HOLY WEEK 1998 - LOVE SO AMAZING

Preacher: Father James Murray SSC

EASTER DAY - HIGH MASS Wearing His Wounds as Signs of Glory

And they went out and fled from the tomb: for fear and trembling had come upon them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

"Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran. Peter and John both ran, but John outran Peter, and reached the tomb first. And he saw and believed."

Terror, fear, expectation, running until out of breath, hoping against hope under the shadow of the known facts of our mortality&emdash; these are the first recorded reactions to our Lord's Resurrection.

But the first experience of the Resurrection is terror, a picture of startled women running out of their wits from the tomb.

They had come as soon as they could, as soon as decency allowed and custom countenanced. They came at some risk, while it was still dark, but they all had one thing in common : they loved Jesus from Nazareth.

They were devastated that someone so full of life was now so dead and buried. They had got a few things together, spices, balms and unguents, to anoint his poor, marred body. They would do what they could, but they were not wonder-workers or makers of miracles. They just wanted to hang on to what was left of him. We know the feeling.

But it was not as though the frustrations of death were unknown to them. They had all experienced what it was like to have the eyes of those they loved look up at them in sickness, expecting some compassionate action to save them from agony, to assuage the pain, but they knew the ultimate helplessness was when the time inevitably comes when there is nothing you can do, when death intervenes.

With the dear Jesus, the dying on the cross was infinitely worse, for here was one who had never failed them. He had always been there to save them from every agony and every pain. He had seemed impregnable, but helplessness had overcome him too.

And his mother had come to depend on him. How her heart ached, so full of memories it was, of water changed into wine, of Lazarus risen, of Mary Magdalene healed, but Our Lady's greenest memory was of standing beside the cross. O how his words had wrenched at her, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?"

If others had forsaken him and fled perhaps that was human enough and understandable. And his more difficult sayings had made him unpopular. She had been afraid for him then, but she recalled that the desolate cry that had so alarmed her came from an ancient psalm about victory and fulfilment, even though its more doleful phrases were what stuck in her mind like a dark music as she sat, exhausted, on the first day of the week in the upper room.

How his voice had lilted, even from the cross; and the words of consolation so precious to her, "Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother."

But the cry, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" was like a sword in her heart. To feel so helpless at his last hour was the final sorrow.

She did not leave the house or go with the other women. John sat with her, but no one spoke of resurrection. It seemed to have escaped their minds. They were all so engrossed in their grief and their guilt; they had all forsaken him, and fled. But the women running back from the tomb were in a state of panic. After all, they were nobodies, and the tomb had been sealed. How ironical that the authorities did remember his claims about resurrection. And you could not take chances. So the women had another anxiety. They might be blamed for the tomb's desecration.

Mary of Magdala's legs were failing her, and, as she ran, she remembered how she used to feel when she had suffered a nervous breakdown and "saw things". She had become the butt of cruel jokes, the target of innuendo. She even noticed that people were afraid of her, but the dear Jesus had shown no trace of fear. He had healed her, and now he was dead and gone forever. His enemies had performed the ultimate treachery. They had taken his body away. They would not even let his poor body lie in peace.

She felt her sickness returning. She was distracted, yet there was in her an intuition which was drawing her back to the tomb. It was like a magnet. She was hurt, nonetheless, when the other disciples had been so contemptuous, when told about the ravaged tomb and the sight of angels. They even said, "You women are seeing things." They had tried to extinguish the flickering hope that Jesus was somehow alive. Those men from Galilee dismissed her and the other women as "tellers of idle tales", and they knew they were not wonder workers or makers of miracles. Perhaps they had been the victims of some cruel hoax.

But, of course, the world remains as obdurate. It is a world afraid of resurrection. We may be afraid of it ourselves! For the resurrection adds a new dimension to our lives. No longer is our birthday the crucial day, but the day of our death, the day of our departure. If the Resurrection of the dear Jesus is true, this life is transitory, and our running after other gods, the gods of money and power and importance, futile. But we have to go through the desolation prefigured for us in the cross. Look how those shivering men in the bolted and barred upper room were defeated by death as the world is.

Every knock at the door alarmed them, and death made them afraid. Death, the ultimate defeat of human hopes. However important you might become, death could vitiate your life. However rich, however powerful, death was the inescapable enemy which turned the gold into dross and power into mockery.

So we are in the upper room, the women come running in to us to tell us the shattering news, and we do not believe them.

In an inexplicable way, we almost prefer to hang on to death, we tend to believe it will happen to other people. We are very human. We somehow feel that we will be immune from death. Yet our baptism plunged us into death and dying.

It is a shame in a way that we no longer baptise by total immersion, although the Prayer Book does direct that the baby be immersed in the font, and our Orthodox brothers and sisters take the baby's breath away in a liturgical dunking which must alarm their mothers. But, if we remember going swimming and someone else put our head under and held us there, there was an intuitive fear that we might expire, run out of breath, and die.

And then when the oppressive hands let go, and we rose out of the water, we gulped the air with unutterable relief. We tasted resurrection.

Mary of Magdala was drowning in her own grief. In the upper room the Resurrection meal of a few days ago was now forgotten, the bread stale and the wine sour, forgotten too the compassionate hands of the dear Christ himself as he divested himself of his clothing and washed their feet. All they remember now are those hands transfixed to the cross as he bled to death. John may even have recalled the psalm again, and the desolating cry "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" And its prophetic words, "My strength is trickling away, my bones are all disjointed, my heart has turned to wax melting inside me. You lay me down in the dust of death".

Did he also recall the other words of the psalm? "He has not despised nor disregarded the poverty of the poor; he has not turned away his face but has listened to the cry for help".

So Easter is a vindication of our Lord's faith. After all, what a laughingstock his name would have been if he had died and never risen again, and never been seen again. Then those who had heard his predictions about his own death and resurrection would have easily silenced the church and made its witness an empty song echoing in despair throughout the world. But remember that what we celebrate is death and resurrection. You cannot have one without the other. It is sometimes popular to put a splendidly clothed and risen Christ victorious on crosses, Christus Victor. The stark figure in a loincloth, dying, is repugnant to many Christians. They want Easter without Good Friday, but it is the wounds of the dear Jesus which convince doubting Thomas. Christ is not a phantom but a reality. He shows us his hands and his side, and so our little wounds are healed, our little troubles defeated by death and resurrection when we turn to Christ.

And we are in the upper room. The dear Christ cannot be held at bay like a messenger of death, bedraggled with the rotten rags of our mortality, smelling of corruption, and he cannot be bolted and barred from entering.

He comes, resplendent in his Resurrection Body, still recognisable, but transformed, wearing his wounds like signs of glory. He makes a covenant with us. How lovingly he characterises us. As Christ himself enters, we are the "blessed who had not seen and yet have believed".

So we reach out to touch him. In this Holy Meal he is our resurrection, sustenance, our daily bread. He is our companion on the way.

So we turn to you Lord Christ, Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World. We worship you for your divine integrity. No promise you have made is ever broken. We turn to you for the divine love which burns within you like a flame. We turn to you that we may catch its light, even on our fingertips, and glorify you. Even in our pain, we turn to you because you have given us a company of love in your holy Church, both seen and unseen. You who have made so many lives your personal resurrections.

From the darkness of death, we turn to you, the bold interpreter of history, so that even the evil and vile conflicts which seem to defeat your wisdom never defeat your compassion. We turn to you in our own anxieties and fears. We are so fixed on places, monuments to death, the passing names of loved ones, and the shame of guiltiness, but we find the tomb empty and the body we would have cherished taken away. We are afraid. We are terrified at finding you alive, so we turn to you that you may unfold for us the eternal mystery of your Resurrection, and we cry out, we cry out with our whole heart "Christ is risen, Alleluia. He is risen indeed, Alleluia."