Easter Day Sermon

ST PETER, MANEY

EASTER DAY 2010

EVENSONG

‘I handed on to you what I in turn had received...that Christ was raised on the third day’ 1 Corinthians 15.3

There is a special thrill to hearing the testimony of a direct witness to events you have often heard about at third-hand. It was like that for me when I met Michael Ramsey, the great former Archbishop of Canterbury in retirement and asked him about a well-known anecdote about his early life. ‘Well’, he said, ‘it wasn’t exactly like that..’, and, as he went on to tell the story in his own words, his shoulders started to shake up and down in time with his laughter, in his own unique way.  There we were, seeing it through his own eyes.

And here we are, as we read and listen to chapter 15 of Paul’s first letter to Corinth, hearing what we might call the ‘ear-witness’ account of the Gospel as it was first summed up.  When Paul speaks of ‘what I received’ he is linking us with the very earliest church, those who preached the gospel in the years immediately after Jesus died and rose again. Later, some years after Paul wrote this letter, our four Gospels would set down records of Jesus’ life and words, as well as his death and resurrection. But now, as he reminds the Corinthians of what he had first told them, some years back, his own mind returns to the days after his conversion, fifteen or twenty years earlier.

Philip Pullman, well-known for his condemnation of the church, has just written a book about Jesus Christ. Or rather, he has written a book about two brothers, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. Essentially—in his own words—he saw ‘the two parts of the name ‘Jesus Christ’ as like two parts of an atom, waiting to spring apart’. So his book separates them—the ‘good Jesus, and the ‘scoundrel Christ’. 

Likemany writers before him, he thinks of the simple earthly Jesus as a good and insightful human being, while he sees the concept of ‘Christ’ - that Jesus is in fact the Son of God who rose from the dead—as a clever fiction dreamt up by Jesus’ naughty brother, who himself is egged on by a ‘stranger’ - who seems, I gather, uncannily like St Paul. (NB my information is from Erica Wagner’s interview with Pullman in The Times, April 2nd, not from the book- The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ - itself.)

Pullman’s idea will appeal to many people who share with him a great respect for the words and example of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, but have difficulty with the greater claims of Christian faith. Its one massive flaw is shown up clearly by these verses from I Corinthians. 

Remember, Paul did not in the least want to emphasise his own dependency on the apostles who pre-dated him, and who had known Jesus in the flesh. In his letter to the Galatians, he makes it abundantly clear that he had his own call and message directly from Christ.  Yet, here is his unadorned testimony to that dependence. The belief which he has given his life to preaching—that Jesus died and rose again to save the world—was the first thing the early Christians told him when he was converted. And those original eye-witnesses (Peter, the close friend of Jesus, and James, his brother, among them) bore testimony to his death, burial and resurrection.  These were not a different set of people from those who had walked with Jesus, but the same disciples, nor were they conned by Paul. On the contrary, they were the source of the testimony Paul received, they passed on what they had seen.  It was, after all, the awareness that Jesus was the Christ, the saviour, which inspired them to hold onto, and pass down, the record of his life and teaching. Without the shock of the Christ we would not know of Jesus

But it is time we looked more closely at the verses from Paul’s letter and considered why he wrote them and to what effect. For in Paul’s letters, just as in ours (or our e-mails) there is some specific cause or occasion for everything that is written.

Here, the cause only becomes apparent in the next verse (15:12), where it becomes clear that some of the Corinthian

Christians  are saying that there is no resurrection from the dead.  Now, from everything else we know about them, it is highly unlikely that they were—like some modern Christians—uncertain about eternal life as such.  Much more likely, they were saying that real Christians were already experiencing life in the kingdom of heaven, maybe, too, that real Christians would not die before Christ returned to judge the world.  In other words, they were questioning the promise of resurrection, precisely, for the dead. And Paul recites for them that concise summary of the original gospel, quoting what was probably a well-known formula, to remind them that the whole faith rests on resurrection from the dead: the rising of the dead, buried Jesus.

Such faith as I have in the promise of eternal life rests on the same testimony that Paul gave to the Corinthians.  So it must be with anything grounded in history—the anecdote about Michael Ramsey as a curate, 1066 and all that, or the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Our acceptance of the reality of each rests on those who first bore witness and on the survival of their testimony.

But that is only the first building block—the foundation stone, if you like—of resurrection faith.  For here we are not talking about the mere acceptance that a past event really happened. We are talking about the vindication of a whole way of living and believing. We are talking about the hope and destiny of all human life. And these things can never be established on the basis of history alone.

The historic evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is, I believe, compelling. But all it can compel me to do is to try, experimentally, living by the implications of his resurrection.  In one sense, the whole of a Christian life is one long process of testing, challenging and confirmation of the reality of the resurrection, not just as a historical datum but as a living truth. Death, in the end, will be the final test.

It was true of the first apostles, of Peter, James and (later, as to one untimely born) Paul. Even the staggering fact of having seen the risen Lord would come to mean little or nothing, were it not for the daily proof of the gospel. And no-one gives more vivid witness to that daily proof, in triumph and disaster, than Paul.

As Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘by the grace of God I am what I am’. The triumph of Jesus’ love, on the cross and in his resurrection, is known in our lives as grace: the power to live through thick and thin as people ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. In the end, the experiment of living in the light of the resurrection of Jesus seems to become less my experiment than God’s experiment in me—to quote Paul’s words again, ‘it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. 

 I began by talking about the testimony of the first apostles of  the resurrection—those whose witness laid the foundation stone of our faith. If we are fortunate, we can call to mind a string of much more recent witnesses—people who have somehow been drawn into the life of Christ  - for me, Michael Ramsey was one such.  If we are extremely lucky, we know some who are still living.  Nothing we can do can make the same happen in us—and we should be highly suspicious of those who tell us that the light of Christ is already shining in our eyes.  But we can hand on the message that we received, as Paul did , helping to lay again the same foundation of faith.  And we can keep treading the path of  abandonment to the grace of God, which gives life to the dead.