resurrection

The Gardener of Life: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 17th April 2022 (Easter Day)

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Readings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’

What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?

St Mary’s, Potterne – a lovely place to celebrate my first Easter Mass. © Gerry Lynch

Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?

Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.

Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.

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For the Were Afraid: Sermon Preached on 4th April 2021 (Easter Day)

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Josef Žáček, Resurrection (1988). which hangs in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice, Czechia.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15: 1–11; Mark 16:1–8

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Josef Žáček, Resurrection (1988). which hangs in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice, Czechia.
Josef Žáček, Resurrection (1988). which hangs in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice, Czechia.

When I was boy, the local radio station my mother always listened to in the morning had a daily feature of the wackiest snippets from the day’s papers. One Easter week, it told the story of a church on the previous Sunday, that I seem to remember was in Devon. When the parishioners arrived for the main Easter Day Eucharist, they were told that their newly installed vicar, the Reverend So-and-so, had died suddenly on the afternoon of Good Friday. Nonetheless, his wife had battled on to make the church bright and full of new life for Easter morning. The show must go on and all that.

The parishioners were distraught, some openly weeping as the service began, with a strangely hollow Gloria and then the readings. At the end of the Gospel, some strange bumping noises began to be heard from the giant, two metre-high, papier maché egg, that some of the churchgoers only at that point noticed was stationed just below the pulpit. Soon, holes began to be punched in the egg from the inside by a pair of furious fists. Suddenly, out jumped the vicar, with a cry of “Surprise!

He said his aim was to allow the parishioners to actually feel the sense of shock that the first disciples felt when they realised that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. The parishioners were, however, deeply unimpressed. I think they must have written some stiff letters to the Bishop of Exeter afterwards.

I can promise you that I shan’t resort to such histrionics at any point in my time with you at St John’s. That Devon vicar from 35 years or so ago clearly made a rather crude error of judgement. Yet, for all its emotionally manipulative crassness, his stunt did get across one easily missed point; the experience of the Resurrection was, at least at first, deeply disturbing and upsetting.

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