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WHILE IT IS STILL DARK:
a sermon praught by the Rev’d Dr Richard Major
to the Anglican church in Ljubljana
on Easter Day, 24th April, 2011.
© Richard Major 2011
abridging 15iv2001
[email protected]
Jeremiah xxxi1-6; Psalm cxviii1-2,14-24; Colossians iii1-4; John xx1-18.
From the Gospel:
While it was still dark,
Mary Magdalene
came to the tomb
and saw that the stone
had been removed.
In the Name of God,
Father, Son
and Holy Ghost:
Amen, alleluia, alleluia!
Bronzino, Noli me tangere (1561),
Musée du Louvre
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While it is still dark/ Ljubljana / Easter Day, 24iv11
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The Holy Gospel
E
ARLY ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK,
(NRSV)
while it was still dark, Mary
Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed
from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple,
the one whom JESUS loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord
out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him.’
Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two
were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.
Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen
wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on JESUS’ head, not lying with the
linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached
the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not
understand the scripture, that He must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned
to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look
into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of JESUS had
been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why
are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not
know where they have laid Him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw
JESUS standing there, but she did not know that it was JESUS. JESUS said to her, ‘Woman,
why are you weeping? For Whom are you looking?’ Supposing Him to be the
gardener, she said to Him, ‘Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have
laid Him, and I will take Him away.’ JESUS said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to
Him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).
JESUS said to her, ‘Do not hold on to Me, because I have
not yet ascended to the Father. But go to My brothers
and say to them, “I am ascending to My Father and your
Father, to My God and your God.”’
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the
disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that
He had said these things to her.
While it is still dark/ Ljubljana / Easter Day, 24iv11
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ODAY’S
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EUCHARIST IS LIKE A SHOUT OF JOY, except that it doesn’t stop, as a
shout does, but goes on and on. It will go on for ever, until the universe shakes
apart and what is left will just be us and our shout of joy.
Today’s Eucharist is a crashing roar, but not like a thunderclap. It’s like
the crash of a river, way up in the mountains where the water is still white and
wild, and the roar of the rapids makes aweful music against the trembling
canyon walls under the starlight, at dawn, all day long, without drawing breath.
At midnight, when Easter began, the bells of every church in the world rang, as if for the
moment even the words of the Gloria in exclesis were not enough, as if no words were enough.
Everywhere people banged and hammered bells as if they were not going to stop – because in a
sense they do not mean to stop. There it is, for the duration: this is human existence: a jolly
clamour, happiness spilling over into noise forever.
Today I’m not going to talk about the Resurrection of Christ. It is beyond me. The Gospel
reading trumpet-blasts away anything I could say.
What I do want to speak about is something much more small, and dim and out of the way.
I mean, the inside of our heads. I want to talk about our thoughts and feelings. I want to discuss
what we feel this morning, what goes on in our minds on Easter Sunday.
What occurs in the human brain on Easter Day is happiness.
Now, why is that? Because today is the central feast of Christianity, and Christianity is a
merry affair. The symptoms of Christianity are these: joy, hope, good cheer, hilarity, an oldfashioned word for humour; sensual delight, delight in all the arts, especially, perhaps, music; easy
affection, good taste, sociability, friendlessness, appetite, fine carelessness, courage and vigour. All
the fasts and rules and vigils, the renunciations and disciplines of the Faith, are on the surface. They
are necessary means to an end. The end is absolute exultation, which is to say the sort of joy that
overflows from being a mere mood and fills up all experience. This is a joy too solid to worry about
moods. That’s why brave self-discipline and cutting self-knowledge can be endured in church.
That’s why we don’t shy away from the black horrors of Good Friday. We don’t have to treat our
joy as if it were fragile. It is wrapped up in the Faith, and it’s at the core of the Body of Christ. It is
hard as bone.
What is this Christian exultation about?
Despite what outsiders suspect, exultant joy does not occur because we are primly certain of
being right. It is not occur because we are smugly sure of being ‘saved’. It does not occur is not
because church-goers are certified as good. We are not exultant because we have nobly (or
stubbornly, or anxiously, or conservatively) clung to what most modern folk have jettisoned. Those
would be revolting and ridiculous reasons for joy, were they possible; anyway, they’re impossible.
No one is swept into delight of this sort by any religious pose.
No: if we examine the inside of our heads, and track down the source of our Easter
exultation, we find this. Easter lets off in our heads, like a sky-rocket, this realisation: that life is
infinite and death is not. All the things we delight in, and dread to lose, will not in fact get lost. The
While it is still dark/ Ljubljana / Easter Day, 24iv11
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unspeakable joy of existing (which we have not earned and cannot preserve for ourselves) is
nonetheless ours forever. Good cheer, hilarity, delight, affection, appetite, courage, and the rest of
it – these are our deep reality.
The nightmare possibility that life means nothing, the nightmare of utter disintegration,
annihilation, oblivion: that turns out to be, precisely, a nightmare, a bad dream. We are so baffled
by death that we become obsessed, gazing down into the maw and seeking the essence of human
existence there. But this is a mistake. Why seek . . . the living among the dead? the angels asked on Easter
morning. There is nothing much to be found in the grave. Mankind is inherently alive.
The basic pattern of things is triumph. We know about this triumph, and we feel it, because
we see it in a certain person, JESUS Christ, the refulgence of the Father, the overflowing gleam of
divine light. We say “overflowing” because He wasn’t merely God. He poured down, or emptied
Himself outwards, into humanity. Because of Christ, God is Man; Man soars up into God, to His
God and our God, to His Father and therefore ours.
That is the theory, the doctrine. Like all good theory, it is immediately practical. One
practical result of it is the phenomenon in your head this morning: the cascading joy, the Christian
exultation, the Easter hope.
The Easter sensation now going on in our heads will last as long as the world does, and,
indeed, far longer. Exultation is the normal, proper, typical, Christian experience. Easter is the
normal, proper, typical, Christian feast. The Church kept Easter from the very beginning. From the
moment Mary Magdalen told the apostles what she had seen, exultation was endless. Easter was all
the time. Even now, the only point of keeping Sunday as a special day is that every Sunday is just a
little Easter, a copy of this day.
AM DONE. I’VE RESISTED
talking about the Resurrection. I have been as subjective
as possible, attending to only what is going in our heads.
And that is quite enough to wonder at. Not only is life permanently
victorious over chaos; we are allowed to know that it is, even to feel that it is.
Today we know, we can feel, and even see, that the victory of life is now total;
strife is finished.
While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed. It is
still, in a sense, dark; it is, in many ways, a dark world and an ominous universe. But we have come
and seen the stone smashed aside, we have see life triumphant even in the pit of death. We embody
the miracle of rejoicing even in the place of death. Christ’s rising for us is the beginning of the song
of triumph, which is endless as life because it is so strong, and so strong because it is true.
Christ is risen today! Alleluia! Alleluia ! Amen.
© 2011 The Rev’d Dr Richard Major,
Nansough Manor, near Ladock, Cornwall TR2 4PB
24B Jurčkova cesta, Ljubljana, Slovenija
[email protected]