Sermon at the Liturgy on Easter Day 2017

Some years ago The Listener carried the script of a radio talk by an American woman.  She had pioneered new ways of offering care and hope among the very old and described a typical institution she had visited:

They were all sitting half dead in their wheel-chairs, mostly paralysed and just existing; they didn’t live.  They watched some television, but if you had asked them what they had watched they probably would not have been able to tell you.  We brought in a young woman who was a dancer and we told her to play beautiful, old-fashioned music.  She brought in Tchaikovsky records and so on and started to dance among these old people, all in their wheel-chairs, which had been set in a circle.  In no time the old people started to move.  One old man stared at his hand and said, ‘Oh, my God, I haven’t moved this hand in ten years’. And the 104 year old, in a thick German accent, said, ‘That reminds me of when I danced for the Tsar of Russia’.

It’s a striking picture: an account of a remarkable therapy. It depicts the effect of the really alive upon the half-dead or upon lifeless situations. It’s an image which mirrors the effect which Jesus Christ has upon his friends.

What does it mean to be dead? Really dead? I guess we’re all familiar enough with the sight of cold, pale corpses in TV detective series or at the pictures: the sheer stillness of a body physically dead - no heartbeat or breath or movement. No doubt some of you may yourselves have witnessed the death of a loved one or of a patient.  You know at first hand that clear sense of a person departing this life.

Physical death may creep on gradually or may happen in an instant. Often much more difficult to cope with is the gradual accumulation in life of the many mental and emotional deaths which all of us suffer. Worn down by ill-health or the demands of a family or work a mother may sink into the numbness of low-level depression.  A father loses the energy to keep up with his friends. The children become disruptive and destructive.  In the midst of life we are in death.

Early explorers in the polar regions spoke of the dangers of creeping death catching them unawares. Determined to be the first to the South Pole, Captain Scott drove his men hard across the Antarctic ice. He often ignored the telltale signs of early frostbite. Fingers and toes were excruciatingly painful at first, then blessedly numb; and finally gangrenous and dead.

To be alive, to be fully alive, is to be aware, conscious and sensitive to the world around you and to other people. It’s to feel pain and joy and the whole range of emotional responses which make us human: to be alert and responsive. To be dead is to experience a lack of feeling, to fail to notice, to be indifferent to your surroundings. Damaged health may drag our spirits down, but the quality of God-given aliveness often continues strongly in people who are the victims of illness or adversity.

And today is Easter Day. Today the good news is that change is possible; that life can be kindled where at the moment all is death and apathy. Here’s how.

Five hundred years or so before the birth of Christ the nation of Judah was re-established after the traumatic fifty year exile of the Israelite leadership in Babylon.  The exile had represented - in a real sense - the death of the old kingdoms of Judah and Israel.  A nation had lost its way, and had ceased to exist except in the minds of some scattered communities and a few dare-devil prophets.  But then, astonishingly, the nation was re-established through the gracious choice of God to act on behalf of his people.  Where once there was death, then there were the beginnings of new life, new life for the nation marked by hope and the values of divine justice and peace.  Suddenly the past was over for God’s people.  ‘You shall dance and sing and make merry … for there shall be a day when you will hear the sentinels call, ‘come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God…’ sings the prophet Jeremiah.   

Dance and sing and make merry! You can almost see Jesus smiling at the astonishment of the two Marys as they suddenly meet their risen Lord on the way back from the empty tomb.  ‘No you’re not dreaming or hallucinating, either of you.  It’s me, it really is.  Dance and sing and make merry!  And go and tell the others that though I was dead, now I’m alive.  Go and do that for me.  Believe me, and hurry! 

Life has overcome death.  Life does overcome death.  This extraordinary conviction was what gave power and drive to the Christian movement:  against all common sense, that Jesus was alive and present.  He had been publicly executed and his corpse had been hastily buried.  The whole thing happened so suddenly that his followers were utterly unprepared; the blow shattered their morale and their hopes.  Later they recalled how this experience had been a kind of death for them.

And then they were completely changed.  They have been born into a living hope by a fact they try to pass on for the rest of their lives:  Jesus is alive and present.  The Jesus who had been so alive and present to his disciples during his earthly ministry is alive and present now.

How does Jesus’ ‘aliveness’ touch the dead?

It had done so throughout his life.  The Gospels record Jesus’ intense sensitivity to people around him.  His sensitivity was such that he could and did speak the truth freely - not trammelled by the fears which often damage our own communication.  Who else in the over-crowded house could have guessed that what the sick man on the ground most wanted to hear were the words, ‘Your sins are forgiven’?  Who else heard the desperation in the cry of the blind beggar above the din of the crowd outside Jericho, and stopped to ask what he wanted - and then gave him the gift of sight?  Who else had the poet’s sensitivity to notice the small things of life - the fading flower, the dough in a kneading trough, the chirp of a sparrow - and to speak of God through these things?

And that sensitivity and freedom and truthfulness - the marks of sheer vitality and aliveness - span Jesus’ life and death and resurrection.  Where he went, and where his Spirit goes, there is life: life which unfreezes the numb, shakes the apathetic, frees up the knotted untruths of our relationships, if we will but let the risen Christ draw close.

It can be painful work to admit our deadnesses and to name them - for ourselves, for our communities, for our world even.  The thawing out of pins and needles in cold feet can be as nothing to the painful honesty required of us before the risen Christ.  But he speaks our name in love.  And he knows through and through the small cruelties of our daily deaths as well as the agony of utter death on the cross.  All that was offered to his Father.  All his aliveness and sensitivity and freedom was surrendered, and is now offered back to us.

Nothing is forced on us by the risen Christ. Life is offered, and our response is invited. The choice is ours: choose life or choose death.  His real aliveness is on offer. Come: choose life!