Sermon preached on Easter Sunday 2022: Luke 24, 1-12

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

A favourite Easter hymn of mine is ‘Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain’. It doesn’t have some of the gravity of the grand and assertive, triumphalist Easter songs, but the image is good; the metaphor is descriptive, and it surely proclaims that Christ rose after three days in the sepulchre – and that makes it a good Easter hymn.

Verse 4 of the hymn runs like this:

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,

Thy touch can call us back to life again,

Fields of our hearts, that dead and bare have been:

Love is come again,

Like wheat that springeth green.

It is not possible this year to think about or preach on Easter Sunday without reference to what is happening to the Ukrainian people. It is our Easter today, and we must remember that for most Ukranians Easter will be next Sunday as the majority of the population are Orthodox. We can rightly use this week between Easters to re-double our prayers for Ukraine, remembering that Orthodox Christianity is now in a melting pot, as one Orthodox Christian is pitted in battle against another, Russian and Ukrainian.

We pray for those clergy and faithful Ukrainians who will seek to worship safely through this coming week, and finally make the annual proclamation that Christ is risen! Alleluia! We are left wondering what the background landscape to Easter will be in Ukraine  – those vast fields of wheat that produce so much grain for the rest of Europe –  or city-scape – seeing those buildings destroyed in Mariupol? How will the faithful seek to proclaim their message of Easter hope. How will this message sound this year – in Ukraine, and in Russia? It challenges all of us at this time.

 

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,

He that for three days in the grave had lain,

Quick from the dead, my risen Lord is seen;

Love is come again ,

Like wheat that springeth green.

 

Christ, the new life rising up from those grain fields of Ukraine; the risen Christ walking away from those buildings now sitting in rubble, their structures standing hollow like empty tombs. We pray from the depths of our hearts for our fellow Christians in their plight: Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.

Christ, the new life rising up from those grain fields of Ukraine; the risen Christ walking away from those buildings now sitting in rubble, their structures standing hollow like empty tombs. We pray from the depths of our hearts for our fellow Christians in their plight: Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.

 

The first witnesses to the risen Christ must have been devastated. St. Luke gives us the details. Three women, bereaved and mourning the loss of a dear friend who had been mocked, abused, humiliated and crucified, come on the third day to where Jesus had been buried. They bring with them spices to use in the rituals for a dead body – rituals that could not be done before due to the speed with which the body had been buried. They couldn’t fit it in because, as St. Luke tells us, they had rested from the Friday sunset until the Saturday sunset to observe the Sabbath – observant Jews.

 

The women are named: Mary from Magdala, Joanna, and another Mary, the mother of James, but there is a reference to other women being present also. The women are the first to experience the empty tomb – and they then tell the eleven male apostles.

The message they tell to the apostles is dis-believed. Might it be because these are men, suspicious of what a group of women share with them, a classic case of ‘old wives’ tales perhaps, or is it just so utterly unbelievable. Peter wants to see for himself – and sure enough the tomb is as the gossipers had said – empty. It is now time for all of them, female and male to gossip the gospel.

 

The gossip has never ceased – and we are now the ones who have to live by and proclaim the Christian gospel of the cross and the empty tomb. We are the sharers of the good news, the proclaimers by word and deed, that God in Christ is alive, and that the mystery of the cross and the empty tomb is for all a sign of hope, hope that is so much needed in our own lives, and yes, in the lives of our Ukrainian sisters and brothers, and in the lives of those Russian mothers whose conscript sons had been sent into battle against their brothers and sisters in the faith.

The power of this message is not just about goodness overcoming evil, life conquering death, love defeating the enemy – all of which we rightly sing about; the message is not shattered by the circumstances of terrible human atrocity; the power of this message is that Christ is the pioneer and perfector of our faith and he suffered, and he died on the cross, and that it is through the horror of the cross that Christ walks away, risen, from the tomb now empty. There is no Easter faith without Good Friday. There is no resurrection without crucifixion. There can be no new life unless and until the old life dies like a seed, awaiting that burst of life and energy, of growth and fruitfulness.

 

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,

Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;

Love lives again, that with the dead has been:

Love is come again,

Like wheat that springeth green.

 

Amen. Alleluia!