Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne, 9th April 2023
Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8
Christianity is a very strange faith – if it were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Take Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. At first, she doesn’t recognise her close friend, whom she last saw just two days before; in fact, she thinks this stranger must be the graveyard’s gardener. It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognises that the impossible has happened; that the man whom she had watched being put to death is in fact alive. Yet there is something odd about his physical nature – He asks her not to cling to Him.
In our reading from Acts, another of the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, Peter, has been asked to visit a senior Roman solider who has had a mysterious vision of angels. Peter recounts his own encounters with Christ after the Resurrection. In these encounters, too, Jesus’ physical characteristics are very odd – He is sometimes not recognised until He speaks or acts in a particular way; He sometimes appears in the middle of locked rooms. Yet He also eats and drinks with His disciples, apparently normally; they can embrace Him and even poke their fingers in His crucifixion wounds.
Jesus has clearly not been simply brought back to life, miraculously healed, but instead has become somehow different than He was. Nor is He a ghost or an apparition – He has a definite, tangible, physicality. The new life of the Resurrection is clearly something different from the mundane life of mortal human beings.
Of course, this could all be a story made up by people who couldn’t cope with the death of their hero.