The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec

Easter Day

Readings: Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; Col 3:1-4; Matt 28:1-10

Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.

The angel’s words ring across the centuries, as fresh and astonishing this morning as they were in the grey light of that first Easter dawn: ‘He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay’. Those two women, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (none of them Mary, mother of Jesus – there are many Marys in the New Testament), came to a sealed tomb. They came with grief in their hearts, with the weight of loss, with all the bewildering darkness of Holy Saturday still upon them. And they found, not absence, but the most staggering presence; not the end of a story, but the beginning of one the world has never been able to stop telling.

We gather on this Easter morning as inheritors of that story. I want to suggest to you that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not simply a fact to be believed, but an invitation to be entered, a new way of seeing, of living, and of loving, opened wide for all of humanity.

Matthew tells us there was a great earthquake, an angel descending like lightning, guards falling as though dead. The cosmic machinery of Easter is dramatic, to say the least. But notice what the angel actually does: he rolls back the stone and then sits on it. That detail has always moved me. The angel does not simply remove an obstacle; he takes his seat upon it, as if to say: this stone, this seal of death, this final word that every empire and every grief has ever pronounced has been overturned, and I am resting on top of it.

The two Marys had come to tend a body. They found instead an open door. And in that openness, theologians of every generation have seen something more than a miracle: they have seen the character of God. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is not a God who seals things up, who closes people off, who says ‘thus far and no further’. The God of Easter rolls stones away. This is a God of radical, boundless, costly openness.

In our tradition, we have always tried to hold together the fullness of that openness (Scripture, tradition, and reason) in creative and sometimes uncomfortable tension. We resist the temptation to entomb the living Christ inside any single creed, any single culture, any single interpretation. The empty tomb scandalises all our tidy certainties. Christ is risen and that means he cannot be kept where we last left him.

Saint Paul writes to the Colossians with breath-taking economy: ‘If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’.

Now we must be careful here, for this text has sometimes been misread as an invitation to otherworldliness, to turn away from the pain of this world, to spiritualise ourselves out of engagement with creation and with justice. But that is emphatically not what Paul means. ‘Things that are above’ does not mean ‘things that are far away’. It means things oriented towards the divine life – towards love, compassion, justice, mercy. Paul is not asking us to leave the earth behind; he is asking us to see the earth and all its people transfigured in the light of resurrection.

‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God’. There is profound comfort here for every person who has ever felt overlooked, diminished, unseen. Every life, in all its magnificent variety, is held within the life of God. The resurrection declares that God takes flesh seriously, takes personhood seriously, takes the particularity of each beloved creature seriously. The risen Christ bears wounds. He is not resurrected out of his humanity, but through it and beyond it. And so, our lives, in all their wounded, particular, irreducible humanity, are hidden with him and are safe and precious.

Peter, preaching in the Acts of the Apostles, makes a statement that must have startled his first hearers just as it ought to startle us today: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God’. Peter has just had to let go of deep religious convictions about who is inside and who is outside the family of God. He has been converted – not once, but again and again – by the relentlessly hospitable Spirit.

The resurrection has this effect on people. It breaks open boundaries. The first witnesses to the empty tomb were women, in a world where women’s testimony was legally and socially discounted. The risen Christ first appeared to the marginalised, the frightened, the grieving. The commission he gives: ‘Go and tell my brothers and sisters’, is given not to the powerful, but to the faithful. Easter has always been on the side of those the world has tried to seal away.

In our own time, the Church is still learning this lesson. The resurrection challenges every hierarchy of belonging, every wall we build between the sacred and the secular, between the worthy and the unworthy, between those we consider fully human and those we would diminish. The angel’s invitation at the tomb: ‘Come, see’, is addressed to everyone. The table of the risen Christ is wide. The Anglican tradition at its best has understood this catholicity, this radical, all-embracing welcome, as central to the gospel. Easter faith is not a possession to be guarded; it is a life to be shared.

The angel’s first words to the women are among the most repeated words in all of Scripture: ‘Do not be afraid’. They are spoken to people who had every reason to be afraid, who were living through occupation, loss, bewilderment, and grief. And then Jesus himself meets them on the road, and his first words are identical: ‘Do not be afraid’.

Easter faith is not the absence of fear. It is the discovery that in the very place where fear has done its worst: at the grave, at the end, at the point of utter hopelessness, something else is also present, which is older and stronger than death. The early writers of the Church called this the harrowing of hell: the descent of Christ into every place of abandonment, and the discovery that even there, God is. Even there, love has gone before us. Even there, the stone has been rolled away.

Whatever tomb you have come to this morning; whatever sealed place in your own life, your community, your world; hear the Easter word: do not be afraid. You are not alone in the darkness. The one who was crucified, dead, and buried has passed through every darkness there is, and has come out the other side, bearing light.

The two Marys left the tomb, Matthew tells us, ‘with fear and great joy’. Not one or the other, but both at once. That is what resurrection feels like: it does not resolve all our questions, but transforms the ground on which we stand. They ran to tell the disciples. They were sent, as we are sent, not to have all the answers, but to bear witness to what they had seen and known and touched.

We too are sent. To our families, our neighbourhoods, our workplaces, our schools and universities, our fractured and beautiful world. We are sent to roll stones away wherever we find them. They might be stones of injustice, of exclusion, of despair, of silence. We are sent to say, with our lives as much as with our lips, that death does not have the final word. That love is stronger. That the God who raised Jesus from the dead is still at work in creation, still drawing all things, all people, all creatures, the whole groaning world – into the divine embrace.

The risen Christ goes ahead of us into Galilee, which is to say, into the ordinary places, the everyday world, the places where we live and work and struggle and love. He is not locked in the past, sealed behind dogma, confined to the sanctuary. He is risen. He is loose in the world. And he is inviting us, all of us, without exception, to follow.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.