EASTER DAY EUCHARIST 2008

It's that moment between night and sunrise. Light is a pearly grey and everything is drained of colour. To the West the sky is still dark; in the East a soft brightness, not yet green or blue.. In the low limestone cliff there is a gaping black hole. Outside it a woman swathed in black from head to foot is sobbing convulsively – a broken woman with a broken heart. A dead woman walking..
Then behind her we see another figure, dark against the dawn sky. He speaks to her
“Woman, why are you weeping?”
She thinks he is the gardener.
“Oh, sir,” she cries through her tears, “They have taken away my Lord and I don't know where they have put him.”
The stranger repeats his question: “Why do you weep? Who are you looking for?”
She turns to face the stranger. “Oh, sir, if you have carried him off, tell me where you have put his body and I will take him away.”
There follow just two words, which together carry a greater intensity of feeling than any others I know in human literature. He says just her name.
“Mary!”
“Rabboni!!”
What a weight of ecstatic joy that single word contains. It is the summation of Easter ecstasy.

And yet there are two strange things about this story. Even after he has spoken to her twice she doesn't recognise him. Yet this is the man with whom she has been in love for two years or more.  She has followed him on his travels round Galilee, cooked for him, mended his clothes, treasured every grateful look or smile. We recognise the voices of our friends even on the phone. Yet she does not know him. How strange!
And why does the risen Christ ask her the same question twice?. He must know the answer. No one need ask that question of a mourner weeping beside a grave. Is Christ asking her: exactly who are you weeping for? For the man you saw horribly crucified two days ago? Or for yourself and your broken heart, your ruined life? Or for the part you played in his death?
That may sound a strange or harsh thing to say. Unlike Peter and the others, Mary is guiltless. Mary wasn't directly implicated in the betrayal of Jesus like Judas or Peter. Yet she, like a lot of other men, women and children who Jesus met and healed, was one small pebble in the landslide that destroyed him.
Consider. She was a prostitute and mentally deranged. A filthy bit of human trash, a moral leper and full of demonic evil. Jesus rescued her. He restored her to sanity. He gave her back a sense of self. He included her as an equal in the little community of his disciples who travelled with him. For the Jewish priests and all decent people that was scandalous – morally outrageous. In rescuing Mary Jesus put himself on a collision course with the priests and all righteous folk. One nail in his cross had Mary's name on it.
Yet here in the half-light of that miraculous dawn he meets her, before any of the others, and names her with love. “Mary. You have nothing to weep for..” In naming her he gives her back her self. When she falls down and embraces his knees, he gently tells her: “You can't cling to me. I am ascending to the Father” The risen Christ is not a resuscitated corpse. He hasn't come back from the dead. Like Lazarus. . He has passed through death and out the other side into the very heart of God. No wonder he seems strange. For God all places are Here, all times Now. Wherever God is, there is Christ Jesus, the human face of God, risen and naming his friends. Mary is  named and loved but now the love she is enfolded  in is the overwhelming love of the Father.  She runs home radiant with that love. She has a life again. “Because I am alive,” says Jesus, “You too can live.”

There is another incident right at the end of St John's Gospel which also takes place in that strange half light of dawn. Peter and the others are rowing to the shore after a fruitless night's fishing. As they come closer a dark figure on the headland hails them:
“Any luck, boys?”
“Not a thing all night!”
“Try your net on the far side of the boat.”
To humour the stranger they throw the net one last time, and it is suddenly squirming with fish. John, the most intuitive of them all, stares at the figure on the shore. Recognition dawns.
“It's the Lord!”
Peter drops his net and leaps into the sea to swim ashore. For decency's sake he took the trouble to put his tunic on. That looks to me like an eyewitness detail. When they come ashore there is a charcoal fire burning with fish and bread baking on it.
“Come and have breakfast.” says the risen Christ. And none of them dared ask “Who are you?” because they knew it was him. This stranger who names them is unknown, yet known.

And then there comes another of these poignant little conversations. Jesus looks straight at Peter and asks him three times, “Simon son of Jonah, do you love me?” and again, “Simon son of Jonah do you love me ?” And yet again,  “Simon son of Jonah do you love me?” Now the only other place in the whole of scripture where a charcoal fire is mentioned was the one burning in the courtyard of the High Priest's house where Peter warmed himself and denied his master three times.. Now three times the Risen Christ shows him his wounds and forces him back to acknowledge his betrayal. Three times Peter pleads with him, “Yes, Lord, I love you. Yes I do love you.” And then in tears “Lord, you know my heart. You know I love you.” Jesus smiles at him and gives him back his life.
“Feed my sheep.” He is Peter once again the Rock, the chief shepherd of Christ's people. Jesus  named him Peter and now gives him his true self. We can only imagine the sense of overwhelming joy and freedom that his forgiveness gave him. He has been a dead man walking. Now he has a life.
“Because I am alive,” says the risen Christ, “You can live too.”

The Risen Christ has wounds in his hands. Calvary and Easter are locked together like two sides of a single coin. Easter does not undo Calvary. It brings the Cross with it. We would like to come to Easter, as many people do, bypassing Good Friday. We would like it to be a sign of the return of Spring, of daffodils and birdsong, that life goes on after the dead of winter and brings hints that we too might have an after life.  A faint hope of a life beyond life. But that's not the Easter of Mary or Peter. They only come to Easter through bitter weeping because they have encountered the Risen Christ who shows them his hands and his side, as if to say, “This is what you have done. This is what I did for you.” There are no roads round Calvary. We are here  not to celebrate the Spring but to encounter the crucified and Risen Christ .

What kind of encounter can this be for me? I wasn't there. It wasn't me. My conscience is – more or less – clear. What about Darfur? Paul  who had never met Jesus, was shocked to discover on the Road to Damascus that his victims were the embodiment of the crucified Son of God. “Saul, Saul, why are you wounding me?” Christ's crucifixion goes on, and on, in the slave trade which made us rich, in the battle of the Somme, in the Holocaust, Hiroshima, in Rwanda, in Somalia, in Darfur.  Young Ugandan boys – Christ's lambs - are kidnapped and  brutalised to kill with guns which we have made and sold. We wear diamonds which cost the lives of thousands in Angola and the Congo. We wear shirts made by child labour in India. Our whole affluent  economy is built on the bodies of impoverished millions. My affluence impoverishes the earth. I have here in my pocket a £20 note which could have saved a child, one of Christ's lambs, from dying last week.  Should I not weep that I am such a man? If with Peter and with Mary I have not wept, I can't know what Easter really means.

What does it mean? An encounter with the risen Christ. In spite of everything we are and have been, he names us with love. Mary, Simon, Peter, Henry, Elizabeth, Ann, George One by one, individually and personally he names every one of us. And in naming us he gives us back our true selves, a self only discovered in our being enfolded in his unconquerable love. And then? Then he invites us to eat at his table and gives us the Bread of life, the Wine of the Kingdom, the fruits of Calvary. “My Body and My Blood.”
“Come and have breakfast. Now,” he says, “our new life together can begin. However dark and painful the road to it, God's  future is yours. Because I am alive you can live too, and live with joyful hope.”

In a recent film called ‘Blood Diamond’ the central character of the film is a father called Solomon Vandy whose young son Dia has been kidnapped and forced to become a child terrorist, a brutalised killer.  A rescue party finds him in the bush. Dia points his gun at one of the rescue party intending to kill him, for life has now become cheap to him.  And his father moves in front of him and says to him:

‘Look at me. Dia, what are you doing? You are Dia Vandy from the proud Mende tribe.
You are a good boy who loves soccer and school. Your mother loves you so much and she waits for you, making plantains. Your baby sister waits for you. The cows wait for you. 
I know they made you do wicked things but you are not a bad boy.
I am your father who loves you and you will come home with me and be my son again.’

And whilst he says all this both of them begin to weep. Eventually Dia drops the gun and allows his father to hold him secure and to take him home.
That's Easter.