A sermon preached by Christopher Cocksworth, Bishop of Coventry,
at the Festal Eucharist in Coventry Cathedral
Easter Day 2023
Acts 10.34-43 / Matthew 28.1-10
Permacrisis
I stood here on Christmas Day and spoke about a new word I’d come across: permacrisis. A state of being in a permanent sense of crisis. That’s how the world can feel: covid crisis, cost of living crisis, crisis of war and conflict in danger of escalating into a calamitous nuclear crisis, crises of climate and environment threatening life itself.
Since then AI has hit the news big time, with all its possibilities but also with dire warnings, some of them from the creators of AI itself that without careful controls, AI will take control of us, fulfilling all the worst imaginings of Scifi disaster movies.
It's difficult not to live with a low level anxiety in the face of all of this that can rise to a fear for our very existence.
The earth quakes
Matthew’s story of the first Easter morning has the feel of crisis about it, and catastrophe in its wake.
‘And suddenly, he says’, ‘there was a great earthquake’.
Earlier in this week one of our sons painted this painting. *See image at top of artice.
It impacted me strongly. It seems to depict a dramatic, eruptive, explosive event. But rather than death-dealing catastrophe, it looks to me more like a life-giving cataclysm that gives birth to something breath-takingly new. And it seems to come from the heart of cross shape.
Catastrophe or Cataclysm?
That’s how Matthew is depicting the first morning of the Easter. That’s how Christian Faith has understood these events in human history, in the material fabric of the world, in the universe. In this place of burial, where the dead lay, life erupted.
What looked like an utter catastrophe to Jesus’ followers: his death by cruel execution under the judgements of religion and the decrees of the imperial state was in fact a cataclysmic event where the purposes of God for life intersected with the propensity of humanity to cause death and re-set the future.
In our family we’re awaiting the birth of grandchild. Giving birth is no gentle thing. It’s cataclysmic. A woman’s body is broken open and a child erupts into the world. [It’s also a holy moment, and sometimes one can sense the angels descending from heaven as did Mary Magdalene on the early morning when Jesus burst from the tomb.]
Our word, cataclysm, comes from two Greek words put together: a deluge that comes down from the heavens upon us. It was applied to the waters of baptism. A few weeks ago I was in Milan in Italy and I saw the baptismal pool where St Augustine was baptised 1500 years ago. It was cataclysmic event – not only for Augustine but for the whole of European civilization influenced by his momentous mind.
Krisis of decision
Matthew story of the resurrection is full of energy and joy and life and a new future beckoning Mary, the other disciples and all humanity.
And at the same time, I think he would also have described it as a crisis. Jewish Matthew wrote in Greek. And in Greek, krisis means decision – a turning point in life.
Ground shaking, angel dazzling, guards quaking, earth’s tombstone moved by heaven’s power, dead man rising – all this demands decision.
‘Come, see the place where he lay’, the angel says to Mary.
And now ‘go quickly and tell the disciples, “He has been raised from the dead”’.
It was as they made their decision to come and see and then go and tell that, ‘Suddenly, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!”, and they took hold of him’.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a crisis for the world, a crisis for each of us. Will we decide to ‘come and see the place where he lay’? Will we accept the invitation to encounter the reality of the risen Christ?
And then, will we go quickly and tell the world, ‘He has been raised from the dead’?
The testimony of millions and millions, indeed billions, of people throughout the centuries that have followed the first Easter morning, is that as we do that: as we decide to believe and turn to follow, as we step out in faith believing that Jesus is risen from the dead and as we obey the call to walk in his way, we will meet the risen Jesus. And he will greet us and we will take hold of him and keep going with him.
‘Do not be afraid’
Matthew wants us to do more than believe that Jesus is present for each of us personally, and that Jesus is present here among us as we meet together in his name, placing himself into our hands and hearts through bread and wine and promising to go with us as we go from here, never to leave us.
Matthew wants us to believe that Jesus’s resurrection is the demonstration that God has taken hold of the fabric of the material, the stuff of creation, the future of the cosmos and changed it.
That’s the point of the earthquake, the dazzling light, the stone rolling away: God is penetrating the created order in danger of death and orientating it towards God’s own purposes for life.
So when the risen Jesus says to Mary Magdalene – who might not be quaking as much as the soldiers guarding the tomb but was surely full of her own questions and fears – Jesus says to her: ‘Do not be afraid: go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me’.
In the face of the crises of life: personal, national, international, economic, ecological it is easy to fear.
But Jesus says to us: ‘Do not be afraid’. I am risen from the dead. Death is defeated. Life has come. Hope has dawned. Believe in me and and turn with me towards God’s ways: walk and work with me towards the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!