This sermon was preached by The Bishop of Winchester, The Rt. Revd. Michael Scott-Joynt on Easter Day 2003, in the Cathedral

“On the first day of the week  Mary Magdalene came early, while it was still dark, to the tomb....(John 20:1).

  I had an e-mail this week from the Archdeacon and parish priest of Goma in the Eastern Congo where I spent an evening, a night and a morning at the end of October. Goma was surrounded in 1994 by the most enormous and terrifying refugee camp after the genocide in Rwanda – the border is just a couple of kilometres away along the head of Lake Kivu; and in January last year the volcano behind Goma erupted, sending two great streams of lava through the town, each some three metres deep and forty or fifty metres wide. The Christians told us how all this had been, and what it was like to be the church in Goma and in the surrounding area where everyone, themselves  included, is more or less in danger all the time.

Archdeacon Assumani began by wishing me a good Easter festival; and then he continued in language that gets to the heart of things – the Resurrection is not a matter of Easter bunnies in Goma! : “May the blood and the body of Christ protect you and direct you in your ministry.” And he went on: “we beg you to pray for us ceaselessly, for we risk again living in another war...” – and he gave me his reasons for saying this.

In so many other places today, too, our fellow-Christians “keep the Feast” in circumstances like  this – think no further than those of Myanmar, or of Iraq, or of  the West Bank and Gaza. Let them remind us that our – as well as their - very existence as Christians depends upon the truth, and upon the meaning, of  what we are celebrating today.

I want to point us to just two phrases, one from the very beginning and one from right at the end of the Gospel that we have just heard, that can help us freshly to be moved and grasped by this truth and this meaning.

“On the first day of the week....” began John’s story. When he wrote it, thirty or forty years after the event, most of those who heard his book  would have seen nothing strange in having Sunday as their main day for worship. For them as for us, it was simply part of the Christian “package”. But for those who lived among Jews, or who had been Jews themselves, as for those who live today among people of other Faiths with other days of observance, it singled them out as people the whole rhythm of whose lives is marked by, depends upon, Jesus. And this is one among the very many pointers that Jesus really was raised from the dead, and on the third day: that the first Christians, Jews to a woman and a man, took the extraordinary step of breaking away from the centuries-old and fundamental Jewish commitment to the seventh day, the Sabbath, and  worshipped their Lord on the next day, “the first day of the week” -  because it was the day of his Resurrection.

The words also signal something close to the heart of the meaning and  the effect of the resurrection of Jesus. John  began his book with  God’s work of Creation (“In the beginning was the Word...” ); and the raising of Jesus makes for a fresh beginning, the creation made new and a new start for humankind with God – “to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12).

And just before the end of what we heard just now, Jesus sends Mary Magdalene to say for him to her colleagues: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father....” – ascending not to the clouds, but to the throne of God: “I saw (Revelation 5:6) standing in the midst of the throne of God ...a Lamb with the marks of slaughter upon him”. From the beginning, Christians have understood Jesus’ resurrection as affirming the rule, the kingship, of God; as affirming that “the earth is the Lord’s” (Psalm 24:1), not the Emperor’s or anyone else’s. Christians are those who celebrate this secret both in their ultimate freedom from others’ domination however oppressive and of whatever kind, and in their care (as the Lord’s brothers and sisters and co-regents),   for humankind and for God’s world.

In Goma that October evening, they told me over supper how they go up the foothills of the volcano in small groups, some Scouts, some Mothers Union members, one of the clergy, even when they can hear gunfire, to visit the villages, to look after the girls who have been raped, to try to rescue the children who are being pressed to carry a weapon, to take some salt or some sugar, to pray. They can do it, even though they are frightened and hungry, because they trust that Jesus was raised from the dead – and so, that there really, actually, is more to the world and to human beings than all the greed and violence, the cruelty and the suffering that they see around them; and  because they trust that “Jesus is Lord”, that Jesus is the one who is  ultimately powerful through his persevering and loving and suffering in his people – not the warlords and the bandits, or the little groups of hungry boys with a gun or two, who make the lives of all of them so tragically vulnerable. So Assumani wrote to me: “May the blood and the body of Christ protect you and direct your ministry” - because he knows that it is like this for me, too, in different ways in this society as a priest, and for all of us as Christians, if we are serious about belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.

As we grow in believing in the Resurrection, in trusting that Jesus is Lord, we   recognise signs of all sorts that in spite of everything the world was made new, given a fresh beginning, on the first Easter Day; we see signs in others and in ourselves that  human beings have received Christ’s new life through his pouring the Holy Spirit upon us; and signs that God is with others and with us as we trust him to make living his way, serving his purposes, possible.

We also recognise all the more clearly in ourselves, as well as around us at every level and in every kind of institution including in the church,  the human disobedience and sinfulness and cruelty that continues, and its terrible and multiple effects.

To believe in the Resurrection is to trust that God has caught us up into living the new life of Christ in his new world even while so much of it is still so terrifyingly and destructively hostile to being made new and obedient; and that God has involved us in being agents of  our Lord’s suffering struggle with all that stands against Him. To believe in the Resurrection is to trust that God makes us able to live like this however hard and painful the going; and  it is to find, against all purely human expectations, that just this life of his in us makes for love and joy and peace and laughter, for life at its fullest.

So the Archdeacon wishes you, as well as me, “a good celebration of Easter”; and so I share with you, for you, his prayer for me and his other friends:  “May the blood and the  body of Christ protect you and direct your ministry”.

Amen.