Holy Saturday
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Saturday 23rd April, 2011
The Resurrection
The Angel said to the women … He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. (Matt 285-7b)
‘Yes, Christ is alive. He is with me every day of my existence.’ Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, wrote these words at a key moment in her pilgrimage of faith. ‘Yes, Christ is alive. He is with me every day of my existence.’ I say that too about my own much less dramatic life. All over the world millions of believers say it, ‘Christ is alive’, sometimes in a whisper or in the silence of the heart, sometimes in pain or in prison, sometimes alone or in isolation; but today, on Easter Eve, we say it together in a multitude which no one can number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, ‘Christ is alive’. Or, as the familiar hymn puts it, ‘Jesus lives’. That is the basic Christian experience which underlies both doctrine and speculation, and without which all other affirmations about the Resurrection are sounding brass and tinkling cymbal: the personal knowledge that Christ is alive now, that He is living in my life and in the lives of others, even as our lives are hidden in Him. That is what inspires and energises, motivates and vivifies our thoughts about what happened at the first Eastertide.
So it was in the New Testament, where the earliest accounts of the Resurrection are all of experiences of Jesus, alive, surprisingly, unexpectedly, vividly alive even after the crucifixion. As St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘He was crucified in weakness but he lives by the power of God’ (2 Cor 134). That is the heart of the Gospel according to St Paul and the centre of his own life: the crucified Christ is alive by the power of God. The stories of the empty tomb come later. They are a true and dramatic and pictorial way of expressing, and to some extent explaining, this astonishing fact of the disciples’ and our experience. In this respect they are like the stories of creation in Genesis, which give form and shape and explanation to our consciousness of our own existence, our wonder at all that is, our dependence on God and our despair about our alienation from the world, from one another and from Him. And now as surely as the angel in the Old Testament drives us out of Eden into history BC, into human life on earth in all its grandeur and misery, so too in the New Testament an angel points us away from the tomb into history AD and into ordinary everyday life, which will never be ordinary and everyday again, because it will be lived with Christ. ‘He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see him.’
Where is Galilee for us? First of all, it is home, where we like all disciples come from and to which we must return. There is no future in failing to face the past. Galilee is home, where we live our lives and bear our witness among people who are like us, and who know us for what we are and for what we have been. It is not an ideal world somewhere over the rainbow. It is here. It is also the place where we first met Jesus and He first met us with a call to which we responded in the springtime of our lives. But since then many things have happened between us and our neighbours, our families and friends, between us and Jesus; many petty acts of cowardice and deceit, of mean spiritedness and treachery; and in so far as Galilee is our familiar past, our experience there of the resurrection of Jesus must be to us as it was to the first disciples, an experience of repentance, of forgiveness, of the healing of memories of guilt and failure and an opportunity for a new beginning, for what Dostoevsky calls ‘The end of the old nightmare, of disgrace, death and decay’.
But Galilee is also Galilee of the nations, humankind in all its manifold variety and misery, with its many cultures, many faiths and ideologies, and its limitless possibilities for the good and ill of the whole inhabited world which press in upon our age as never before. It is there.
Galilee is Fukishima, North Africa and the Gulf; Galilee is the debt-ridden nations and the aids-ridden cities and villages of our globe, Galilee is Westminster and Washington, Brussels and Copenhagen; everywhere at the crossroads of the world, where decisions have to be taken and where choices must be made between the way of life and the way of death.
Men and women of faith approach the crossroads expecting to find Jesus already there, because they trust the message of the angel, the messenger of God’s strange love, ‘He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see Him.’
Two thousand years’ experience of the faithfulness of the Risen Lord gives us the advantage over the first disciples. They had much less to go on. There is nothing to guarantee to the disciples that when they return to Galilee, to their gentile neighbours, to their homes and villages, to their everyday trades and ordinary occupations, He will be with them still. So His message is: ‘Do not be afraid.’ We need to hear that, too, because the Resurrection life is full of surprises. When the disciples went to Galilee and saw Jesus, ‘they worshiped him, but some doubted.’ That is all Matthew says; no commentary, no moralising, simply stating something which was then, is now and always will be characteristic of his followers. Worship and doubt co-exist in the church, indeed in individual believers; they are not mutually exclusive; they are companions on the way.
But what way? Well, the way into the future, the way home and the way into all the world. The so-called Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s Gospel (‘Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… and remember, I am with you always’) is a summary of the early church’s experience of life, lived with the risen Jesus in both those Galilees, home and abroad, called away from the tomb, away from the past, away from everything that smells of disgrace, death and despair. It is astonishing that the first disciples were not satisfied with forming a local memorial society to commemorate their fallen leader, to exchange reminiscences, bewail their loss and pour libations to his memory until they, too, died out with the death of the last founder member. Instead, they resolved in the power of the Spirit to be dynamic rather than pathetic, universal rather than local (‘of all nations’) and permanent, rather than temporary (‘always, to the end of the age.’)
Insofar as there can be any proof of the resurrection at all, it is this, the expansion and persistence of the Christian church from that day to this, in Russia, in Denmark, in England, in all the world. And that means that we are part of it; we are drawn into it by baptism, we are caught up into its dynamic, its movement, its élan. What we have to do is to leave the tomb, the grave of hopes, the sepulchre of sorrows, the burial-place of the past, and go each to our own Galilee, trusting in the message of the angel: ‘He is going before you…; there you will see him.’
Amen.
