He is risen indeed, Alleluiah!

Collect:	Lord of all life and power, through the mighty resurrection of your Son You overcame the old order of sin and death to make all things new in Him: grant that we, being dead to sin and alive to You in Jesus Christ, may reign with Him in glory: to whom, with You and the Holy Spirit, be praise and honour, glory and might, now and in all eternity. *Amen*.
Readings:	Isaiah 66, 17 – 25 (omit if only two readings are used)
	Psalm 119, 14 - 24
	Acts 10, 34 - 43
	John 20, 1 - 18

The Resurrection is one of the five great miracles. It is right up there with Creation, Life, Freewill and Love. All five are equally unlikely.

Why on earth should God bother with creation? He could have just stayed in perfect and harmonious bliss, in the uncreated, but no, He spoke, and it was so. His utterings were the Laws of physics, and all the matter and energy that make up the universe, both known and unknown, seen and invisible, observed, and still-to-be discovered.

Then, having created, He could have remained the sublime master of the heavenly bodies, the great gas clouds, light years across, the luminous dust, the unimaginable energies of the stars, and the great expanses of space illuminated by their light and heat. He could have remained the ineffable conductor of the heavenly symphony, untroubled by all the challenges of life. But this sterile beauty was not enough. He took a risk, and He created life.

The Psalmist imagines God playing with the monsters of the deep, like a child with a fleet of rubber ducks in the bath. And the beauty and complexity of the various life forms must indeed give God enormous pleasure, even if nature is red in tooth and claw. But He didn’t leave it there – He took the greatest risk of all – He gave mankind freewill.

Perhaps that was because you cannot have love without freewill. You can have adoration and respect, certainly, but not love. For there to be love, there must be choice, and only in the risky context of freewill can choice be exercised. Of course, mankind was almost certain to make wrong choices, away from the will of God, and the whole of our world is filled with the evidence and results of those wrong choices, but so it is filled also with God’s next great miracle, love.

You only have to watch the care of a mother Cayman, as we saw recently on one of David Attenborough’s amazing wildlife documentaries, that fiercest of all animals, a hangover from the dinosaur age, to see that the whole fabric of creation is shot through with the possibility love. But it is only in the context of mankind’s exercise of freewill that love becomes a possibility. Gently as she carries her tiny hatchlings in her fearsome jaws, the Cayman is only ensuring the continuation of her genes in future generations. People, on the other hand, can love altruistically, selflessly, and that is the summit of all God’s creative work, because God’s love, and the whole of his creation process is selfless, even to the extent of being self-giving. And that is what Jesus means when He says that God is love.

Now the resurrection is not separate and distinct from the love of God; on the contrary, it is both the logical and ultimate expression of the Love of God, and the best possible evidence, or sign, of it too. In the resurrection, we see the beginnings of creation fulfilled, realised and explained. In that sense, the resurrection is the ultimate defining sacrament, of which our Christian faith, and indeed the whole of creation, is just an expression.

The four Evangelists, as perhaps you might expect when they are trying to describe the pivotal event of all creation, differ in the precise detail of when, how and even where, the resurrection took place. But on three essentials they agree: the empty tomb; that the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples and others; and that the whole of creation was profoundly changed by the event.

The message of love, born first at great cost, and much sacrifice, by the Church on the back of that austere, cruel and loveless institution which was the Roman Empire, has spread throughout all the world, and continues to spread today. Little by little, minute by minute, step by step, in the hearts and minds and lives of Christians and even those of his children who are not yet of the faith, God’s resurrection love finds new expression. Or, to put it another way, the Kingdom of God comes on earth. Slowly and painfully, together with all our brother and sister believers, with many set backs, and much straying down blind alleys and cul de sacs, God’s resurrection Kingdom comes in us, his Church, on earth. Time and time again, we turn away from it, Christians though we be, but time and time again, God brings us back to the resurrection, to its sustaining, affirming warmth and its gently cleansing fire. In our hearts, and in our lives the resurrection is made real.

The empty tomb reminds us that the resurrection is not just a virtual event that takes place in some divine computer, nor even a paper transaction that belongs in the realms of heavenly accounting, but that it concerns real tangible events and times and people. Just as at Christmas the Word of God is made flesh, with all the indignities of nappies and parental discipline, so at Easter, the bruised, tortured and bloodied body of Christ rises from the agony of an unjust and unwarranted death.

Our God is not just a theoretical God, dealing in the abstracts of heavenly mathematics, way beyond our comprehension, but a nuts-and-bolts God who lives and loves and saves, and always has, from the very beginnings of his imaginings of creation. He is the God who gets his hands dirty in the stable at Bethlehem, in the confused Messianic expectations hidden even under the smelly nets of the fishing boats of the Sea of Galilee, and in the politics of first Century Jerusalem, and its strained relations with the two thrones, one in Rome, and the other in Heaven.

In the resurrection, we encounter not just Jesus, but God our Father, and in Him we find all our hungers satisfied. The hunger for affirmation, the hunger for righteousness, the hunger for justice; all are met by Him, Who created us for Himself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Him. It is the resurrection that has fired up the greatest and the largest religion on earth, Christianity, and it is the resurrection that has caused Europe to be more than an insignificant appendage on the edge of Asia. In meeting Jesus, we meet one another, for all are made in his image, and we are confronted by the ultimate reality, in which we find all meaning in history, in the here-and-now, and in the forever.

In that empty tomb all the ways of the universe meet, foreshadowed by foreigners at his birth; the gold of power, the incense of holiness and the myrrh of suffering and death.

Pilate is nearby, in gold, guarded in his palace, content that another threat to Imperial Rome has been defeated at the modest cost of one life – if only he knew.

God is there, the Gardener, who with his incense makes fragrant the whole universe, even this new Eden – and He does know. Angels are there in the holy incense smoke, singing glory, as they did at his birth, for they too know.

Mourning women are there, weeping, ready to wash Him, and lay Him out with myrrh, a royal funeral for the King He truly is. Frightened disciples are there, tinged by the dreadful myrrh of his suffering, hardly daring to believe. Coarse Roman soldiers are there, acknowledging that this truly is the Son of God, but sleeping. And we, in spirit at least, are there, marvelling and hoping, watching and waiting for the changes to be made real everywhere.

But Jesus - He is not there, for He is risen. He is everywhere, He is with all of us, He spreads love and light to every part of creation.

Alleluiah, Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed, Alleluiah! Amen.

Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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