Easter Sunday 2009 Sermon

Easter Sunday 12.4.09

If we have been to all the Holy Week ceremonies we probably have spent more time contemplating sorrow than joy, but we are very glad finally to arrive at the joy of today, Easter Sunday.

The experience of sorrow seeming to outweigh joy is probably fairly typical of this whole earthly life, this ‘vale of tears’, where we encounter so many sufferings and disappointments, yet we live in hope of eventual and eternal joy. When it is all said and done we will have a lot more joy than sorrow, which leads us to conclude that life is worth living and we are glad to be alive.

The final stage is hard to reach but if offers so much. Today we rejoice that we have the hope of eternal life; the fulfilment of every hope; the reward of every good action, the compensation of every suffering; the righting of every injustice.

We celebrate the possibility, probability, even certainty of our eternal life. We make it certain by coming closer to Him.

Necessarily our celebration is still a little muted given we are still in the earthly stage. We cannot yet celebrate unrestrainedly because the final joy is still in the future.

But we have enough going for us to be able to celebrate. We are in a very good position overall! We are a great deal better off looking at Resurrection as against looking at simply nothing, a great void after death.

Christ is risen. Initially we might think, what is that to do with me? Everything, when we realize that to be united with Him is to rise with Him.

We become more alive by coming closer to Him. We begin resurrection here and now. Heaven is not just something that happens to us if we die.

Sudden death, sudden heaven? Not that simple. Heaven is not just a place where they take dead people. Resurrection is not just that you happen to wake up after you die. If you are the same sort of person with all the sins and faults death would not improve anything. There has to be a change in the person, at the interior level.

Heaven is for people who are alive in Christ, who have received His grace, have let Him work in their souls, have had some sort of contact with Him.

Life is available as much as we want, not only life without end as we normally understand it, but the life of the soul, the capacity to love, that which makes us truly human.

Life like this is both promise and demand. To live forever in Christ is the promise, and to live like Christ is the demand if we are to receive what is promised. The key to life is acting in a God-like way. That is how we lost the life in the first place (sin). Remove the sin and life takes its place.

Easter may not yet be unrestrained celebration but it does help us to position ourselves in a much better way.

Think how fortunate we are. We have been created and then recreated. We are born and that is good, but to be reborn is better still.

God could have put us in heaven straight off, but this way is better, despite being so much harder. The resurrected life is better because it is in a sense earned, requiring the cooperation of the one risen. Resurrection is not just a passive thing, something done to us, but a partnership, a covenant with God.

So we have to begin resurrection now. We cannot avoid physical death but we can do a lot to reduce the apparent dominance of death. We can be so alive before death that the actual death is just a punctuation mark in the longer narrative.

Christ is Risen. We are risen with Him, in part already, and the remainder will come if we stay faithful.