Easter Day 2007

Yesterday our children were in a department store not far from here when lo, they beheld an apparition tall and furry. It had long floppy ears and a fluffy white tail, and was sporting a purple bow around its neck. It also had with it a basket full of Easter eggs, and, after some consideration, this meant that it was deemed worth approaching. Later, though, the chocolate digested, and reflecting on the encounter, our daughter announced that she didn’t think the Easter Bunny was real. ‘He’s just a bunny’ she said ‘dressed up as a person’.

At Easter, you see, recognition is everything.

It came early to Northern Ireland in 2007. Held in the dark of uncertainty and political division for so long (held in the dark, as it were, of the rock-hewn tomb), longing for daybreak and straining to catch a glimpse of the rising sun, the citizens of the six counties saw the stone rolled away on that remarkable day when Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley agreed to serve together in a devolved government.

The enormity of the moment cannot be overstated. It’s as though the kaleidoscope has been turned a fraction and a new pattern has come into focus. These are bitter rivals who have spent their public lives spitting visceral contempt for one another. They have made a virtue out of their refusal to compromise or negotiate. Yet we all saw the pictures of them sitting behind their desks, agreeing that henceforth their disagreements will be about drainage and education policy, and that they will be conducted with words across a debating chamber rather than with megaphones and Semtex across the province’s divided streets.

It was a new beginning. It was a moment when new possibilities were opened up to their people. It was an experience of new life. It was an experience made possible not by the magical convergence of the vast impersonal forces that we like to talk about. It was not made possible by the coming together of communities, or cultures. It was made possible by the willingness of two men to do something act new; to recognize one another as the legitimate representatives of their traditions and to recognize the legitimacy of those traditions. It was made possible by their willingness to speak with one another, their willingness to attempt to relate to one another and work together. It was made possible by their readiness to see one another as human.

Yet another powerful image from the weeks of Lent is the video recording of the British captives in Tehran. The Iranian government released them because it understands well the power of recognition, the power of faces and names. It is easy to gloss the capture of unnamed personnel, and more difficult to ignore the plight of a young Leading Seaman who has spoken cheerfully about the circumstances of her imprisonment. Knowing one another’s names, using them (as, behind closed doors, I suppose Paisley and Adams must) begins to draw us into relationship with one another, to open us up to one another. It nudges the kaleidoscope just a fraction, and brings a new pattern into focus.

What is the connection between these stories of the last weeks and the great feast we celebrate today? Well, we live in Da Vinci Code days, and Lent began with the sensational discovery of some bones in an ossuary supposedly bearing the names of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The excitement was short-lived as the very ordinary nature of the find became quickly obvious. However if the headlines prod us into thinking a little more carefully about what we understand when we speak of the resurrection, or even what we understand when we speak of God, then we need to thank those who created them. Perhaps the discovery of an empty tomb and the physical appearance of Jesus on Easter morning are unimportant nowadays; perhaps those events were actually an intense spiritual awakening for Mary and the other first witnesses; perhaps we could believe in the risen Jesus even if we were confronted with unmistakeable evidence of his mortal remains.

I’m not convinced. What has always set Christianity apart from other faiths, and made it ridiculous and even offensive to our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters is the extraordinary claim that in Jesus Christ God became man; that in the tortured figure of the crucified one we see simultaneously the immortal and invisible Creator of everything that is. Ours is a faith of paradox, a faith that understands God to be beyond our knowing and yet also longing to be known in Christ Jesus; a faith that believes God to be utterly different to the world he created out of nothing, and yet entirely present within it in the life of the carpenter from Nazareth. Matter matters to this God; it is how he chooses to make himself known to us. If the resurrection of his Son is a purely intellectual event, perceptible only to the inner eye of faith; if the stories of his resurrection appearances are mythological ways of explaining this deep truth to the simple, then our God is no God but instead a schizophrenic fly-by-night who lurches from one idiom of communication to another, without integrity or consistency. But surely that is not the God we worship. Our faith is not some rarefied formula for spiritual ecstasy. It is flesh and blood, tears and laughter, oil and water, bread and wine. In the dying of his Son God does not abandon the stuff of our living. He embraces and transforms it.

So the encounter in the garden in the early morning of the first Easter Day is above all a moment not of awareness or of awakening, but of recognition. The resurrection means nothing until the grieving woman is called by her first name: ‘Mary’. Only then can the new life take hold of her; only then can she take hold of the new life that she is being offered. Christ speaking her name changes everything as surely as does Ulster’s old adversaries speaking each other’s names. In that moment she knows that she is in the presence of a power greater than she can possibly understand. The one who has died is speaking to her. And in that moment she knows too that the nature of that power is love, for he is speaking her name. She is recognized and remembered from beyond the grave and into the new future that Easter is bringing about. The kaleidoscope has moved and a new pattern has been brought into view –a pattern into which we have been baptized and in which we will live for ever.

To God be the glory, now and in all eternity. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.

Easter Day, 8 April 2007