Easter Day 2024
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Do you believe that? Do you really believe that?
More than a few times, someone’s asked me that question, on Easter Day. “Fr Gary, do you really believe Jesus rose from the dead?” The answer is, always, profoundly, “YES!”
My questioner can look surprised, baffled or bewildered by this response. Really? They will say again. Yes, I respond. Why?
We live in an age when we are as likely to get our information from rolling news or social media as once we did from newspapers, or by word of mouth. We face significant challenges in that: conspiracy theories, disinformation, AI-enabled ‘deep fakes’. What can we believe? Where is truth?
After all many of us edit a photo before we post it online: to reduce red eye; to clear up spots; to clean up a background. Our image – our reality – is manipulated by ourselves or others with more ease than ever before.
Yet when it’s noticed accusations of fakery fly. A photo of a mum and her kids is edited because small kids fidget and wriggle when photographed. Which’s fine, unless you’re the Princess of Wales… then that’s a sign (so X, formally known as Twitter tells me) and yes, I have seen all of these examples:
- It’s an old photo, that plant doesn’t bud in March
- It’s not her – it’s a body double.
- She’s actually dead (and has been for some time), and this is an AI ‘deep fake’ state cover-up
- She’s been kidnapped/sold to a foreign power / left Prince William for someone else and…
I’m just waiting for someone to suggest she’s living with Elvis, somewhere outside Scarborough… No one in the public eye needs or deserves this sort of twaddle. We pray for her and her family at this time.
That sort of nonsense plays with us though. What if you think the earth is flat, that the moon landings were faked, that COVID vaccines contain brain-controlling microchips or any of the other nonsense. You’ve been conned. So what we look for is real evidence, even if that admits to doubts, has quirks, or even when we know there might be exaggeration.
This isn’t new. If you go read Matthew 28:11-15 you’ll find people being paid to say Jesus hasn’t risen, his friends stole the body… Twitter really has nothing the bible hasn’t already seen…
Much personal portraiture in history has often depicted the subject in a far more flattering and kind light than their real appearance. And gossip, rumour and innuendo aren’t the preserve of tabloids – it’s circulated since Adam said: “It wasn’t me, mate; you’d need to ask her…”
This though recognises belief requires an investment on our part. But it cannot just be an emotional connection – God wants our hearts and our minds. We have each for ourselves to think through faith. We ask why we believe what we do, why that is important and what its consequences are.
The eyewitness accounts that we hear in the Gospel today are compelling. So too is the witness of the Church over two millennia. Scores of theologians have reached the same conclusion: that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, dead and buried rose, physically from death to life. He is the Son of God and offers a central, extraordinary hope, in love, to those who follow him: that we too will rise – that death is not the end.
As a sign, instrument and foretaste of the fullness of that physical resurrection from the dead, he has given us his Church. We are both the living witnesses to his resurrection and conjoined with the Church gone before us, the saints, charged with sharing the good news of our salvation. We are given sacraments, physical signs: not least of which is the gift of Holy Communion, through which we are fed, sustained and nurtured, given grace by God that we might grow in holiness and becoming the people God has created us to be, knowing the hope of eternal life.
Jesus’ resurrection is not just real and transformational for him: it is real and transformational for us.
And because of that foundational belief. We’re called to live as children of the resurrection; to strive through faith and works to merit the promise God has made to us; to become an Easter people whose song is alleluia!
Easter is a call to take faith seriously. Christianity is not, nor can it ever be, nor should it ever be seen as an adjunct to life, a leisure activity, a nice thing that some people do. If we believe the promises of scripture then for every human being alive now there is a choice: heaven or the other place. Heaven isn’t guaranteed. It is not a right. It is not the automatic default – nor indeed somewhere we go if nothing else we’ve just been ‘nice’ in life. The Church holds that Universalism the belief that ‘everyone goes to heaven’ is an error – a heresy an untrue thing.
The Resurrection invites us to discover ourselves the truth of the life God offers and to be changed by it. We have to work at that belief – and that’s not always easy. It has heft and weight in what it requires of us. It challenges the status quo, and so becomes unpopular.
Fundamentally, the resurrection asks us to take life and death seriously. It tells us that physical bodies are important things: that human beings have, each, significant worth, that we are loved and that we can love. Human beings are not simply ‘economic units’ in a free market economy, whose worth is purely to be measured in fiscal terms: cost centres to be rationalised and justified.
What I’ve just described is today’s secular liberalism. Cut free from the shackles of anything as outdated as Christian ethics and morality it reductively technocratically proclaims we’re just a ‘budget line’ a ‘unit’ to be accounted for and axed if we’re economically unviable. It’s empowered by those who espouse Christianity lite: faith shorn of any central doctrines as silly as the resurrection – but Christianity without the literal resurrection simply falls apart and leads to a spiritually bankrupt society. You might think I exaggerate…
Well, much as I like The Times columnist Matthew Paris, I profoundly disagree with his piece yesterday, that ‘assisted dying’ is a thing he’d welcome: “We simply can’t afford extreme senescence or infirmity for as many such individuals as society is producing”. His Nietzschean nightmare should chill us: “Social and cultural pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths so as “not to be a burden” on others or themselves. I believe this will indeed come to pass. And I would welcome it.”
Faith, rooted in the resurrection objects to his assertion: for the life of each of us is precious in the sight of God. Faith profoundly rejects the idea that when you’re too old, too infirm, too disabled, too ill, too depressed, too whatever characteristic you think is little more than ‘fiscal drag’ then the answer is, we’ll give you some pills and shuffle you off this mortal coil as fast as we can, so we who are left can be a bit less burdened by and a bit wealthier without you.
The resurrection of Jesus is here the corrective we need. The evidence for, and the realisation of what Jesus’ resurrection from the dead means, places on us all who bear the name Christian a fundamental obligation. It starts in a life where we worship: to take and eat as we do in this mass, it grows to a life where we ‘watch and pray’ as we have seriously and solemnly, these last three days: confronting death; and lives out a life where we love and serve not just those we like, but those we find it the hardest to love and serve – each other, the sick, the old, the dying, the infirm, the disabled, the migrant, the unemployed, the different, the indifferent, the difficult, the criminal, the mentally ill…
We do this, worship, pray and serve, we are obliged to do this, in return for and because of what God has done for us. He sent his Son to die for us, that we might have life and life in its fullness – because we have worth: and we must share that core belief and the values that flow from it. This is full-fat faith, no cheap grace: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It demands our attention, our time, our investment: we resist that at our peril.
For you and I are loved by God – even when we are at our most unlovable. You and I are precious to God – even when we feel most worthless. You and I are saved to God – even when the world tells us we are little more than disposable sinners – sorry, ‘units’.
So, Fr Gary, really, do you really believe Jesus is risen from the Dead? Do you believe in the faith the Church proclaims? Do you believe that God loves us?
You’re damn right I do, and I encourage you to believe it too if you think that human life – your life – is important!
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
thebusypriest 