The First Day

Preached at Holmfirth Methodist Church
24th April 2014: Shoppers’ Service
John 20:1-18

Resurrection is confusing. Every year we read the story, we hear it explained; but somehow it never gets any less strange. In fact, the more we think about it, the stranger it seems to get. Resurrection is simply not something we’re accustomed to. We listen politely as Mary runs to tell us that she’s seen the Lord, but secretly we’re wondering what on earth she’s on about. It’s like she’s speaking another language. She can’t, after all, mean that Jesus is alive and has met with her in person—that’d be crazy, that’d be downright ridiculous. She must mean something else; anything but the plain, straight-forward meaning of her words.

We’ve been conditioned into thinking that death is the end, the great unavoidable full stop at the end of life. It’s like we’ve grown up every day of our lives being taught that the earth is flat and one day Ferdinand Magellan comes along undermining everything we held to be true. Faced with such a bombshell, the most convenient course of action is to try and make it less shocking than it actually is. And so we call it metaphor. We say that it’s like the bright new life of spring, the rejuvenation of nature, the flowers which bud and blossom after the harshness of winter. Karl Barth rightly says we interpret it to mean that “After each and all evils there naturally follows something good,” that the take-home message is that “One must hope, and not lose courage!”

Scared by the real meaning of resurrection, we minimise it. We try to make it something safe, something unlikely to ruffle anyone’s feathers. We reduce Easter to a vague and woolly optimism that in the end everything will turn out alright. And yet to do this, to make it into a mere symbol or metaphor is to strip it of its true meaning and power. As the American poet, John Updike has written so beautifully:
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The meaning of Easter is simple: Christ is victor! Christ, the Light of the world, which seemed to have been snuffed out for good on Friday is alive and well. The darkness did its worst, but has not overcome him, has not mastered him, has not extinguished the flame. Christ is victor. And because he is victor, because the darkness has failed to smother his life-giving light, death no longer has the final say. A new word has been spoken: “Let there be light.” At Easter, we stand with the crucified-but-risen Christ at the dawn of a new world, the first day of a renewed creation.

John, in his telling of the Easter story, shows us what the resurrection really means. He begins, telling us that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb on the first day of the week, while it was still dark. For Jews, the last day of the week, the Sabbath, was Saturday—the day God rested from his labours in creation. John (with the other Gospel writers) is keen to tell us that Christ rose on a Sunday, day one of a new week. What stands out, however, are those five small, seemingly insignificant words, “While it was still dark.” Matthew, Mark and Luke, when they tell the story simply say that it was dawn. John goes further; he starts his Easter story in the dark. Why is that?

Is it mere narrative scene-setting? Unlikely, I think. John’s Gospel is known as the “spiritual Gospel”, keen to explain to us the deeper, theological meaning of events. For John, the motifs of light and darkness, day and night, are hugely symbolic. When, for instance, Nicodemus comes to Jesus in John 3 failing to understand who he is, we’re told that the encounter happens in the thick of night. When it comes to spiritual things, Nicodemus is, quite literally, in the dark. When, on the other hand, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman in John 4 and she realises who Jesus is, we’re told quite conversely that the action occurred in midst of the noonday sun. Remember also that John’s Gospel begins not with the nativity, but with a poem about Christ the Word who was with God in the beginning—a beginning in which “darkness was over the face of the deep.” John is trying to tell us something.

But that’s not all. Look at where the drama takes place—in a garden. The great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. Co-incidence? I don’t think so. This is meant to remind us of Eden. Eden was the place in which humans enjoyed intimate fellowship with God. Though our sin separated us from God, John is trying to tell us that through the risen Jesus, the way back to God now stands open. What’s more, whereas God once put two of the heavenly host to stand guard at the entrance to stop us getting back into Eden, this time they’re sat inside the tomb pointing us to the God who has come out of the tomb to us.

Still not convinced? When Mary meets the risen Jesus, who does she suppose him to be? The gardener. Just as Adam’s God-given task was to tend the Garden, so Mary thinks Jesus is the gardener. She (unwittingly) identifies him as one whose role is to cultivate new life in the world. Jesus is Adam 2.0, which makes Mary the new Eve. By which I don’t at all mean that Jesus and Mary had a Derren Brown conspiracy kind of romantic relationship. What I mean is that Mary represents all Jesus’s followers in a new kind of divine-human union—a marriage of mutual indwelling where Christ is forever present to us by his Spirit. And just as Eve was the messenger of the serpent’s lies leading to death; so now Mary (and we with her) is called to be the messenger of the truth of Christ’s resurrection leading to life.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is about rebirth. Easter means that we and the whole creation with us have been given a fresh start. We no longer have to be defined by sin and death—by our weakness, our mistakes, our insecurities, our failings and our mortality. Instead, we are now free to live as the people God made us to be in the first place—people remade, recreated, renewed in the likeness of our true humanity, Jesus Christ, the second Adam. Paul puts his finger on it when, summing up the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection, he says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). That’s exactly it. Resurrection is about new creation. Easter is the first day of the rest of our lives; the first day of a new life. The question is: Are we living it? Are we living as if Christ is victor? Or, are we still living as if Death has the final word?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Christ is victor! Thanks be to God. Amen.