Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The cold war, as we used to call the tension that existed between the Communist Bloc and the Western Democracies is now a thing of the past. But for those of us who lived through it, it was a time of total alienation. The Russians might as well have been from Mars. They were officially atheists. They had their fingers on the firing pad of a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons poised and ready to create a nuclear holocaust–total devastation. In the late 1980’s George H Bush was Vice President and he represented our nation at Leonid Breshnev’s state funeral. The whole thing was broadcast live.
The funeral was as cold and militaristic as the Iron Curtain. Death was death to the atheist Russian realists, but then Mrs. Breshnev came up to the open casket and did an astounding thing. She reached down, kissed him good bye and on his forehead traced the sign of the cross. She then crossed herself.
She had been the First Lady of Atheism, the official representative of a nation without God, and as her last official act she confessed Christ.
God always has the last word because he alone is our hope.
It is Easter. The sights and smells of new life fill our senses. Hearts swell with hope and joy. Jesus has been raised from death-and we too will rise in the fullness of time. Easter says that God is never finished with us. His love is too strong to let us go. Not only us but all of creation too. The most famous single verse of scripture says “for God so loved the world….” It is no only we who are redeemed but the whole world.
Because we are trapped in a world of time, decay and death, it is very, very hard for us to imagine a permanent world-a world without our primeval enemies; corruption and decomposition, wasting away, ageing, rotting.
Yet, all the Easter narratives-and there are many, point to how different the resurrected body will be. Our first one is in John’s Gospel. Mary sees Jesus and does not recognize him until he speaks to her and calls her by name.
How can we make sense of that? We can understand that she was expecting a dead body, not a live person, but her confusion reveals how different the resurrected body will be. Perhaps it will glow with light like Jesus’ did at the Transfiguration. Perhaps it will radiate health and vitality like very pregnant happy women do. We can’t be sure. It’s one of those thing one has to experience.
Even the disciples who meet Jesus on the road to Emnaus walk and converse with Jesus for hours, don’t recognize him. At the tail end of Matthews’s Gospel, Jesus meets the 11 disciples on a mountain too, to bless them and remind them of their mission: to disciple by baptizing and teaching. Yet, one phrase sticks in my mind “but some of them doubted”. If you knew someone had been crucified and laid dead in a tomb for three days-you might just doubt your own eyes.
St. Paul says to the Corinthian church-what has been sown perishable must be raised imperishable. This new imperishable body, this resurrected body will be new. Bishop Tom Wright of Durham England calls the new body which will be raised our re-embodied self. And not only us, but all creation will be new. The last chapter of Revelation speaks of trees that will flower and fruit simultaneously-in other words –they will give perpetual life.
All shall be raised who are in Christ. Won’t the earth be overpopulated? That too will be so hard for us to imagine. The truth is that over half of the people who have ever been alive are alive now. It is nothing for God to redeem the world, that is, creation as well.
As I have told you before, I have flown around a lot. I once flew from Dakar in Senegal to Nairobi across the Sahara-7 hours across a barren wasteland of rock and sand. God promises to renew creation at the resurrection and transform it. God will make the Sahara, and the Gobi, and the Kalahari and Death Valley all the deserts and wildernesses of the world bloom and be orchard and pasture. God promised this renewal to Israel in the prophecy of Isaiah the 41st Chapter; “I will make rivers flow among barren hills, and springs of water in the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water and the dry land into flowing springs. I will make cedars grow in the desert and forest in barren land”.
The point is that God’s love for the world mentioned in John 3:16 extends not only to us who are human but to the creation the world which God’s hand fashioned for us to live upon. All will be redeemed. All impermanence will give way to permanence in the resurrection of God for which Jesus is both foretaste and first fruits.
In raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead the Lord shows us the world according to God. In Jesus, the world is now a new world. It is a world where the meek do inherit the earth even through they don’t have a deed to it registered at the courthouse.
It is a world where the poor in spirit have the only riches, and among the poor the bread is blessed and broken and everyone has enough.
In the new world of the resurrection, those who mourn are more than comforted-they dance before the Lord with their dead-even through they may be still grieving.
It is a world in which the peacemakers know themselves, and everyone else, as children of God, and the merciful know what mercy does; it turns our enemies into new sisters and brothers and the weapons used to kill will be turn into ploughshares and pruning hooks.
The point is that the song and story of Easter need to be engraved in our hearts and minds. It says – Yes you will die, but you will rise like Jesus – Yes this world will come to an end and you with it, but God promises more – Your life will go on and on.
Rejoice, it is Easter and New Eternal life is busing out all over. May it burst out in you as well.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Who We Are