Tuesday 6 April 2010

Easter Sunday 4 April 2010 Sermon

Easter Sunday 4.4.10

Our Lord came all the way from heaven and spent some time with us on earth, and then returned to heaven.

As St Paul puts it in Philippians chapter 2, He gave up equality with God and was treated as a slave even being put to death. But God raised Him up and gave Him a name above every other name.

If we think of Our Lord on Good Friday He was at the absolute low-point of degradation; then think of Him on Easter Sunday as glorious and triumphant; then a further triumph again as He ascended to Heaven a few weeks later.

We could think of these three events as stages of victory.

The first, Good Friday, was a victory over sin. By going willingly to the Cross, Jesus was reversing the sin of Adam.
Adam’s sin was to put his will before God’s. Jesus reversed that by submitting totally to the will of the Father: not My will but Thine.

Sin is taking what is not ours; the opposite of sin is to give back to God what is ours, even what we would be entitled to keep. Our Lord’s sacrifice of His life was totally voluntary. It was the Father’s will but it was not forced on Our Lord.

(It was a victory over sin also in the sense that Our Lord overcame and outmanoeuvred the devil and all his human assistants.)

The second stage of the victory is what we are specifically celebrating today, the Resurrection.
We could call this the victory over death. But for this event we would be resigned to thinking of death as a permanent state and the last word on our lives. How sad it would be to think of death as the end of a person. Indeed there are many who do think this but they are mistaken.

Our Lord’s resurrection tells us there is life beyond the grave, and it is available to all who unite themselves to Him.

So taking these two phases of victory together we have victory over sin and death. One leads to the other. It was sin that brought death into the world; it is the absence of sin that brings life back where it had been forfeited.

The third stage of Our Lord’s victory was His Ascension to heaven. This event is somewhat underrated, being overshadowed by Easter, but it is important for us all the same.

We are promised resurrection but not just to life on this earth. We would not want to live here forever if the world remains as it is. We are raised to a better world, where there is no suffering, and only joy – the world of Heaven.

So we share in every stage of Our Lord’s Incarnation: but our experience to date really only tells us about the first phase, the degradation of sin; the other two stages – the resurrection and ascension we can only anticipate.

This is why so many people in our own society have little or no faith in life after death. They see life lived here in a cynical materialistic way and regard ‘religion’ as pie-in-the-sky.

When we encounter suffering or disappointment in any form we face a point of decision. Do we abandon hope and turn away from Our Lord (as so many do)? Or do we hold firm in the knowledge that what we are feeling is ‘Good Friday’, but the ‘Easter Sunday’ and ‘Ascension’ experiences are coming shortly after.

It is easy to turn cynical but if we can resist that temptation we have a whole world of joy and hope before us. And firm in that new understanding we can evangelise others, being messengers of hope. Do not be afraid. He has gone before you. You will see Him again.

All praise to the Risen Lord!

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