09.04.2023
Sermon for Easter Day by the Archbishop of Dublin
Archbishop Michael Jackson preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, for Easter Day. The Gospel reading was St John 20: 1–18.
St John 20.1: Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tome and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.
While it is entirely correct to see and to understand the account of what happened early on the first day of the week (St John 20.1) as dramatic, in some ways it seems even more helpful to think of it as cinematic. Not that I have a lot of time to go to the cinema, but the key for me to a good film is that in the first few seconds you have laid before you in short compass the key themes and the more interesting twists of fortune that will unfold as the film itself unfolds. That is, if you have the antennae to see them at first glance! The whole sweep is there for the attentive in the first fleeting glimpses. Of course, you also get the chance to join the threads as you move forward with the sweep of the whole film; you are not shut out from the action at any point. It simply is a question of when or how soon you ‘get it,’ as people say.
To suggest that the Gospel for Easter Day is cinematic is not to suggest, either, that it is false or plastic. It is to suggest that it is fast moving (kinema has to do with rapid movement of images). The intricacies of detail show us a series of stills and of tableaux each of which holds our attention and transfixes our imagination in the direction of the fuller narrative of resurrection. Every detail matters. Every second counts. Every movement holds a clue to what will next unfold, not only in what remains of St John’s Gospel but in the future life yet to unfold of response to The Resurrection in the gift of The Spirit. This is what we call church. The rehabilitation of Simon Peter starts here and now. The detail points us in the direction of something significant to come. Peter who had the misfortune to become his own outcast has the nerve and the impetuosity to go into the tomb. Once again, we see the cinematic technique at work: still by still, detail by detail. And we see John, the other disciple, now also having the nerve to go in and in seeing to believe. Believe in what, you may ask? Believe in the reality that earthly emptiness can be heavenly resurrection. Neither of them yet had the confidence to go and tell even though they had come and seen. We are told that they both returned to their own homes. And, in cinematic terms, that could have been THE END.
But it does not end there. Every bit as important is the recognition given to the pivotal position of Mary Magdalene in the transmission of the story of Easter. It has taken a long time for this to become established in the self–understanding of the church, but I think we are beginning to get there. It is, after all, she who in this cinematic presentation of salvation comes to the tomb first, runs to get Simon Peter and John. It is she who remains at the tomb after they have gone off home. Both these stills are important for the future development of this story. She has the need and the nerve to go to the tomb. She has the instinct to inform the two other disciples who might take her seriously and begin the chain reaction of spreading this news. Mary by not leaving, early on the same morning, through her tears of weeping, sees something entirely different. Narrative moves on. But the perceptions of those who observe also changes and has to change, if cinema is to be an interactive medium rather than a photographic exhibition. Mary now bends over to look into the tomb. She sees two angels. Their role is an interesting and an important one. They ask her a question: Woman, why are you weeping? And once again Mary repeats her grief. But then the question is answered. Her joy begins. The Gospel Reading finishes with her confident statement to the disciples: I have seen the Lord.
Often we associate a piece of Scripture with its primary liturgical pigeon hole and, when it has fulfilled its function on the day in question, we almost forget about it until the next year. In some ways, the limpid sophistication of The Lectionary is also its static limitation. Our reaction is prescribed by how the compilers of the Lectionary locate the Lections, the Readings for us. If any reading should have an impact right throughout the year, it ought to be The Easter Gospel. It speaks directly of resurrection in both its complexity and its confidence. Faith too is an amalgam of both complexity and confidence and we ought to seize the opportunity to learn and to live.
The first ‘take away’ that I sense is the willingness to be small and to love from small to big. This is not an automatic progression because life asks of us and indeed forces upon us that we continue to start again and continue to start small. Those early glimpses and flashes of courage and of cinema: the painstaking detail of Mary coming early and then running to share, Peter and John looking in each for the first time in their lives into the empty tomb … and so it goes on. Don’t forget the small when you go big. Each new person who comes to the faith, and each established person who returns to the faith needs these special moments of small for the purpose of big.
The second ‘take away’ is the presence of the angels. Old and New Testaments speak of angels. Christmas and Easter speak of angels. What do angels do at The Resurrection? Angels break the silence. Angels ask what we might call the human question, but it is the angelic question: Woman, why are you weeping? By their probing, they allow Mary to say it all in words that Christian history has never forgotten: They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. And the connection between earth and heaven is restored and reconnected by the fact that The Risen Lord Jesus asks exactly the same question: Woman, why are you weeping? The rationale of pastoral care is laid before us in these few short verses of Scripture. Perhaps we need to find fresh space for angels in our religious understanding.
The third ‘take away’ is the journey from grief to new life. The early minutes and hours of grief are just like what these three disciples show us. Weeping and courage, disbelief and flight all come together as we face perhaps not The Empty Tomb but the departed loved one of our affection and our acquaintance. Reading the account of The First Easter through the lens of bereavement, we empathize with countless people inside and outside the church, locally and worldwide, in Ukraine and in Turkey and Syria and across the forgotten parts of Africa and The Americas, who mourn. The Easter Gospel tells us that, in the Christian understanding, Jesus stands with them often unseen and unrecognized.
The fourth ‘take away’ is the theological resolution of the tension of loss by the experience of knowing on the part of two people who are being pointed towards one another in a new and living reality. Jesus speaks. Mary hears. They both address each other, the one by name, the other by title. In the continuity of shared knowing, Jesus moves the agenda from Resurrection to Ascension. In helping all future readers and listeners not to cling to a physical that is no longer there, he helps us today to address an important aspect of knowledge itself. Increasingly our quest is for information and our goal is accumulation. The Easter Gospel invites us to another pathway. It is a type of understanding that can live with and can flourish in the vitality of change as the dynamic of the unknown.
This is a journey that we began in this cathedral church on The Feast of the Presentation. The versicle and the response went as follows:
Here we now stand near the place of baptism
Help us who are marked with the cross
To share the Lord’s death and resurrection.
The Day of Resurrection holds together baptism, death and resurrection through the glory of The Cross. Its scandal remains our hope.
St John 20.18: Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord; and she told them that he had said these things to her.