Bishop John's Easter Day sermon

ROLLING AWAY STONESIt's always struck me as wonderfully ironic that the people who unlock the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem every morning are Muslims, a family who've proudly carried that responsibility for many decades.

They let pilgrims in to the place of the awesome mystery at the heart of our faith - the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. You slip inside, and first you have to get through the various services that are going on simultaneously in different parts of the building, and the processions, and the bells and the chanting, and the crowds milling around, lost and bemused by the confusing sights and sounds all around.

Then you spot the queue that'll lead you to the sepulchre itself, the traditional site of the resurrection.

You head across. But what is this? It's an ornate box, freestanding under the dome.

No rocky grave in a garden with a giant stone rolled to the side.

It's all marble and silver and lanterns and candles.

And a man eventually ushers you inside the box like a policeman at a football match, and after a few seconds he ushers you out again.

Your eyes have hardly got used to the dim light, hardly taken in what's there.

What did you see, or feel, or think or experience in there? It all happened so fast you've no idea.

So where was the resurrection? Where was the ecstasy?The good news is - Jesus wasn't in there.

But I don't think all this is quite what Jesus had in mind.

There are so many obstacles around the empty tomb, so many stones to roll away before the risen Lord can meet us. I was talking last week with an intelligent, creative young woman at the Northumbria Community where I'm the Anglican Visitor.

She'd evidently had many stones firmly in front of the tomb when she was at university.

Indeed her life was a mess, compounded by drugs and bad relationships.

No risen Christ in sight.

But she'd come to a point where, through a particular contact, she'd met a curate and found herself pouring out her troubles to him, and then he prayed for her.

And she felt, she said, as if Christ himself had entered the room; as if she could feel his hand on her shoulder.

And she said, 'It was a love so pure I was made new. ' She said it entirely naturally.

It sounded completely authentic. As ever I thought, 'experience is sacred; interpretation is free'.

We can make what we like of that in our own interpretation, but in her own experience of it she was renewed from top to toe.

When I talked to her she was preparing to lead a weekend course as a member of the Community up in Northumbria. That's the authentic experience of encountering the risen Christ.

Indeed I would own something of that myself.

What happened to me here in my undergraduate days was determinative for me, reshaping my life.

The stone was rolled away and the glow of resurrection lay over everything.

So a key verse for me has always been 2 Cor.

5. 17: 'If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation.

The old has passed away, the new has come. ' I too encountered the risen Christ, though it's always hard to say precisely what that means. But I'm conscious of so many stones that continue to lie across that tomb, stones that prevent us from encountering the risen Christ.

The stone of honest doubt has my complete sympathy.

Who can believe that a dead man could rise again? Pull the other one.

But I believe that stone can be dislodged and can start to roll back if we really look at the evidence.

It's certainly what Lord Chief Justice Darling found when he said of the resurrection: 'In its favour as a living truth there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in the verdict that the resurrection story is true. ' Then there's the stone of underestimation ; we underestimate the significance of the resurrection and reduce it to manageable religious proportions.

As Professor David Ford said: 'There is no ready made worldview into which

fits.

If we think we have a framework that contains it, then we haven't grasped the sort of event it is. ' Or equally vividly, Rowan Williams wrote: 'When we celebrate Easter we're really standing in the middle of a second Big Bang, a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe. ' This stone of underestimation keeps us imprisoned in a tomb of low expectations and safe religion.

The resurrection simply isn't safe.

It's explosive.

Then there's the stone of pain, rolled over the tomb.

Again, I understand why this would keep many trapped inside.

When Elie Wiesel saw a child hanged in Auschwitz he wrote: 'I shall never forget the moments which murdered my God and my soul.

I shall never forget the flames which consumed my faith for ever. ' And yet he also wrote: 'We cannot understand it with God.

And we cannot understand without him. ' Suffering keeps us locked away from the touch of Christ - or it causes us to turn at last to that irresistible grace and so be enfolded in love.

Then there's the stone of low hope which lies heavily across the tomb.

Our society can't imagine what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe of joy.

We've settled for giving everything a cash value rather than a moral and spiritual meaning, so our discourse is impoverished and our hopes are minimised.

But the resurrection means that the future is wide open.

In a sense we're just a shadow of our future selves; we're a tombful of possibilities just waiting to get out. So there are many stones lying across the tomb, holding back the risen Christ from touching our lives.

And yet, if we allow that stone to shift even a bit, the resurrection can ricochet around our lives and the worlds we inhabit.

We become an Easter people, even if we live in a Good Friday world. Kiev is sadly in the news at present, but there's a famous story about an atheist rally held in Kiev in 1920, just after the Russian Revolution, when the powerful orator Bukharin was sent from Moscow and for an hour he demolished the Christian faith with argument and ridicule.

At the end there was silence.

Then questions were invited.

A man rose and asked to speak.

He was a Russian Orthodox priest and he just said three words, the ancient liturgical greeting for Easter Day, 'Christ is risen!' And at once the whole assembly stood up and responded 'He is risen indeed.

Alleluia!' Bukharin made no reply. That's the power of the empty tomb, when the stone is rolled away. Easter 2014