd. Canon David Pickering
Mark 16.8 For they were afraid
I greet you with the joy and happiness of the risen Lord.
Or in modern terms, a happy Easter to everyone.
But do I greet you with joy or do I confront you with fear.
In many ways both.
We live in a world that is afraid of the resurrection.
In a former parish I was told when I arrived that the preparing of the Easter Garden was the vicar's wife's job. Others feared they wouldn't get it right. As Christine was working here in Hong Kong at the time, ten years ago, others had to take the responsibility.
I'm not sure whether it is true here, but in the UK Christmas Communions out number Easter communions as if the birth of Christ were the greater feast. But if there had been no resurrection we would never have heard of the birth of Jesus, and after all two of the gospel writers choose to say nothing of the Christmas story. But all four are fairly uniform in their testimony to the risen Christ.
In the Church we have lived with and celebrated the resurrection for 2000 years. Each Sunday is a weekly celebration of the resurrection.
We're so used to the fact of Jesus rising from the dead that we almost take it for granted.
But what about those women on the first Easter morning? It was the last thing they expected. No wonder they were afraid.
The way Mark tells the story of the resurrection and ends his gospel is a bit of a puzzle. For all intents and purposes his gospel ends with this morning's reading. Verse 9 onwards is so very different in style, vocabulary and grammar it must have been written by someone else.
Was Mark's ending lost early on, and someone else has added a conclusion? Or didn't he have time to complete it?
It certainly ends awkwardly, For they were afraid
Or in the Greek ephabunta gar, gar being the preposition, 'for'. What a strange note on which to end the greatest story, the most amazing event in the history of the world?
What are we to make of the women's fear?
If we had witnessed a cruel and violent execution, and seen the dead corpse, how would we cope with an empty grave, even if someone told us, especially if someone told us, the victim had been raised from the dead?
One of the greatest fears is the fear of the unknown
The resurrection should also have fear for us.
We should fear the implications and consequences.
The new life of the resurrection, if it is to be experienced by everyone in the world, will have a direct affect on the lives of all of us.
It is very easy to be complacent about the resurrection.
God has won the victory over all evil and even death.
So everything is now OK.
The cross is behind us. But it isn't.
The cross and resurrection are together at the centre of our faith. We show this unity of cross and resurrection by the symbol of a plain Cross. Today I have removed the figure from the Cross.
A Methodist Minster friend of mine had, as a young man, literally flirted with becoming a Roman Catholic, mainly because he was attracted to a certain young lady at the time. But he said for him the problem with Roman Catholics they seemed to have ignored or played down the resurrection and with their predominance of crucifixes have forgotten to take Jesus on the Cross.
Jesus won the victory of love and goodness over sin and evil by dying on the cross for us, which is something that we should never forget, but that triumph is gloriously revealed in the resurrection of Easter Day. The cross and the resurrection do go together.
The resurrection does not say there will be no more crosses in our lives. But the risen Lord gives us the courage to faces the crosses we encounter, and the encouragement to respond to Jesus' call to take up our crosses to follow him and be his disciple.
Often before we can experience the resurrection in our lives there will be a cross to bear.
There may be crosses that bring the unknown, even fear and foreboding, but we can approach them with the faith and confidence of the resurrection. In fact with the certainty of our resurrection faith, we can respond with self assurance to the call of Jesus to take up our crosses and follow him.
We entered this cross bearing but risen life at our Baptism, so as part of our Easter celebration of the risen life we now enjoy, the Church invites us to renew our Baptismal promises.
Amen, Alleluia.
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