Sermon Easter Sunday 26

First Reading Acts 10.34-43

Gospel Reading Matthew 28.1-10

As you may know for the last three years, we have been truly blessed at St Mary’s to have people come forward to be baptised on Easter Sunday. People who are coming to church and encountering the scriptures anew or for the first time. When we do things again and again, it can be hard to think about things anew, but that is something that Easter Day offers us all. To think about life anew.

This year the story of Jesus resurrection comes from Matthew’s gospel instead of John and gives us a different perspective of the story. In John, the women go to the tomb expecting to find a body. They had gone with spices and ointment to anoint the dead, yet in Matthew’s version, they have only gone to see the tomb. Having journeyed with Jesus as one of his disciples and heard him teach them and say that he must die and rise again, they have come to the tomb expecting it to be empty. Rather than John’s account which starts with sadness and despair, Matthew’s account is different and opens with expectation and revelation. Mary Magdalen and the other Mary come to see the tomb and there is a great earthquake where an angel of the Lord descends from heaven, rolls back the stone from the mouth of the tomb and sits on it. It’s quite a dramatic opening scene full of the supernatural with an earthquake and an angel descending from heaven. It’s a very different narrative from John’s version which just has the stone already rolled away when the women arrive.

Last Sunday when we read the dramatic reading from Matthew’s Gospel, it ends with Pilot being commissioned to have soldiers posted at the entrance of the tomb to make sure the disciples don’t take Jesus body away and pretend that Jesus has been resurrected. Here we have this affirmation that the disciples had nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus, but that his coming back from the dead has come from God. Further on in the reading, it says that the guards shook and became like dead men. Here we have this juxtaposition between these guards who have done Jesus harm leading to his death, yet he has risen to new life, and it is guards who are like the dead.

As is often the case with God’s story with us, things are being turned upside down. The dead are being made anew and not how we expect it to. There’s no scientific or clear-cut explanation, it’s mysterious and surprising and requires a leap of faith.

This is something all of us who come to believe in Jesus Christ are required to do. To have faith in this story of the resurrection and believe it is from God. That God ordained that Jesus would die, suffer and then be raised to new life so that we may all partake in this new life. Not only is the story extraordinary, but God also ordains that the ones who are to become the first preachers of this story are to be women.

Women who are marginalised in a patriarchal dominated society, are entrusted by God through his angels to share the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. Although we might find the story of Jesus’ resurrection surprising and mysterious in different ways, this is all consistent with God’s story with us and Jesus’ teaching. As people of God, we should be assured of what we read here and have hope what it means to us.

Throughout our lives we make choices and we choose a path to follow. Sometimes that path will lead us to stray from God because following the path that God has set before us may not seem easy or straight forward at first. We know very well from those last few days of Jesus’ life that God’s path can sometimes lead us to suffer. Yet after the suffering Jesus says, ‘Greetings!’ He is not angry or berates the disciples for deserting him, he greets them with joy. We each of us have scars both visible and invisible caused by what life has put on our path. Yet through the death and resurrection of Jesus these scars no longer have hold of us, we are made anew just as Jesus was when he rose from the dead. The injustice of his death is turned on it’s head and those with power tremble at the sight of the angel proclaiming how Jesus has conquered death. His death brings an end to the sin that clings to us and so we each can be reborn and know that we have a chance to live lives anew.

In a few months time I will be bringing a new life into this world. As a parent there is only so much you can do to prepare for a new child. As they grow, you realise more and more that they have to make their own choices for their own lives. While I am gone from this place, you as a community will also have to make some choices. I pray that you would listen to the work of the Holy Spirit and be inspired by the blessings this place has already received. Trust what God is already doing in this place and share the good things you as God’s chosen people have to offer. Know that the path God set before us is not often straight forward and is often the most surprising. Have hope that God is doing something new, new within each of us and new in this place.

So, as we come to celebrate Easter anew let us be assured by what the Holy Spirit is doing here among us already and have confidence to trust in the God that brought life out of death. Let us pray to God to be alongside us on our refreshed journey of faith, that we will have the courage to live with the scars that life has given us and know that Jesus loves us, the whole person that we are.

Amen.