EASTER DAY, 1996
SERMON BY ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY GEORGE L CAREY IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL
Surprises come in all shapes and sizes. There can be unpleasant surprises like finding that in your absence from the annual parish meeting, you have been unanimously elected to serve on another committee. There can be nice surprises when you learn that the committee is scheduled to meet on 31 February. There can be few better surprises than when you are overwhelmed by an unexpected joy that leaves you giddy with amazement. If you have ever read CS Lewis's book Surprised by Joy you will know what I mean. In that book Lewis recounts how as a young man thinking very seriously about the Christian faith he made a journey one day to London Zoo. He got on the bus an agnostic. Then something mysterious and extraordinary happened which changed his life for ever. He arrived at his destination utterly convinced of the reality of God and the Resurrection of Christ.
In recent weeks, I have studied the Resurrection stories again. All of us need to recognise that we are profoundly influenced by the scepticism of the modern age. We have been taught from our childhood to dissect, to question and be suspicious of anything that cannot be proved by reason or direct experience. Traditional sources of authority are no longer taken on trust. All truth claims are challenged until proven: 'How can you be sure?' becomes our constant and instinctive reaction. Thus, people in western society now begin with an in-built resistance to the story of the Resurrection. How can we base our beliefs about the very purpose of life on something so hopelessly improbable?
Against this background, we need to engage with the question: 'Are there reasons, apart from emotional conviction, for believing in this story?'
Let me direct you to some surprises I find in the New Testament account of the Resurrection. First, it was totally unexpected. There used to be a theory that if you believe something long enough you can convince yourself that it happened. According to this idea, the disciples were so besotted with the idea of the resurrection that, of course, it happened or at least, they thought happened.
That view cannot be substantiated. The Gospel read to us makes that clear. Mary Magdalene and the other women came to the tomb early on the Sunday morning ready to anoint the body of Jesus, a job they would have done on the eve of the sabbath if they had had time. Mary's surprise was total. She ran to Peter and exclaimed: 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him'. `They' must refer to Jewish or Roman authorities and her natural assumption was the Jesus' body had been removed. She did not conclude that He was risen. This presupposition runs through all the Gospels. No one expected the Resurrection; indeed, Jesus himself was elusive on the subject. He gave a few hints here and there, but they were not taken up by his followers. His cry from the Cross, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?' does not suggest he knew in any detail what was going to happen three days later.
Second, the story of the Resurrection shows the male disciples in a poor light. It is clear that they had not expected the Crucifixion, let alone the Resurrection. Their hopes were dashed. Instead of following an exciting young leader into a glorious future, they felt all was over. The times were violent and the men left hurriedly to avoid the same fate as their leader. The women of course had no such fears. Civilised society at the time gave them no status but as a result at least they did not fear physical reprisals for being followers of Jesus. They could watch with Jesus and make sure he had a decent burial with all the ritual that went with it.
But the embarrassing fact is that the men ran away. So we have documents which record that no man had the courage to stand alongside their leader. Shame runs through the Gospel record. Boasting, cowardice and betrayal scar the apostolic witness. They have the ring of truth. A made up story would have sanitised these shameful features of male humiliation. the women have too high a profile in a story in which men are supposed to have the central place. This underlines the credibility of the narrative as a whole.
Third, these dejected and humiliated disciples are suddenly transformed. Within a few days, they are reborn as men of faith, hope and outstanding courage. They are willing to bear witness, even to go to their deaths for the faith. What has changed them? It can only be one thing - the staggering impact of the Resurrection.
A further surprise is the change of holy day. We must not underestimate what the Sabbath meant to devout Jews. The Sabbath was at the heart of Judaism and central to Jewish identity. Yet Jesus' Jewish followers took the extraordinary step of changing their holy day from Saturday to Sunday and calling it the Lord's Day. Only something quite overwhelming could have led them to do so. We know what it was, for it has been spelled out in our Creeds from early Christian times: 'On the third day, he rose again from the dead'.
And ever since, the reality of that divine surprise has been the heart of the Christian faith. Almost every book of the New Testament throbs with resurrection joy. It overturns our understanding of Christian beginnings. The beginning is not where you think it is. It is not the birth of Jesus. It is not the Ministry of Jesus. It is not the Cross of Jesus. It is the Resurrection of Jesus. Listen to Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury: 'The Resurrection is the true starting place for the study of the making and the meaning of the New testament... for the first disciples the Gospel without the resurrection was not merely a Gospel without its final chapter, it was no Gospel at all.` He concludes: 'It is both historically and theologically necessary to begin with the Resurrection. For from it in direct order of historical fact came Christian preaching, Christian worship and Christian belief.'
Of course, the Bible accounts leave us with many questions unanswered. We are left questioning the manner of His Resurrection and the way the appearances fit with the empty tomb. We are left with questions about the nature of Christ's resurrection body. It appears to be the same as before but there are qualitative differences about it. In almost every account Jesus is not recognised at first; not by Mary, not by the two disciples going to Emmaus, nor by the bigger groups of disciples gathered in the upper room and beside the Sea of Tiberius. Yes, there are things we do not know and cannot explain, but two things stand out: His body was buried and God raised it.
All this seems academic and far removed from our day. That is not so. First there is the matter of fact. If Christ is risen, then life and love ultimately triumph. St Paul is as blunt about it as any materialist today could be. He wrote: 'If Christ has not been raised then our preaching is empty, your faith is vain and you are dead in your sins. And we are of all men most to be pitied.' He was a realist, he knew that the fact of the Resurrection is the bedrock on which Christianity rests. It is the Church's message of eternal hope to the world. What a wonderful gift it is from God to all people. Life for all who come to God. Come, all are welcome here.
Second, there is the matter of belief and life. The Resurrection challenges the Church to get its priorities sorted out. Sometimes, in the superstructure of theology, liturgy and doctrine built up by the Church, there may seem to be too much abstraction and too much talk. But here in the encounter with the living Christ we find the essence of the Gospel. The disciples were met by a love that all their betrayals, doubt and fear could never destroy. The Resurrection proclaims to a tormented world that God absorbs all human sin and defeats it with love. It challenges the church to be an Easter people and to trust God for the future. 'You Christians' said Nietszche, 'will have to look a lot more redeemed before I start believing in your saviour'. Too often modern Christians sound and act more like Good Friday Christians than Easter Christians, followers of a Risen Christ.
But the Resurrection message is not just for the committed church-goer. It is for all people. Our society is more profoundly influenced by the Christian faith, Christian values, Christian culture than it realises. A survey released today shows that 50 per cent of the people believe in the Resurrection; 34 per cent do not and 16 per cent are undecided. Those who thought our society was overrun by secularism and scepticism will be in for a surprise. It shows the deep deposits of belief beneath the surface. and there can be no doubt of the goodness and generosity of so many people, whether church-goers or not. We must avoid the trap of becoming fixated on evil.
But there is a drift from explicit Christian values and hope. The Easter message says to us all that if we try to live life without God we shall be powerless and constantly defeated by the chains of our sins, by the fickleness of our nature and the weakness of our will.
The consumer society invites us to concentrate on shopping and short-term pleasure and leave the big questions of life and death to someone else. Commercialism, cynicism and fatalism all play too big a part, crowding out the pursuit of higher things which give life its true splendour. But the breathtaking thing about God is the way he challenges the way of the world and defeats it. The world shames and humiliates, God comes with His forgiveness and hope. The world speaks a word of cheer to the strong and successful, God comes with a message to the weak. The world often condemns, God rushes to us with His love and embraces us with His greeting 'Peace be with you.' Easter says that nothing can kill God's love. Easter is God's statement that He makes things new. In the Church He is fashioning for Himself a Resurrection people, a people who are not afraid of crucifixions because they believe in a God who raises the dead, a people who have the courage to carry the Easter message of life and love to the wider world.
Christianity at its best is never comfortable. But if we open our hearts to the Resurrection message, we too shall find ourselves surprised by joy.
SERMON BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL EASTER DAY 1997
Shalom. Salaam. Peace. "Peace be with you". The greeting is not mine, although I gladly extend it to you this morning. It is the greeting of the risen Christ when he met the fearful disciples on the evening of that first Easter Day.
"Peace be with you". What an extraordinary greeting to give to a group of so- called friends who had let him down so badly. They had done very little to justify the gift of peace. The last he had seen of most of his disciples were their backs turned as they fled in terror in the garden. The last word he has heard from Peter was "I do not know this man". And now he confronts them. He could so easily have said: "You cowards. In spite of all your boasting you ran away. Where were you when I needed you most"?
Yet he said nothing of the kind. Instead he came and stood among and said "Peace be with you". "Shalom". That was the word he used or something very close to it. It is a Hebrew word rich in meaning. It is not negative, denoting the absence of something, as a tired mother might say after the children had gone to bed: "Now for some peace". Rather, it denotes the well-being and wholeness that are generated when the fragmented parts of our existence become one. Here, with this one word, we are close to the heart of the Christian faith; to encounter that peace is to look into the face of God and to see there his longing for his world to be reconciled to himself, and to itself. A longing that extends far beyond the rules and rituals that have sometimes threatened to engulf the Church's life - what E M Forster ironically described as "Poor, little, talkative Christianity". A longing that shows his deep love for his creation and his desire that we should experience the fullness of that love.
Here, in this one word, everything that is dear and precious about the faith which this historic building has preserved is summed up; peace between God and humanity, peace in our hearts; and peace in our communities.
First, it speaks of peace between God and humanity. Easter is the culmination of the life and death of Jesus. "He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good". The haunting words of the old hymn tells us that the peace given came with a price attached to it-the agonising, brutal, shocking and sacrificial death of God's son. That is why Jesus confronts his disciples with this greeting of triumph because, in some mysterious but nevertheless real way, the cross brought a holy God and sinful, fallible and ignorant people together.
People today often say that they cannot understand how the death of Christ could achieve this. I sympathise with the difficulty of describing precisely how it happened. After all, how can his sacrifice bring about such a reconciliation? It is indeed a mystery to wonder at. Yet the power of sacrifice is still a potent and understandable force in our world. We encounter it in family life in the love of parents that will sacrifice everything for their children. We see it in husbands and wives who live out their promises to be loyal to one another "in sickness or in health till death us do part". We know it too in the long term sacrificial care given by many to disabled relatives. Such love, we recognise to be very costly and deeply creative. These are all examples of the huge, redeeming power of the love that goes the second mile and beyond in the service of others. That is the love shown supremely in Christ's self-sacrifice, risking everything for others. The Cross and resurrection proclaim to our broken world that God has absorbed all human error, and peace is his gift.
Shalom. But such a gift has to be accepted and made part of our confused lives. It has to be taken up and used. A Middle Eastern saying is "if you wish to walk in someone else's shoes, you have to take off your own". If you and I wish to know the peace of God we must follow the peace-giver and walk in his way and bear his cross.
Secondly Christ's gift is one of peace in our hearts. As he came to those disciples that first Easter Day, so he offered them not only peace with God, but peace within themselves.
Go into any bookshop. Look along the shelves and it will not be long before you will find a series of titles offering help to their readers to discover an inner peace built on self acceptance and inner reconciliation.
The search for such a peace is one of the most powerful forces affecting this generation and I do not doubt for a moment that there is something gained from such books. There are wonderful capabilities within each one of us which, if exercised properly, can result in considerable inner healing. Yet the tragedy is that so many of us spend so much time seeking to find such peace within ourselves - whilst at the same time ignoring the one who offers us his gift of peace. Take, for example, the question of forgiveness. No doubt we should acknowledge our faults, analyse and share any feelings of guilt and try to be more aware of our own good and bad points. But what self-analysis cannot bring is a knowledge of true forgiveness. For that forgiveness and that reconciliation can only come as we receive it as a gift from another.
For that is part of the richness of shalom. It is a gift to be accepted and to be integrated into our confused lives. And by the same token, we can then seek to offer it to others. It is not something to be kept to ourselves, but to be shared.
Thirdly Christ's words speak of peace in our communities. If "shalom" means "wholeness" and "making fragmented pieces one" we need only to think of the divisions in our communities to see the urgent need for such a peace - for God's peace - to prevail in our churches and our world. Our task as a Church is to share Christ's peace with his world and the world will look more to our actions towards one another than to our words in judging the significance of our message. Only in a fierce commitment to that "shalom of God that passes all understanding" will we be able to overcome the fragmentation that brings into disrepute the mission of the Church in many parts of our world.
And in the wider society, the need for God's "shalom" is as great as ever. Perhaps this is most obvious in those parts of the world disfigured by violent community conflicts. But there is excessive fragmentation within our own society too. Despite its richness and its many other virtues there are still too many people who are excluded from a proper share in its resources and opportunities. Too many people - especially young people - feel rejected and undervalued. There is too much cynicism - too much suspicion, blame and envy. Racism lurks in the corners of our national life. The high level of crime causes distrust, anxiety, and pain. There is, I believe, a weakened sense of what binds us together despite our differences. There is also profound confusion about the moral rules which underpin a just and good society. Yes, we need the healing power of God's shalom.
Moreover, many people in different sectors of society feel that their life chances are tossed around by powerful, technological, economic and social changes over which they have no control. As Charles Handy put it recently: "the trouble is that the more I see of the world the more I seem to be only a pimple. What difference can I make? Let me just be busy with my own little life. But, even there, there is no certainty".
But there is no need to give way to such despair. For we know the difference God makes to each of us. We know the difference we can make with his help to those near and dear to us, and we know how the culmination effects of what individuals and families do can add up to the tide of Christian love which can transform the world.
And this is where Easter faith still has the power to change our world and transform our hopes. "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again". We shall exclaim in a short while as we recall his death and passion. This is not a wish; it is the heart of the Christian faith. Easter is the banner of the Church's faith, proclaiming that God values each one of us and wants us to join his never-ending task of reconciliation. To be sure this task may seem, at times, hopeless and futile when we look at the world's problems. But no Christian gives up hoping, believing and working for God's peace to prevail. "Peace be with you" and yet God's peace is no sedative. He does not give it to us to take away from the conflicts of the world. Rather those who enjoy that peace find themselves pitched into the centre of the fiercest battles for the soul of humanity. That was true for Jesus as had walked the way of the Cross. It was true for Peter and his fellow disciples as they went to share the Good News. It is true today for many of our fellow believers as they suffer for their faith, whether in the Sudan or elsewhere.
In a short while, as we go from this place, the invitation will be given "to go in peace, to love and serve the Lord". Let us hear them afresh from the Risen Lord. Let us hear them as a cry of victory - for the peace he has won for us. Let us hear them as a cause for rejoicing - for the forgiveness he alone can bring. Let us hear them as a challenge to service - as we go out in the power of his Spirit. Shalom. Salaam. Peace.
Canon James Rosenthal Director of Communications, The Anglican Communion London, England Editor, ANGLICAN WORLD