Easter Sunday Sermon - Fr Charlie Annis CR

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

In the name of the Father…

There is a marvellous scene about halfway through the documentary series “Shifty” by the contemporary filmmaker Adam Curtis, in which, in a piece of grainy footage Curtis has unearthed from some obscure corner of the BBC archive, a group of English soldiers at a barracks in Northern Ireland pass around copies of the Daily Mail in which were printed, for the first time, a series of those Magic Eye images that were so popular in the early nineties. One of the soldiers holds out one of the images to an as yet uninitiated colleague and says smugly: “In there, right, there’s a picture, a 3D picture of Bambi. Find it.” “In there?” the soldier responds in disbelief. “Yeah” says the first, smiling even more broadly “in there”. And what follows are a series of absolutely splendid images of this same set of soldiers standing around their barracks office, all with utterly blank expressions on their faces, very slowly moving copies of the Daily Mail back and forth in front of their faces.

“There come moments in society” says Curtis explaining the title of his film “when the foundations of power begin to move. And when that happens things become “shifty””, that is to say, “everything becomes unstable, exciting and frightening”. The moment Curtis has in mind is Britain at the end of the 20th Century, but if there is one thing we can say for sure about the accounts of the Resurrection in the gospels it is that they bear witness to a moment when, for the disciples of Jesus, things had, quite suddenly, become very, very shifty. In all four gospel accounts of the Resurrection there is a pervasive sense that the normal rules governing the universe have suddenly and unexpectedly ceased to function in the way they had before. Bewilderment, fear, disorientation, these are the hallmarks of the accounts of the Resurrection in the gospels. Misperception and misrecogntion abound. Mary Magdalene mistakes the Risen Lord for the gardener, the disciples on the road to Emmaus are oblivious to the presence of the Risen Jesus walking right beside them. Peter and the Beloved Disciple, having “seen and believed”, apparently return to their homes as if nothing had happened.

Not only this, but there are points in the gospel accounts where language itself seems to be buckling under the pressure of its descriptive task, where what was up to that point a basically coherent, if rather confusing narrative, seems to teeter on the edge of nonsense. What are we to make, for instance, of the passage in the gospel we have just heard, when we are told that, when the Beloved Disciple went into the empty tomb, he “saw and believed” only to be told immediately thereafter that “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that [the Lord] must rise from the dead”? What exactly, we wonder, did the Beloved Disciple “see and believe” inside the empty tomb if not that the Lord had risen from the dead? Likewise, what are we to make of what we are told a few verses later when the Risen Jesus appears to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, and invites them to come and have breakfast with him, when we are told that “none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord.” Why on earth, we wonder, would they need to ask him who he was, if they knew it was the Lord? Here, as in so many other places in the resurrection narratives, the basic mechanics of human description and comprehension seem to be breaking down in front of our eyes.

And the result of all this, is that we can find ourselves approaching the accounts of the Resurrection in the gospels like the soldiers in Curtis’ film, as if someone had handed us a copy of the gospels and said “in there is the most momentous event in all of human history. Find it.” And so we set about squinting and contorting ourselves before these narratives, imagining that if we just moved them back and forth in front of our faces enough times we would get it, if we were just able to look at the gospels through the right set of “lenses” then the Resurrection of Jesus would pop out at us like a 3D Bambi.

But that is not how the gospels work, nor indeed how the Resurrection works. The disorientation we experience when reading the Resurrection narratives in the gospels is not the same disorientation we feel when confronted with a trick or a sleight of hand, there is nothing cryptic about the gospel accounts, nothing that anyone could mistake for an intentional subterfuge on the part of the evangelists. They are much too strange for that.

So what is it that lies at the root of all this confusion, these misapprehensions, and misrecognitions? And the answer we have generally been given, is that the Resurrection of Jesus is an event so radically new, so utterly unprecedented, that it is not fully comprehensible within the limits of our present understanding of reality. The Resurrection of Jesus is nothing less than a new creation, a reality with one foot in the old world and another in a wholly new one, and so it is not surprising that it stretches to breaking point our powers of description and comprehension.

That at least is what we have always been told. And on the face of it it is a perfectly good answer, a perfectly true answer. And yet I cannot help but think that it is also an answer that rather gets us off the hook, which encourages us to throw up our hands and start thinking about our lunch. And I suspect that the most momentous event in human history asks a little a bit more of us than that.

I suspect the real reason we struggle to get a grip on the Resurrection of Jesus is that the Resurrection is a reality that lies on the far side of a journey that all too few of us are really willing to make. The very journey we have been following this week. The journey of the Cross. It has, happily, become something of a commonplace to acknowledge that we cannot arrive at Easter Sunday without passing through Good Friday, that is to say we cannot come to the Resurrection without passing through the Cross. And yet, what we have all too often failed to realise is that this is just as true of our own lives as it is of the life of Jesus or of the liturgical calendar. If we find that we do not fully understand the Resurrection of Jesus, if the most momentous event in human history remains something of a closed book to us, I suspect the reason may be that we have not yet truly encountered the Cross.

And if this is true, then it goes some way to explaining a curious feature of the Christian tradition’s reflection on the Resurrection of Jesus, which we might describe as a certain reluctance to point to a particular physical location, whether it be the empty tomb, or even the body of the Risen Jesus, let alone to an image or a text and say: “There is the Resurrection”, but to point us instead to lives transformed by the Paschal Mystery we have been celebrating this week, who have themselves passed through the supreme self-surrender of the Cross and come out into the morning light of the Resurrection, lives “flooded with the light of Easter” as one of the founding documents of my Community has it, that is to say, the lives of the saints. Our problem with the Resurrection of Jesus, in other words, is not that the Resurrection is a historical event we have carelessly failed to document properly, let alone a puzzle we have not yet managed to crack, but that it is a country into which we have largely refused the invitation to enter.

At the very end of the episode of Curtis’ documentary we began with, we are gloriously reunited with the same set of soldiers we met earlier still standing around their barracks office rotating their newspapers in front of their faces and coaxing their features into ever more extreme feats of expressionlessness. And then comes the pay off. One of the soldiers in the middle distance twitches his paper, and a tiny flicker of light comes into his eyes, the corners of his mouth turn up, and he says triumphantly: “I’ve got it”.

That, I’m afraid, is not how it is with the Resurrection of Jesus. There is no trick or technique by which we can find ourselves in the wide open country of the Resurrection. There is only one way into that country and it is through the dark of vale of the Cross. The path may be long and narrow, as the Lord himself has told us, and there may be few who find it, in this life at least, but the Resurrection of Jesus, which we celebrate today with great joy, is the Lord’s pledge to us that there is indeed a shore we come to on the far side of that self-surrender. There is a country over the brow of the hill of Calvary.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Amen.