Texts: Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; Matthew 28: 1-10
If a person is born blind, then he or she may never have an experience of sight. If a person is born profoundly deaf, then he or she may never have an experience of sound. Such a person may tell us that he or she has never had such an experience; but what he or she could not do is to go on to say, "and no one else has had such an experience either. There is no such thing as sight or sound."
But that is precisely the error that atheists make. An atheist may well make the claim that he or she has never had an experience for which the word "God" would be appropriate as that word is usually understood within the Christian tradition. Or has never had an experience of meeting the Risen Christ. So far as he or she is simply reporting on his or her own experience – or lack of such an experience – it is not for any of us to argue. What he or she cannot do is to go on to say, "and no one else has had such an experience either. There is no God: Christ has not risen."
To assert that there is no God – or that Christ has not been raised from the dead – is just as dogmatic as to assert the opposite. Atheists are as dogmatic as any other breed of fundamentalists. What they have or have not experienced becomes, in their minds, a universal truth to be held by all.
That necessarily means that all those millions of people today who believe in God, Christian, Jew or Muslim, are wrong. They may genuinely believe that they have experienced the reality of God, but they are mistaken – and with them, all the millions of other people who for the last four or five thousand years have believed in God. All of us are mistaken, according to the atheists, because they have never had such an experience. Those who are blind are denying the reality of sight; those who are deaf are denying the reality of sound.
Or faith in God – our faith in Christ – our faith in the Holy Spirit – is rooted in our experience, and in the experience of our fellow Christians. Sometimes we seem a little worried about that. Experience sounds a rather weak basis for something as important as our faith. It sounds a bit subjective – rather too open to wishful thinking, perhaps, or self-delusion. And there are dangers there, of course. That's why we need to check with the experience of others. That's why we need the Church. We need a measuring rod, sometimes, to make sense of our own experiences. When we find that other believers have experienced something similar, then we can be reassured that we are not imagining things. Self-delusion tends to be personal – not a shared experience across many cultures and many centuries.
Besides, what other evidence could there be apart from experience? How do we know love exists? We can't bottle it, or look at it under a microscope, or weigh it. We know there is such a thing as love only because we experience it. But once we experience it – and once we hear of others who have experienced it, too – we can never deny its reality. The same is true of beauty, for example, or delight. They cannot be verified – they are outside the purview of science – but look at the harbour, or a perfect carnation, or listen to the Moonlight Sonata, and no one on earth will be able to convince you there is no such thing as beauty or delight.
Our faith is rooted in personal experience. And it begins, of course, with the experience of those who first discovered that the tomb was empty. Of course, the knockers and the doubters have always tried to pour scorn on the reports of the empty tomb. They have rightly pointed out that the accounts in the four gospels vary widely. Follow any court case for any length of time and you will note something similar.
It's not the details that matter. It's the fact that the tomb is empty that matters. That's what first unnerves everyone and sets them running in all directions. Clearly, this was completely unexpected. If this was a carefully thought out scam by some of Jesus' followers, we can rule out a lot of people from any list of suspects! The women were not in on the plot, for a kick off. They are scared witless. Earthquakes are scary enough at the best of times. And early in the morning while it is still dark is not one of the best of times to have an earthquake!
Nor outside a tomb that is supposed to contain a corpse but is in fact empty! Throw in a dazzling white angel and the old nerves are going to get a trifle frayed before it is all over. The tough guards were so terrified, says St Matthew, that they shook, and became like dead men. They fainted, presumably – collapsed in a heap. The angel gave the women a message for the disciples, and off they went "afraid yet filled with joy'. Then they met the Risen Christ, and prostrated themselves at his feet. He gave them the same message for the disciples.
What we have here is their account of what they experienced – terror, fear, joy – and an encounter with an angel and with the Risen Christ. Why should we believe part of what they say, but not the other part? Why do we accept that they ran away in both fear and joy, but refuse to accept their account of whom they who they were running away from?
And St Matthew emphasises that this is not some weird episode in fairyland – this is rooted in the history and geography of the Holy Land. For he alone deals with the pragmatic attempt of the chief priests and the guards to cover up the incident. Does that ring true? Would guards be embarrassed to have to confess that a dead body disappeared from a tomb they were supposed to be guarding? Sounds about right to me. And would the chief priests want to hush it up to the point of bribing the guards and offering them immunity from prosecution? That sounds about right, too.
In other words, whatever actually happened to Christ's body, the accounts we have of the reaction of the people caught up in the drama ring true. They are clearly based on eye-witness accounts – accounts of personal experiences.
And when we turn to our first lesson today an eye-witness account is exactly what we seem to have. It is sometimes alleged by critics of the Christian faith that the story of the resurrection was a much later invention; but that simply doesn't wash. Even those who argue that St Peter did not utter the words attributed to him in this passage from Acts acknowledge that what we have here is an extract from a sermon, a sermon that was certainly preached in the first century, and probably no later than 80AD. It is therefore a window into the core beliefs of the very early Christian communities.
It is set in the house of Cornelius in the city of Caesarea – probably an early "house church" – and Peter is invited to speak. Notice how many times the emphasises that what he is talking about is already well known among them: You know the message God sent…you know what has happened throughout Judea. He is not telling them anything they haven't known already – he is summarising it and helping them to understand it's significance. Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit, went around healing the sick, etc. How do we know? We are witnesses of everything he did, says Peter. We were there – we saw it all.
What else? They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day, and caused him to be seen. By whom? …by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Again, we are confronted with what purports to be an eye-witness account. And the question arises again – why should we believe Peter's eye-witness account of the life and death of Jesus, but not his account of his experience of the Risen Christ?
I want to finish today with our theme. It is very short – just one word, in fact. That word is YES! The Resurrection is God's yes to everything Jesus offered on our behalf on the cross. It is God's Yes to Jesus' supreme act of faith to suffer an agonising death on trust that God would vindicate him. That Yes means, love does reign in the universe. That life is stronger than death. That Yes means that our faith is real – that our experiences of God and of the Risen Christ are true.
God's Easter Yes is addressed to the whole world, for it was to the whole world that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. He asks only that we say Yes to him.
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