All the Gospel writers agree that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ coincide with the celebration of the Jewish Passover. They draw from this coincidence points of significance both practical and symbolic.
Practically, the Passover explains why Jerusalem is temporarily home to a fickle mob; why Jesus and his friends share a poignant last supper together; and why the murderer Jesus Barabbas is exchanged for the prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Symbolically, Passover has as at its heart the slaughter of a lamb whose blood is poured out and whose carcass is given to sustain the faithful. Not only that: Passover is a feast of liberty, celebrated in honour of the night when Israel’s God struck down the first-born of Egypt and freed his people from slavery.
So the coincidence is profound and multi-faceted, and it is to just one facet that I would like to draw your attention. It is that the delivery of Israel from captivity in Egypt is the defining moment in the nation’s history. God acts to free his people, and in so acting he creates a people. Henceforth Israel understands herself as the community brought out of Egypt and given the land of Canaan. Passover is the distinctive and defining narrative of a distinct and defined people.
So too are the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like the crossing of the Red Sea and the thwarting of Pharoah’s army they create a people and become the defining moment in a new community’s history. The Church exists because Jesus Christ was crucified and was raised. It exists for no other reason. Things that happened over the course of a few days in and around a provincial capital of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago are the reason we gather this morning. The death and resurrection tell us who we are and why we belong.
Who we are and why we belong are live contemporary issues. The emergence of home-grown Islamist terrorism has been a sharp prompt to the current debate about the nature of our national identity, but such a debate is arguably long overdue in the diverse and pluralist society we have become. The concern at large is that while diverse and pluralist it may be, cohesive and harmonious it is not, and it is these latter qualities that are sought avidly by the debate’s protagonists. The hunt is on for what unites the British, and what the hunt has focussed on almost exclusively is what are called ‘British values’. There are suggestions of a British day and of pledges of allegiance for school-leavers and new arrivals, but what is at their heart is an agreed list of the values that we Britons hold dear.
The debate is welcome and the motives often laudable, but this proposed solution is, in my view, far wide of the mark. Democratic governance, the rule of law, fairness: all these would surely feature in the agreed list, and all are admirable. But any process that has those in power constructing the list on behalf of those who are not is a flawed process. More importantly, does not toady’s feast inform us that values alone cannot hold a community together? Values are culturally and environmentally conditioned, and are endlessly susceptible to a variety of interpretations.
What Passover and Easter offer instead is a narrative, an account of God’s actions in history, actions that have brought communities to birth, communities that have flourished for good or ill across generations and millennia, narratives in which we take our place as latter-day participants. There are such things as Christian values, naturally, but values do not draw us here today. We have not come to celebrate the triumph of hope or commemorate the victory of love. We have, of course, but only because we have come first and foremost to celebrate the rolling away of a stone and the discovery of an empty tomb. We have come to celebrate events, events with whose narrative we have joined the narratives of our own lives. We have come because by our Baptism we have been united with the one whose tomb it was and because we believe that in this Eucharist we will feed on his risen life. The narrative of cross and resurrection has endured and embraced us and countless millions alongside us.
Does not the debate about national identity need to discover its own story, its own his-story, a story that tells us who we are and why we belong? I suspect that we shy away from this, preferring to begin from where we are now and ignoring our past, perhaps because our past contains episodes that are shameful, of naked imperialism and of unchecked greed. Yet it contains episodes that are heroic, of resistance to tyranny and of artistic inventiveness. It is the story of people and their struggle, of the pursuit of truth, beauty and justice, of countless deaths and of countless resurrections. It is all this rather than a fashionable check-list of values. And in the discovery and relating of that narrative might the Church not find her voice again, speaking for the Christ who died and was raised, who died and was raised that he might draw all people - all people - to himself?
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