Winchester Cathedral 
Easter Day 27 March 2005 Sung Eucharist

Mary Magdalene turned and said to him, “Rabbouni” (John 20.16)

A word of reverence, obedience, gratitude - and love: “Rabbouni!”. And I follow St John in offering it to you as the key to what Our Lord is looking for from you and me – and through us from all creation – today.  And with it, another key – or rather, the same key in a different form: Thomas’ words to Jesus a few verses, and a few hours, later in John: “my Lord and my God”. Hold them as elements, as it were, of a single chord, informing, colouring, reinforcing each other.

It has struck me that the frantic statements and counter-statements of politicians in this period of electoral “phoney war” have some use after all!  They can help us, this Easter, accurately to hear this climax of John’s Gospel that we’ve just had proclaimed for us! 

Of the politicians, we know that one way or another they – and we - are dealing both with a range of accounts of how things are, of what is real; and that they tell the stories, present the facts as they see them, so as to win our allegiance and our trust. 

So with the Gospel accounts of Jesus – and this week those of his trial and death and resurrection. Four accounts – and more reliable information too, elsewhere in the New Testament than is often asserted. They are none the less fundamentally trustworthy, I judge, for having been told in these four forms for an over-riding purpose which they never hide, and which John states at the end of the chapter of which we have just heard the first half: “these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” So the beloved disciple “also went in, and saw and believed”; so Mary greets Jesus with “Rabbouni”, Thomas with “my Lord and my God”.

But if the politicians, Messrs Blair, Howard, Kennedy and the rest, want our vote, what does Our Lord want of you and me on Easter Day? As I asked myself that question, the classic answer to it of the prophet Micah to that question, “What does the Lord require of you?” came immediately into my mind; and I have no doubt that it shaped the answers both of Jesus himself and of the New Testament writers – and that we need it to shape ours: 
“to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God”! (Micah 6.8)

To join the Church, the generations of Christians in every century right back to the first generation and in every place – and when I say that, I think especially of Christians in the Holy Land, and in our Partner Dioceses across the Great Lakes Region of Africa, in Burma, in Florence and in Newcastle; and some of you will think of many others – to join the Church in saying “God raised Jesus from the dead”, means determining to see both the world, and everyone else, and everything else, and ourselves, in a quite new light – in His light. We are committing ourselves – receiving his Spirit to help us to commit ourselves – to having Jesus as the Lord of our lives, the arbiter of our judgements, our principle and determining point of reference: 
“Rabbouni”; “my Lord and my God”.

For in the Resurrection of Jesus Creation receives a new beginning, re-established on its proper ground – as early Christians, and I guess John himself, and the great Bishop Lancelot Andrewes saw in Mary’s “supposing him to be the gardener”: St Paul’s Second Adam. 

In Jesus’ Resurrection death is in principle conquered; and no horror, no cruelty, no sin, no suffering is beyond the reach of God’s love and God’s presence – or of God’s will to forgive. 

The earth is declared again to be God’s; and all of us and especially everyone who wields power is accountable to God for our treatment of people and things and the environment. The first Christians understood that to say “My Lord and my God” with Thomas meant refusing to give that worship, that obedience, to the Emperor who was demanding it of them in those terms, whatever the consequences of their refusal; and none of us knows when a decision of this kind may be required of us. 

We become Jesus’ apprentices as we are grafted into the springing life of the Risen Jesus through Baptism and gifted with his Holy Spirit; people marked by his character and growing into his way of life through regularly sharing in this Holy Communion, through using the Scriptures and through the encouragement and correction of our fellow-Christians; wherever he sets us, commissioned to be his representatives whether to individuals or to institutions, to governments or in the everyday clash of ideologies.

So if the politicians can help us to understand that we are reading texts – and if we are going to be effective Christians we need to be reading the Scriptures every day - through which God is looking for a response from us, that response must include our engaging on Our Lord’s behalf with the politicians who seek to represent us! For God’s Holiness has implications on every level, which it is our calling as Christians to discern and to proclaim. 

The Risen Jesus calls us to say to him “Rabbouni”, to have him as our decisive point of reference, about every aspect of our own and others’ personal and family and professional lives. The Risen Jesus calls us to say “my Lord and my God”, to have him as our decisive point of reference, when we are thinking of the ways in which, and the people for whom, society is run. And especially as citizens of a country that is a member of the UN Security Council, of the European Union, and of the G8 group of states, we cannot have Jesus as “Lord and God” and allow candidates, or our fellow-citizens, to keep “foreign affairs” out of sight and mind at election time!

So what does the Lord require of each of us, what is he present among and within each of us to make us able to do and to say, this Easter Day and in the coming days because of His Resurrection? 
“To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God”,
with the reverence, the obedience, the gratitude and the love of Mary Magdalene’s one word of offering of herself to her Risen Lord Jesus:
“Rabbouni”.