Easter Day, 11.00am Sung Eucharist, 31 March 2024

When the Irish actor Cillian Murphy won his best actor Oscar earlier this month, he dedicated it to ‘the peacemakers.’  His award was for portraying Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the development of the first nuclear weapons, subsequently dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Murphy’s speech went like this:  ‘We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and for better or worse we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world, so I’d really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere.’  

It’s hard to disagree with the last part of Murphy’s sentiment.   Peacemakers are desperately needed in so many places, not least in the land of Jesus’s birth: where he lived, died, and – to the amazement and terror of the women at the tomb – was raised from the dead.   But in the light of the resurrection, the Christian faith asserts that we are not living in Oppenheimer’s world, or Putin’s world; indeed our reality is not defined by any form of human destructiveness.   No, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ we see the future God is preparing for us, where peace does prevail, and in the words of Isaiah, death is swallowed up and tears will be wiped from all faces.  And this future is beginning now: in Christ a new world and a new age is inaugurated. 

There will be no further revelation of God.   The decisive difference has been made.   God’s kingdom has begun.   Christ is risen.   He is set free from death, set free to always be at work in our world, to be at work in us, to be at work in the peacemakers and reconcilers.   Jesus has opened up a new and living way, inviting us to embody in our lives, individually and together, the new age he has begun, raised by God the Father in the power of the Spirit.   This is God’s world, no-one else’s. 

Just over three months ago we gathered for Christmas worship – you can still see our BBC1 midnight mass on iPlayer – and we heard of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus ordering a census.   Backed up by the imperial armies, he decreed that everyone, for tax purposes, must return to their home town: disobeying was not an option.  And so the lodging places are full, and a baby is born in a stable.  That baby grew into a man who overturned our expectations of what is possible.  Beginning with just twelve followers, as his story unfolded hundreds, then thousands, and ultimately millions of people let go of their old gods and the harsh beliefs that went with them.  They were remade, reborn, into God’s new world of generous, self-giving love, in which violence and death are no longer the last word.   

What can a new baby do against the might of the Empire?   We know how that one turned out, with Caesar Augustus now just a footnote in the story of Jesus.  What can we do in world so full of hurt and seemingly impossible problems?   We are still working this out, but in company with the risen Jesus we need not be overwhelmed by all that faces us. Despite the gravity of our times, we can live with hope in our hearts, for Christ is risen and free. 

Oppenheimer won best film at the Oscars, while best international film was The Zone of Interest.   It dramatizes the life of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss, his wife Hedwig, and their children.   They live in a lovely house and garden with a swimming pool, while over the wall come the sounds of a concentration camp at work, with screams and shouts and shots.   The Hoss family are well aware of what is going on, but for the most part they simply ignore it and get on with their lives – school, meals, gardening, socialising.   The appalling suffering and death of others becomes a kind of ambient noise that occasionally disturbs  them - but not too much. 

This is a film intended to be just as much about the present as the past.   The Hoss family are uncomfortably like the rest of us, content to get on with our lives while all too often the suffering and need of others is relegated to the background, the other side of the wall, not least the contemporary horrors of Gaza and Ukraine. 

In our current Cathedral ‘What’s On’ guide I quote the great Augustine of Hippo: ‘We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.’  And so we are.   But our rightful celebrations today are not disconnected from the reality of suffering.  They do not reduce the pain of the world to ambient noise.  On Maundy Thursday evening we began the Paschal or Easter Triduum, three days in which recall the foundational events of the Christian faith: Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, and instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper; Jesus’s arrest, trial, crucifixion and death, and his resurrection.   Yesterday we lit the Paschal Candle for the first time, on Holy Saturday, the day in which the Apostles Creed tells us Christ descended even to hell.     

Hell symbolises all that is not God, the ultimate place of suffering and death.   And the risen Christ is not disconnected from this reality, rather it is precisely from here that the resurrection begins.   

In your order of service is printed an icon of the resurrection, alongside a Garrick Palmer painting from our current ‘Lazarus Raised’ exhibition.  In the Palmer painting, Lazarus sits up in his coffin, mouth open, as though gasping for air.   Although we don’t know how old he was, his face bears the marks of struggle, as Christ calls him back to life.  In the other image, Christ is helping two other figures from their graves.   They are Adam and Eve, but not the youthful naked figures of the book of Genesis and of multiple images, including a stained glass window in this cathedral church.   This is Adam and Eve clothed and grown old, who have lived a life like the rest of us: a mixture of joy and suffering, achievement and failure. 

Icons, writes Rowan Williams, take you to the inner story, to the bedrock of what is going on.  And in this particular icon we see that the resurrection is far more than a kind of happy ending to the story of Jesus.   What is taking place here is the remaking of creation itself.   Here, in the image, are God and Adam and Eve.   This is where it all began in the book of Genesis, and this is where it begins again.   God creates the human race to carry his image and likeness, and in the risen Christ restores and recreates us for the same purpose.   The resurrection is the beginning of a new creation – the world really is God’s, not Oppenheimer’s – and in the icon we see this as Christ takes the hands of Adam and Eve and helps up from the place of death.   Their faces are our faces, the experiences that have marked them belong to us also.   They and we are not magically made young and innocent again, nor are our failures wiped away.  This icon is about how human beings, all of us, however young or old, each with our own story and history, may be transfigured and made beautiful. 

In a way this resurrection recreation is even more amazing than creation itself, because it is about the gift of newness, freshness, beauty and vision and glory in lives and faces and histories like yours and mine – and also in the lives of those who today experience horrible suffering in Gaza and Ukraine and far too many other places. 

I have quoted Augustine’s description of us as an ‘Easter people’.   Sheila Cassidy, a doctor who drew attention to human rights abuses in Chile and was herself tortured, prefers the term ‘Good Friday people’.   In a book of that title, she invites us to be more Christ-like in engaging with the pain and suffering of the world.  You can see her point, and it is powerfully made. 

The theologian Nicholas Lash, however, suggests that Christians are really a Saturday people, a waiting people poised between death and life – specifically the Good Friday death of Jesus, and his Easter Day resurrection.    Lash asks us to consider how many Good Friday prayers there are in our world: impatient pleas of ‘How long, O God?’, a longing for an end to suffering and violence; an end to sickness and hunger.  

But it is always the case that the worst situations contain a hint of hope – of patient courage, of human generosity, kindness and compassion.  All is not lost – it isn’t Friday after all, but Saturday.

And then there are Easter Day prayers; expressions of joy and celebration.  Such prayers we can offer for ourselves, in thanksgiving for the good times, and our many blessings.  But only if we’re immediately led back into solidarity with those whose circumstances prevent them from celebrating.  It isn’t Sunday after all, but Saturday; not yet time to rest, there is still much to do so others may join the rejoicing.

For me, I am going to go with Augustine.   Being an Easter people does not mean we have forgotten about Good Friday and Holy Saturday, or have reduced the suffering of the world to background noise.   Through it all we may still affirm that this is God’s world, a new age has dawned, and in the company of Christ we all called to be peacemakers and kingdom builders.  God’s future is with us now, spring is here, hope is in our hearts, Alleluia is our song.  

‘Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!’