The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Christ Church, Worton, and Holy Cross, Seend

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

You just wouldn’t make up a story like this. Sure, if you were sceptical, you could argue the books about Jesus’ Resurrection were the self-deluding product of men who had wasted their youths chasing after a good but deluded prophet, then because they were in denial wasted their prime years chasing a fantasy that He had risen from the dead. But if that were true, surely they’d have made up a story with more credible characters?

And even then, why did these followers of Jesus keep believing He had risen from the dead after so many years of being imprisoned, beaten, and killed? More than that, why did people who weren’t even born when Jesus was alive keep following them, even when it led many of them to the same fates? You can make the case that Peter, Jesus’ staunchest follower, was so wracked with guilt about how he behaved on the night when Jesus was arrested that he built the rest of his life around a delusion that Jesus rose from the dead. People frequently do things as strange as this; indeed far stranger. But why would Ignatius and Polycarp and Perpetua and all that lot, decades or even generations later, give their life for the cult of a failed would-be Messiah, of a people they didn’t belong to, from a country they’d never set foot in?

If the Resurrection wasn’t true, this makes no sense. This isn’t just an abstract question for me. There have been times when I would have preferred the Resurrection not to be true. It would have made my life much simpler. But we’ll come back to that later.

Indeed, why would St Paul have turned from being a persecutor of the Church to its most ferociously devout member? We had a little snippet of one of his letters as our first reading this morning. Does anyone know where he was when he wrote this letter about twenty years after the first Easter? He was in jail. He’d been in and out of jail for years. This respectable Roman citizen, who had once made a good living as a motor-mouth religious extremist (as people still make a living today on the Internet) had lost all that because he followed Christ, and endured years of jailings, beatings, threats, for the sake of a tiny little sect he had once persecuted.

Was Paul bitter? Not at all. He considered it a small price to pay for the priceless treasures he had gained in Christ – treasures not for this life, but for the life to come. That is what he urged his readers to set their hearts and minds on.

Here’s another thing – Paul was writing this letter to the Christians in Colossae, which if you like your Turkish beach holidays isn’t too far inland from Bodrum or Marmaris. It’s nearly a thousand miles overland from Jerusalem and Galilee. Within twenty years of Christ’s death, He had followers a thousand miles away, and indeed far further.

How did a tiny sect of provincial nobodies spread so far and fast? You could argue that was because of the early Christians’ ethical teachings, and their care for the very young, very old, and disabled that contrasted so greatly with the brutal and macho societies that surrounded them. But again, you need to ask what the source of that very different view of the weak was. If what Christianity taught was so different from what conventional life experience had taught clever but conventional men up to that point, then maybe it didn’t come from men at all, but from God.

Tom Holland, the Wiltshire-born historian, said while still an atheist that Christianity launched a dramatic revolution in how people thought of the weak and vulnerable, and about things like revenge. That has reshaped how we think about the world so profoundly that today we can no longer quite imagine how differently people thought before Christianity.

The Church is a flawed institution full of imperfect people and it often fails, sometimes dreadfully. But the message it proclaims is transformative.

Not that long ago, perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago, I was so angry with the Church for how it treated gay and lesbian people – including me – that I prayed to God to take my faith away from me. The Church often fails to live up to its teachings. But, at the same time, those teachings radically reshape our view of the world for the better even when they aren’t practiced as thoroughly as they’re preached. And this radical reshaping of our views through Christian ethics cannot happen if we don’t believe the core of the faith that sustains it. The Christian project of the 20^th Century was to try to keep the ethical core of Jesus’ teaching without the claims about God becoming human and Jesus rising from the dead: in the end it just fell apart. What kept me in the Church wasn’t that it was a nice organisation for nice people – that’s the Rotary Club, not the Church, which anyway isn’t always a nice institution. It was that the Church kept the truth of that first Easter – that Jesus Christ truly rose from the dead.

And thus I found the truth of St Paul’s advice to the Christians in Colossae all those centuries ago. For if you seek the things above and allow Christ to raise you, you will start to live, here on Earth, the risen life that will be yours for eternity when you rise with Christ.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!