Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 3rd Sunday of Easter (April 29, 2009)
Readings: Acts 3: 12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3: 1-7; Luke 24: 36-48
At my father’s funeral, we sung the hymn All Creatures of Our God and King. It contains that moving sixth verse, which reads:
And even you, most gentle death,
waiting to hush our final breath,
O sing now, alleluia!
You lead back home the child of God,
for Christ our Lord that way has trod:
alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
That hymn, penned by St. Francis of Assisi 800 years ago, proclaims a profound truth which we are all too apt to avoid today. That truth is hope, specifically that hope promised to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is remarkable just how seldom we talk about the resurrection, even during Eastertide, which is supposed to be all about the subject. You’d almost think that there was something indecent, fearful, or dare I say even silly about the concept.
Even though resurrection is key to our identity as Christians, we have ladled buckets of doctrinal goo onto it over the centuries. And so there is a temptation to run screaming in the opposite direction when something potentially complex and theoretical looms on the horizon like a conceptual Godzilla. I understand. And that is why there is a profound need to rescue resurrection from where it has been locked up as something too unbelievable, too mysterious, or too abstract for serious consideration. After all, you can’t get much more down to earth than eating a piece of broiled fish, which is what the Risen Christ does in that beautiful vignette from today’s Gospel reading. Resurrection is as real and solid as flesh, as affecting and concrete as an encounter between long-lost friends.
Christ’s transformation from death to life – a new kind of life – prefigures that same reality for everyone. Without the resurrection, we may as well not be sitting here. Without it, our reception of Christ in the sacrament of the bread and wine is a meaningless sham of pretend piety. Without it, as St. Paul famously remarked “we are of all people most to be pitied.”
St. Luke portrays a Risen Lord in the flesh, yet already glorified. It is clear from his account that the time between Jesus’ rising and his Ascension is a sacred period – one of learning, of the nourishment of faith. Christ’s appearances here have a purpose, and they have an effect. That purpose is made clear in today’s Gospel passage – he “opens the Scriptures” to his followers, proclaiming the inescapable possibility that we can know God and God’s will. And the effect is clear from the anecdotes conveyed in the readings from Acts and the First Letter of John. Christ’s resurrection transfigures individual lives, and indeed the life of the world, defeating death and sin through the establishment of a new way of being. Not only are broken lives restored, but social rules themselves take the pattern of the laws of God.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, writes in The Resurrection of Christ, “For Luke, history and theology are one…[Luke] draws out…the important truth that in the Resurrection one epoch of history, human and divine, reaches its climax and another epoch has its beginning.” This new epoch of which Ramsey speaks is the epoch of the resurrection of the dead, and so wherever someone holds fast to Christian belief, there and by that fact resurrection of the dead occurs. In other words, this is not just a hope – it is a reality; one made concrete and operative by our faith in it.
This makes us anxious, because, we ask, “how can we place our hope in a future state?” This anxiety speaks to a deeper one, namely, is there anything at all that one can hope for as a Christian? As the theologian Willi Marxsen puts it, “if what one hopes for is declared already to be present, but present reality contradicts what one hopes for ([because] resurrection of the dead hasn’t happened yet!), then the result can all too easily be hopelessness.” Indeed, what are we to make of this apparent contradiction – of the “already” but “not yet”?
The model of Jesus’ ministry provides us with guidance. He lived as if the loving God was real and active, not conceptual and inert. Jesus expressed his faith by living out salvation – and those who received his gifts of grace can be categorised as either consumers or participants. The nine lepers who, when healed, went on their way are consumers. The tenth, who turned to Jesus and glorified God, is a participant. Those who participate have faith: They live salvation and experience eternal life right now. It is in this spirit, in this faith, that Peter addresses the crowds after the miraculous healing of the lame man: “Why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we made him walk?…The faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health.”
If nothing else, resurrection faith is this lived experience of the rising to new life from the death grip in which the creatures of God are held by the forces of evil and destruction. We need to understand that if we live as though God’s salvation were a reality, it will be a reality. We need to discern and interpret the wisdom of God, written into nature itself, and then live according to those principles. Indeed, it may be said that a Christian is one who has experienced God’s salvation, and awaits new events of salvation with as much confidence as she or he would await the rising of the Sun at daybreak. To live as a Christian is to live in a state of ongoing, imminent expectation.
The expectation above all others is that the dead shall be raised, and thus even at the grave we make our song, “alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” This is the season of alleluia, so let us shout it, but above all let us live it. The resurrection of Jesus invites us to risk his own salvation faith in our lives. Because he lived out salvation, what was expected to happen, what he had said would happen, did happen. With that faith burning in our hearts, our own resurrection is now. Each moment that you inhabit God’s saving love, you have reached the goal, you have saved your life by losing it, and your brokenness has been made whole. That experience of the Risen Christ begins here and now.
In the conclusion of his book on the resurrection of Christ, Ramsey asserts that Christ does not so much descend to us in the Eucharist, as we are raised up to heaven where he has ascended. The suffering servant crucified has been replaced with Christ victorious on the cross, crowned, robed, and enthroned. Christ’s sacrificial death has been joined by his triumphant rising – the Passion has illuminated by the Resurrection. In this Eucharistic feast, and in every moment of our lives, let us join him there. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.
