Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Easter Sunday 23.3.08 Sermon

Easter Sunday 23.3.08 Can you believe it?

Imagine if you were alive at the time of the Crucifixion and you went into the garden where Our Lord was buried on the following Sunday morning. Do you think you would expect to find that He had risen from the dead?

We know the story and we have become used to the idea, but put yourself in the shoes of those who lived then and think what a shock it must have been. People just do not come back from the dead.

Even though Jesus had prophesied it of Himself; even though He had raised three other people in recent years, still His disciples did not expect Him to rise.

We might say how slow and dull they were, but we still doubt the Resurrection insofar as we still fear death, and still wonder if it is all true.

When we are dealing with Almighty God we have to be careful not to be too rigid in our definitions of possible and impossible. Nothing is impossible to God, as Gabriel said, and he was right.

We have our normal routines of understanding how things work, but God is not bound to those.
The sun rises in the east every morning and we do not think anything remarkable. If it rose in the west we would wonder what was happening. We should wonder every day that it rises at all. What we take for granted is miracle also, insofar as it happens only because God makes it happen.

We do not think anything is so remarkable about the birth of a baby because it happens all the time, but it is still a miracle that new life has come from nowhere.

So when a body rises from the grave, although it is not common, it is still just another one of those things God can do. It is as easy for Him to make an old body come back, as to make a new one begin.

So we have the Resurrection of Christ. Not so remarkable if we believe in a God who can do anything. It is no more than the fulfilment of one of His promises.

He said the Son of Man would be taken, scourged, crucified but on the third day He would rise again.

None of the disciples took any notice of the last part of the prophecy because they were so anxious about the first part. But there it was: He had said it, and now He had done it.

Still the Resurrection does surprise us and delight us. God knows that we are more likely to take notice of an unusual miracle than an everyday one, so He sends a few unsual ones along.

We wonder like children, and we declare there must be a God after all (even though we thought there was anyway), and our faith is strengthened.

Today is a day to renew our faith that God is everything we always said He was; that He does have complete power over life and death and can meet any need we present to Him.

We are like children going through a garden of delights and discovering ever new and wonderful things. Like a fairy story, except that this story is true.

Many reject the Resurrection precisely because it sounds too good to be true. Life just doesn’t get that good, people say. But it does. We are not used to it, because we are still immersed in sin and the sadness and oppression that come with it. But it need not be so, and will not always be so. There is a glorious tomorrow after the very long yesterday, and Easter Sunday, though not yet the complete victory for us is a timely reminder that such a day is coming, an eternal Sabbath where there is no more death, nor sadness, and every tear is wiped away.

He has risen. May He raise us with Him.