The Bishop's Easter Message 2003

It was not many years ago that Bishop David Jenkins, as Bishop of Durham, caused a public row because he was thought to have described the Resurrection of Jesus as ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. That was not what he said, it was rather the opposite. The resurrection is not and never was ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s act of new creation, the vindication of a love which in the cross and passion of Jesus came down to the very lowest part of our human need. Easter celebrates the victory in our human nature of the God who created us in love. It is a victory over sin and over death, and to live in the Easter faith in a world in which resurrection has happened is to live in God’s new creation.

The Easter stories are mysterious – how could it be otherwise – for what the Gospel writers are describing is something that is new and overwhelming. St Mark may well have originally ended his Gospel with the women on the first Easter Sunday morning coming to the tomb and finding it empty fleeing away in awe and terror. ‘And they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.’ (Mark 16.8) The tomb is empty. Jesus appears to his disciples and yet, as on the road to Emmaus he can be unrecognised. He is changed, transformed, transfigured – and is to be taken up into glory. The body of the risen Christ has not ceased to be physical but it is now transformed by the power and glory of the Spirit. As St Paul writes in resurrection faith of our Christian hope in death, our bodies in death are sown as physical bodies, they are raised as spiritual bodies (I Corinthians 15.36-37). There is continuity and change, identity and transformation.

Our Christian life is an Easter life. As the First Letter of Peter (1.3) reminds us we have been begotten or born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It is that hope which transforms our lives and sets our dying in a new context. The resurrection hope, as the New Testament makes clear, is not just about our individual, personal lives, it is a hope which is ultimately cosmic. The resurrection of Jesus is the first-fruits of God’s new creation, and it is as those baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus that we ‘look for (wait in longing expectation for) the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ We are to live, therefore, in hope for the world, whatever wars and rumours of wars there may be, whatever manifestations of principalities and powers – terrorist threats, political oppression, economic domination – there may be. And we are to live as those for whom death, our own and that of others, is ‘the gate of life immortal.’

The composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was asked two weeks before his death, what the future life meant to him. He replied, ‘Music, music. But in the next world I shan’t be doing music with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.’ That surely captures something of the Christian sense of living already the Easter life into which we are called through our baptism, but knowing that to die in Christ means to enter into that life fully and completely.

May we live in this Easter hope, the joy that no-one can take from us.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

+Geoffrey