Sermon for Easter Sunday 2nd May 2021: Mark 16, 1-8.
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens and Zoom
It has been an extraordinary year since Easter 2020. The pandemic is still with us. In some parts of the world it is still out of control – India and Brazil especially are being humbled before this virus as social structures and familiar patterns of life are brought to an abrupt close. The word devastating would be an understatement.
All countries have been ravished by this virus, and where there are signs of recovery we are still cautious, because nothing is certain, nothing is predictable.
In those countries where there are some signs of emergence, it is easy to think of the language of new life, of renewal. A little more family life is possible – hugging a grand-child or an ailing parent in a nursing home for the first time in a year. Shops begin to trade again albeit perhaps in some restricted ways. The language of the pandemic has brought a new globally recognized vocabulary all of its own, such as ‘click and collect’.
In our usual human haste plans are being made for summer holidays again. Greece is particularly keen to re-invigorate its tourism as so much depends on it – so many people’s livelihoods linked to seasonal work. Governments have to balance public health with the economy.
For those of us beginning to see signs of walking away from the black hole of the pandemic, the standard vocabulary of Easter seems appropriate. From a long winter of death and illness we see a Spring-time of greater glimmers of hope. Thanks be to God for the research teams who have been and are working on vaccines.
Out of the darkness we see now some light. There is a renewed hope that life will return to some normality. Death, in some countries at least, now seems to have been conquered. We’ve beaten this enemy seems to be the political tune of many national leaders.
‘Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird’. Those who have listened to the pre-recorded version of this sermon will know all about the speaking of the blackbird!
It is tempting for us to use language of new life as metaphor for resurrection – and often pastorally and psychologically helpful – but we must not allow our faith to become clouded by metaphors that are attractive and colourful. There is equally a danger that we consider the resurrection of Jesus simply as a metaphor for the new beginnings that humans so often need to experience and express.
At the heart of all the positive images we like to employ as humans, something real, not metaphorical, is going on in a garden where a body had been placed.
The language used by St. Mark to describe this event is rather blunt and a few words stand out in particular – alarmed, terror, amazement, afraid. These are all very bold descriptions of the feelings of those women who go to the tomb of Jesus early on the 3rd morning and discover that the body of Jesus is gone.
These are not the words that we would normally use to describe our experience of the resurrection – not the words we see beside bunny rabbits and Easter eggs on TV commercials. Yet, these are the human emotions on that first Easter morning.
It is difficult for us perhaps to relate to these rather primitive instincts, because our experience of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus has perhaps become smoothed by familiarity – familiarity of faith, annual liturgical practice and the texts that we read today.
I could be wrong of course, and if so I apologize. Maybe we feel a strong response of awe, of fear, of amazement; we may experience this so powerfully that we dare not share the news with anyone else. If this is how we feel then we share something in common with the first believers in the Risen Christ.
The punchy and abrupt description of St. Mark’s gospel does us all a favour. He sharpens up our faith, and he urges us to share in the astonishment – that God raised Jesus from the dead; has conquered sin and even death itself.
‘Jesus lives! Thy terrors now
Can, O Death, no more appal us;
Jesus lives! By this we know
Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us. Alleluya!
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