Easter Sunday: Taking out the message
Christians are a people of the message, or to be more accuratel
Christians are messengers, and the Church is the delivery service:
it has been since 30AD when Jesus began it with his disciples.
Today is all about the message because it is when we remember
and celebrate Jesus' resurrection from the dead. “Christ has risen!”
has been the message of the Church since that first Easter Sunday,
and every Christian is a messenger. We only have to look to our
first reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, which tells us
about the first Christians and the first years of the Church. There we
see the message being delivered – in this case by Peter, the
disciple who denied Jesus three times but who now boldly
proclaims he is risen: “We are witnesses to all that he did, both in
Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a
tree; but God raised him on the third day”.
The fact that Christ rose from the dead on the third day after his
burial in the grave lies at the heart of the Christian faith and so is
the heart of the message that we as Christian boths believe and are
the messengers of. Because Jesus' resurrection from the dead
proves that his great sacrifice on the Cross; his self-giving act of
love to open up the way between us imperfect humans and our
Creator God, has worked. As one writer on the resurrection has put
it: “Christ rises from the dead, and by his rising he delivers us from
anxiety and terror: the victory of the cross is confirmed, love is
openly shown to be stronger than hatred, and life to be stronger
than death.
So today, Easter Day, is all about the message of resurrection that
is the message of the church down the generations and now in this
generation. Easter Day also reminds us that as Christians, as those
who believe that Christ is risen, we are the resurrection
messengers. Our Gospel reading today from John shows us not
only the empty grave, and the Risen Christ, who gets mistaken for a
gardener, but also the first messenger: Mary Magdalene.
Mary is one of the first witnesses to the resurrection of Christ; she is
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the first to take out the message of the resurrection. And Mary did
not become a messenger of the resurrection by accident, by being
in the right place at the right time. Mary becomes a messenger of
the resurrection because Jesus told her to take the message of his
resurrection to his disillusioned and confused disciples – Peter and
John had been to the empty grave and looked but John tells us that
as yet they did not understand. They had yet to meet for themselves
the risen Jesus, but Mary had, she has seen him, she has even
held on to him and so felt a warm body that was alive with sinews
and blood and so she knows that she is not hallucinating and
seeing a ghost. Jesus has spoken to her, he has called by her
name and she has recognised his voice, a voice that she was
convinced she would never hear again. Then Jesus commissions
her as the first apostle – for the word “apostle” comes from the
Greek “Apostolos”, which means messenger. We think that the first
apostles were all men, like Peter and John, but the first was a
woman called Mary – and she is chosen to be the one who delivers
the message to the eleven who had been with Jesus until his death,
and whom he had chosen to begin his church; the delivery service
for his resurrection message. Look at what Mary says when she
finds the disciples hiding away in their room with the doors shut for
fear of arrest by those who so recently have arrested and crucified
Jesus; she bursts into the room and changes their lives for ever with
a one line message: “I have seen the Lord!” In other words, “Christ
is risen!” to which I am sure the disciples said “Alleluia!”
Mary, the first messenger of the resurrection, prepares the disciples
for their own encounters with the Risen Jesus; who over the next
few weeks would present them with clear evidence that he was no
ghost or hallucination but was for real by eating a piece of boiled
fish, by cooking and sharing breakfast with the disciples by the side
of Lake Galilee, and by even letting them in the person of Thomas
touch the wounds of the Cross in his body. One writer looking at the
beginnings of the church wrote this: “The early Christians did not
believe in the resurrection of Christ because they could not find his
dead body: they believed because they did find a living Christ”.
Mary, the first resurrection messenger sent by Christ, delivered a
message that was incredible and life changing, even world
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changing. For within a few years of Mary becoming a messenger of
the resurrection the messengers had grown in incredible number
and the message had spread and kept on spreading. Michael
Green, a prominent Christian writer on Church Growth has written:
“The Church...beginning from a handful of uneducated fishermen
and tax gatherers swept across the whole known world in the next
300 years. It is a perfectly amazing story of peaceful revolution that
has no parallel in the history of the world. It came about because
Christians were able to say: 'Jesus did not only die for you He is
alive! You can meet him and discover for yourself the reality we are
talking about!' They did, and they joined the church and the church
born from that Easter grave, spread everywhere.”
So what about us on this Easter Day, some 2000 years after Mary
met the Risen Christ and was sent by him as the first messenger of
his resurrection? Surely the challenge is on all of us to ensure that
through our lives, our words and our actions, that we proclaim the
message of the resurrection to this generation, to this world in this
time. If we know in our hearts Jesus Christ to be our risen Lord then
we cannot keep him to ourselves. We as the church, Jesus' own
resurrection message delivery system, exist in a time and place
where many around us are cynical, some even atheists, and where
few have really had the chance to hear and consider the life
changing, world changing message that Jesus Christ crucified is
risen from the dead and is alive! And just as Mary was told by the
risen Jesus to go and say that he was risen from the dead, so we
too have been told to deliver the message of the resurrection by the
risen Jesus. For Jesus left this command to his church, his delivery
system, before he ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of
God the Father: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit” (Matt.28:19). He put it even more succinctly at his ascension
when he was speaking to his disciples who were the beginning of
his church and his first resurrection messengers:
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and
Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). For “witnesses”
read messengers.
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If we know in our hearts today that Christ is risen then, with joy and
love, we must take out the message of the resurrection beyond
these doors to the world; because the message of the risen Christ
can still bring life out of death, it can still change the world – and no
matter how the world around may try it is a message that can never
be stamped out or obliterated.
I close with this story of another messenger of the resurrection that
underlines what I have just said:
Three years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, a great anti-God
rally was arranged in Kiev. The powerful orator Bukharin was sent
from Moscow, and for an hour he demolished the Christian faith
with argument, abuse, and ridicule.
At the end there was silence. Then questions were invited. A man
rose and asked to speak. He was a priest of the Russian Orthodox
Church and he stood next to Bukharin facing the people. He spoke
three words: the ancient liturgical greeting used on Easter Sunday:
“Christ is risen.”
At one the entire assembly stood and gave the joyful response: “He
is risen indeed.” A devastating moment for an atheist politician, who
made no reply.
We are the messengers of the resurrection for our time, and our
church here is the risen Christ's delivery system – we have nothing
to fear and all to gain.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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