Real Resurrection Hope

As Easter approaches many preachers will be preparing their special sermon for Easter Sunday - a high point of the Christian year.  But though people love emphasising the wonderful and amazing idea of resurrection and all that resurrected life means they often ignore all that led up to this. Some churches do not have a service between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday and so you move direct from the triumphal entry to the triumph on the cross with no depths to be plunged in between. It’s a bad habit that Protestants have but perhaps we also criticise Catholics for keeping Jesus pinned to the cross in their iconography.

Part of this is because we don’t like to have to deal with the darkness of Jesus crucifixion, suffering, death and burial. It is brutal, cruel and unpleasant and we struggle to find a place for it in our twenty first century Christian faith. It is the same way that death has now been banished from our lives - death now happens to people in hospital at the end of long full lives and is not something that anyone need come into contact with in their day to day existence. And it is also because we don’t really understand the resurrection and we fail in our attempt to come to terms with a simplistic literal interpretation.

I have helpfully heard resurrection described as a process, rather than as a one-time event. It can be seen to be more like Martin Luther King spoke of the trajectory of history bending towards justice. It is a long term trajectory.  God’s planned trajectory for the whole of humanity is long, messy and sometimes even violent. This is a pointer that leads in the direction towards hope. It leads in the direction of life and love. Moving in the direction of love is most important because though there is always more that can be done , love is the restoring force that brings good into bad and has the power to overcome evil. Love may only be present in a partial form but even without showing its full potential love has the power to restore all that has been damaged including especially peoples lives.

Christian Piatt  -  "Resurrection literally means to make something right again. Though we are bent, bruised and bloodied by life’s darkness, God’s love makes us upright once again. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But faith in resurrection means that our entire existence bends toward God’s fullness."

Resurrection is the most creative and positive force in the universe that has the power to make things right and gives us confidence hat whatever the present state of things then they can be better. They can be much better! This is the real hope that has been formed in the dark days of the events of holy week as the depths of human inhumanity have been plunged. Hope does not just pop up out of nowhere on Easter morning!

Roll away the stone to see resurrection

As I meditate on the Easter story, as recorded by Mark, I keep seeing verses that I have glossed over and not really noticed before. One such verse is the women’s question: “Who will roll away the stone for us?” 

There are many stones that stand in our way. There are stones of education, finance, opportunity, unemployment, racism, prejudice, disability, and health.  People often feel that they have been hemmed in by big stones surrounding them and they can’t roll them away on our own.  We need help to break out. These walls would confine us and halt our progress but it is possible for them to be rolled away. And if the stones can be rolled away, the walls that pen us in are demolished and resurrection can come to us too.

This sort of resurrection will be most likely to emerge in a faithful community, attentive to God’s transforming presence. This will be a community where people look to other peoples needs and not just to their own. It will be a community where those with problems and weaknesses will be helped by those who are strong. A community where those with little will benefit from the sharing of those who have plenty. A place where all sorts of varied gifts will be valued and no one sort of giftedness will be considered to be superior to the others.

This will be church living as a resurrection community. Resurrection will always be a mystery but we can recognise it when it happens.  The resurrection story in Mark's gospel ends with the women in awe, fear, and silence. This is the natural reaction when things turn out in a way that is completely unexpected. It is the only response that is believable when the unbelievable happens before our own eyes.

Resurrection seems impossible when faced with what we all know to be the reality of death. But this final frontier is exactly the place that is affected and the empty tomb shows us the way to a new future - a future of possibilities where we thought there were none. The risen presence of Jesus himself is with us when he brings resurrection to hopeless situations and love where you would least expect to find it. The risen presence is there when justice is resurrected in places where justice seems to have been absent for a long time. Christ is alive, resurrected and bringing the possibility of resurrected life to all situations where we need courage, strength and wisdom. To those situations where we can work together to roll away the stones that imprison people and shut out the light. Resurrected we can join together in healing the world.

I acknowledge a short paragraph that I read by Bruce Epperly as inspiration for this post

Doing the truth

Matthew 7:24-27

New International Version (NIV)

The Wise and Foolish Builders

    ²⁴ “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. ²⁶ But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. ²⁷ The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it. Only in the doing of it does the word of Jesus retain its honour, might and power among us. Now the storm can rage over the house but it cannot shatter that union with him, which his word has created.  -   Dietrich Bonhoeffer.