Easter

Sunday in Jerusalem. The sun sparkles on the white stones of the temple, and on the funeral monuments of the Kidron valley below. The Sabbath has been observed as it ought to be.

The people of the city, or a few of them, had watched as three men were crucified on Friday. But there’ll be no-one talking much about that this morning. After all, crucifixions are almost a routine event under this Roman occupation; the occupying forces like to stage a few at the Passover. It reminds the people who’s in charge; it’s a show of strength at this time of tension.

I should think that Pontius Pilate will have been pleased at the reports of his officers around the city. His garrison troops would have been carefully active through the festival, making sure their strength was noticed. Now, before too long the pilgrims would be heading home, and this crazy city could return to what passed for normal here. The tension would subside, and people could breathe easy. Things seem to have passed off without too many hitches.

Gnarled olive trees stand among the spring flowers in a garden outside the city walls. It is here that the man Jesus has been laid. The body was wound around in its grave clothes, before being carefully placed in a new tomb cut out of the cliff face. There he lay now, in a stone coffin in a stone cave, with a great stone rolled into place to close off the entrance. Pilate will have known the place. After all, it was he who had given the order that the body might be released into the care of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish council no less, to be interred in the tomb he had provided for his own future burial. Pontius Pilate had thought it prudent to place one or two men on guard, though; there’d been some popular support for this one.

Anyway, as this Sunday morning dawns, those who occupied the places of power in Jerusalem had retained their grasp on the means of power. The controllers remained in control. That’s how the world is. Nothing ever really changes. A few days ago, pilgrims coming into town from Galilee had shouted ‘Hosanna’, and thrown coats and palm branches onto the road. They’d found someone different, they’d found a teacher whose words burned like fire in their hearts. Was this man going to change the world? Was this the one God had promised he would send them? But now, nothing - the system has won again, as it always does.

Meanwhile, in the first dawning light of the first day of the week, a mysterious and even an unreal time, there are women making their way into the garden. The gnarled trunks of the olives are hazy and half-glimpsed in the white mist; the air is sharp and cold, and the dew on the branches and leaves soaks through the outer clothes of the women as they push past. Perhaps there’s birdsong, but far away. As they walk along the path through the garden, the women are surrounded by a reverent stillness. And as they walk, Mary and the others anxiously wonder how they can get into the tomb to anoint the body. How are they going to roll away that huge stone without help?

Then, through the mist they see the tomb, but not as they expected to see it – for the stone is already rolled away. That’s not good news, but disaster. It means something awful has happened, one more awful thing to add to the awfulness of their grief.

Yet by the day's end both the women, and the fearful disciples of Jesus, will be beginning to grasp a wonderful new reality. They will be beginning to understand that their Lord, the man whose final breaths they witnessed, is not dead, but alive. He has been dead, and now he is alive. And, knowing that, they now live in a different world. The Easter world.

There is, I would say, a Saturday world, and there’s a Sunday world. Those who entered the garden that morning, and those to whom they ran with the message of what they’d discovered there - they are now Sunday people, Easter people - and so are we; for we follow those first friends of Jesus by choosing to meet on the first day of the week, and as we do so then Sunday by Sunday we affirm and celebrate that on the first day of the week, long ago in Jerusalem, the world changed forever. We affirm that here and now we are citizens of that new world, that world in which the system no longer wins, the world in which death itself has died.

This morning is only the start of it. Easter in the calendars and traditions of the Church is not one but forty days - and all those days would be needed for this great mystery not to be solved or explained, but discerned and rejoiced in and lived with. Over that time the friends of Jesus will be moving on from their initial delight - “our Lord lives!” to understanding what that will mean for themselves, and for the world. Easter is not the miraculous escape of one man from death. We are not here to celebrate Jesus the escapologist; Jesus hasn’t survived anything, Jesus has not returned from anywhere. Resurrection is not the same thing as resuscitation; Jesus does not come back to life on Easter morning, he goes forward into life; something new begins.

Illusionists and escapologists entertain us; and as we marvel at a magic show we can amuse ourselves by trying to work out how the magician has managed to escape from what looks to us to be an impossible situation. But Easter is not an illusion; this is real.

We like to hear stirring tales of survival against the odds - solo yachtsmen, arctic explorers, travellers lost in the jungle. If Easter was that sort of escape, it would be a story worth telling. But that would still be a story still set in the old world, the world in which the system always wins.

In the old world, death still gets you in the end, however many cat's lives you might use up in the meantime. Death is still real and final, however cleverly you may wave the magic wand. But this isn’t that story. Jesus doesn’t escape from death, he enters death, he is dead. But on this golden morning he has broken through - he’s left the Saturday world behind, he’s shaken off the chains of death, and not just as a one-off, not just for himself. Jesus lifts from us the sting of death, he breaks its power once and for all. He takes from us the deadening impact of our sin and our denial of God.

Lazarus emerged from the tomb still dressed in grave clothes, saved from one death to fie another. But Jesus has left the grave clothes behind, and his disciples find them lying in the tomb. And he challenges us to be Sunday people in the Saturday world, and Easter people in the world that is still in thrall to the old system of fear and death.

It may look as though the system still wins, it may seem as we hear the news that the old power games are still up and running. On that first Easter Sunday morning Pontius Pilate will have been a relieved and happy man, happy to be still in charge, happy that nothing much had changed, that the Passover was done with, that things were the same as always. But in the mist of that first Easter morning, as a few people have begun to understand that silently but forever the world has turned upside down, the cross on which a man died has become a royal throne, and the love he proclaimed and lived and shared is revealed as stronger than death.

Some famous words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “Good is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, through him who loves us.” Here is the truth of the Sunday world.