Easter Day Sermon 2008
by the Bishop of Gloucester, The Right Revd Michael Perham,
in Cirencester Parish Church on 23 March 2008

AlIeluia. Christ is risen.

I have been glad this year to find a strikingly good Easter card to send. It’s a modern picture of the three Marys  carrying ointment to the tomb. I like it because there isn’t an egg, a daffodil or a lamb in sight. An angel, an empty tomb, three crosses in the distance and the three Marys, but no egg, no daffodil and no lamb. I know why we need to have them, and indeed the daffodil is one of my favourite flowers, and, yes, they speak, of life and growth and new birth, and all those are Easter themes. Bu they also seem to imply that the resurrection is somehow part of the natural cycle of creation. And that simply isn’t so. That a man, who was dead, came back to life, left his tomb, and walked and talked and ate and drank and turned frightened men and women into evangelists is not part of the natural cycle of creation. It is the counter-cultural activity of a God of surprises out to challenge the way we expect things to be. The God of the Christians is a subversive God and never more so than on Easter Day.

“Life gives way to death.” Isn’t that the natural order? Look at our sadness when a great tree comes down in a storm and has to be felled. Look at our sorrow when a human being or even a much loved animal dies. And don’t just look at physical decay and death, real as that is, look also at the seemingly inevitable pattern that everything that is good somehow goes sour or stale or out of fashion or declines. Cynical that may be, but it is the way the world thinks and it has quite a lot of evidence to back it up. But along comes Christian faith, faith in the God of surprises, insisting, that, no, the world has got it wrong. It isn’t that life gives way to death, but that death is the entrance to life. And it cites the Easter event as the most powerful piece of evidence for this counter cultural view. Jesus died and the tomb ought, in the world’s way of thinking, to have been the end of it all and the stone undisturbed, but, not only did he come back to life, but it was a life of so much greater quality, intensity and reality than the life before. It was and is eternal. He is with us, wonderfully alive, till the end of time.

From that event we work out the implications.  Resurrection becomes not simply a once-off event, but the way God works. When we die, our bodies may lie in the dust, but our souls live with God. And when, at various points in our life, we go through an experience of darkness or despair that seem death-like, that very depth of darkness and despair is the seed-bed of hope and life and resurrection. That is the Christian counter-cultural faith. The God of surprises is a resurrecting God. He can’t stop doing it; it is the way he is.

Christian faith not only recognises that truth, but invites people to embrace it whole-heartedly and let it shape their lives. For that is exactly what baptism is about, embracing Christ’s counter-cultural way of dying to the old to rise to the new, being buried with Christ in order to be raised with him. It is the life-style that we have embraced, though it may take a life-time to be truly conformed to this Christ-like way.

Yes, death gives way to life, not life gives way to death.

There is a parallel truth that Easter proclaims. Our readings this evening illustrate it. The common experience of the human race is that love fades, passion disintegrates, relationships are time limited. Fidelity, for instance, in life-long committed loving partnerships, is now often seen as unachievable. Eternal love is a hopeless ideal. But the writer of the Song of Solomon makes a protest against that particular cultural assumption. No, “love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave  . . many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it”. And Mary Magdalene’s love for the Lord clearly had that quality. There is a wonderful beauty in their encounter in the garden of the resurrection. But it has that quality because it is derived from, fed by, inspired by the love of God himself. And that is the love that does not fade, the love that is eternal, ever-renewing itself within the loving of the trinity. That is the love with which the Father loved the Son back into life. That is the love that rolled the stone away. And, in contradiction to the culture of despair that says “Love fades”, is this trinitarian love, that is on offer so that, in human relationships also, love may last for ever.

Of course, a God of surprises, a God of the unexpected, may not always seems good news, even to the Church. For, with our biblical authority, our well-developed traditions, our theological niceties, even our liturgical codes of behaviour in church, all of which give us stability, we think we’ve got things sorted. In a way, though we wouldn’t say it, we think we’ve got God sorted. Stability has its place, both in the Church and in the Christian life, but you can over-rate it. Stability can be ill at ease with the God of surprises who lets nothing be set in stone. God is the only constant, God and the resurrection of his Son and love that lasts for ever. For the rest all is provisionality; it cannot be otherwise with a counter-cultural God, full of surprises, whose love leads him in fresh directions and whose Spirit is always making new. And that makes it very difficult to adopt secure positions, safe from challenge or struggle, on the issues that now confront us, whether gay clergy, same sex unions or women bishops. It’s not that the God of surprises is necessarily on the side of innovation. God has some unexpected things to say to liberals as much as to traditionalists. But it is to say that the Spirit may take any of us where we do not expect to go and that calls for an openness and an exploratory mind-set that is not always apparent. Mary Magdalene teaches us that, even through the eyes of love and longing, it takes time, and sometimes tears, to hear the words of Jesus and recognise the one who speaks them.

This God of surprises may not, at first, seem to be good news either for our secular society. For that society is convinced that the Christian faith has had its day and the Church is in terminal decline. Yet all over the place, in this diocese, and elsewhere, the God of surprises is doing unexpected things. There are growing congregations. There is a renewed yearning for spiritual things. There is a huge involvement of the churches and the other faiths in the public life of the nation. And there is the prophetic word that the Church speaks in the name of God, that sometimes leads to accusations of interference in politics, but which is simply the gospel of God’s love applied to the injustices and immoralities of our world. All this comes from a God of surprises motivating counter-cultural Christians, the children of the resurrection.

It may not at first seem good news to a world that does not take faith very seriously. But, of course, for a world ready to be surprised, it is good news indeed. It is good news that life and love are eternal. It is good news if our society begins to recover a sense of the disturbing divine. It is good news that the Church has a living transforming Lord who even gets through doors that are locked and bolted. It is good news that God calls men and women by their name.

On this Easter Day we preach subversive good news from the counter-cultural God. He is eternal and unfading love, who draws life out of death, just because that is the way he has chosen to be. He did so supremely when he raised Jesus Christ from the dead. This Easter gospel is good news for the Church if only it can be open to the unexpected. It is good news for the world if only it will allow itself to be surprised. It is good news for every man and woman who, like Mary, searches for love and for life.

Happy Easter! Alleluia! Christ is risen!