This is the Truth!

Texts: Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; John 20:1-18

One of the most important and helpful things we do in the Church around this time of the year is to set aside all other readings, and the sermon, and read in its entirety the Passion story as we have it in one of our gospels.  All of the various episodes in the story are important, and most of them are familiar to us, even if we can never quite remember which bit comes from which gospel.  But it's when we hear the whole account at one hit, as it were, that its full extraordinary power makes itself felt.

Perhaps the usual practice is to have the story read on Passion Sunday, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, two weeks before Easter.  But it has been my practice to have it read on Palm Sunday.  There is a cost to that; it means that we tend to overlook the Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, and all that that entails; but I think the cost is worth paying because it sets out for us the way to the cross that we walk in Holy Week.  It enables us then to focus on a part of the story on Maundy Thursday, and another part on Good Friday, without losing sight of the fact that it is all one story that we are involved in.  So last Sunday, Palm Sunday, we had read to us the whole Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Mark.

That whole story then was in our minds and our memories – in the air we breathed in the Church - this week as we followed Jesus to the Cross and to the tomb.  And the story ended there, in death, in silence, as we were reminded in our services on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  We were out of words; there was nothing more to be said.  We went home in silence and sadness.  And it's because we do that – because with the Church we wait through Holy Saturday in sadness and silence – we can enter into the shock and awe of today's discovery that the tomb – against all odds and expectations – is empty!

And that is the truth the Church proclaims today.  "Ah," said Pilate to Jesus, "but what is truth?"  How modern Pilate sounds today when he asks that question!  Of course, we don't know how he asked that question.  It seems to depend on the reader!  Was he sneering when he said it?  Was he just being cynical?  Was it a genuine inquiry?  Or was he just being modern – refusing to make a personal commitment to any particular truth?  Did he believe there are any number of truths, all of which are equally valid?  That's the modern view, or perhaps I should sound clever and say it's the post-modern view.  Whatever it is, it's complete nonsense, and today of all days we need to affirm that certain things are true.  And one of those is that today, Easter morning, the tomb is empty!

One of the things that I have tried to do at regular intervals during my ministry is to re-read the order of service we use for the ordination of priests.  And there is a very interesting little bit in there that is especially important on Easter Day.  It comes in a series of questions put by the Bishop and answered by the candidate for priesthood.  The Bishop, having asked about the candidate's view of the Scriptures, now asks this:

Will you set forth the doctrines of the faith as this Church has received them?  To which the candidate is expected to reply:

Yes, I will.  My duty and my joy will be to witness to Christ crucified and risen.

There are two things in particular about that little interchange that I want to draw to your attention.  The first is that important phrase "the doctrines of the faith as this Church has received them".  We are not called to think of new ideas each year, to stay relevant or something, to get into the twenty-first century or whatever; nor are we called to proclaim our own truths as individual priests.  We are called to proclaim what we ourselves have received.  That's what it means when we say that we stand within a tradition, within a community of faith; and that tradition, that community of faith, dates back to the discovery that first Easter morning that the tomb is empty.

For the second thing I want to point out in that brief interchange between the Bishop and the candidate for ordination is found in the candidate's answer.  Remember that the Bishop has asked about "the doctrines", plural; and, of course, we have a lot of those.  We might suppose that he has in mind the Doctrine of the Incarnation, or the Doctrine of the Trinity; always fun for a Bishop who wants to test out a nervous candidate for confirmation!  But the reply by the candidate does not mention either of those doctrines explicitly.  The candidate promises, not to teach the Doctrine of the Trinity, but to "witness to Christ crucified and risen".

In other words, the nub of all the doctrines of the faith as this Church has received them is Christ crucified and risen.  The phrase, of course, comes from St Paul, and today we draw on his justly famous writing on the resurrection, found in 1 Corinthians 15.  We remember that as far as we know St Paul never met Jesus of Nazareth, as the other apostles knew him.  He met the Risen Christ, and spent the rest of his life bearing "witness to Christ crucified and risen".  And he starts by making it clear that the resurrection of Jesus is a well-attested fact.  He is not talking about his own extraordinary experience alone, as if it was entirely unique: rather he emphasises that he was merely one of over 500 people who experienced an encounter with the Risen Christ; some of which are recorded in the gospels.

But notice what else he says.  He does not say that he has reflected on all these experiences, and this is his suggestion as to what they all mean.  He says: I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  And then he goes on to say this: For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures... and then he lists the various people to whom the Risen Christ appeared.

And there we have that word "receive": from the very beginning, remembering that St Paul is writing to the Corinthians within 20 years of Christ's death, we have a clear tradition, clear doctrine, that he has already received and is passing on to them.

Our second reading affords the same evidence of this foundation tradition, for it contains one of the earliest sermons from the same apostolic period.  Peter is teaching some new converts and gives a sort of "story so far" summary to them.  He includes this: "They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead and caused him to be seen."  Long before the gospels were written, Peter and Paul and the other apostles were passing on the doctrines of the faith as this Church has received them, so that today we can say with them it is our duty and our joy to witness to Christ crucified and risen.

And it all began because of the truth of Easter Day.  To be honest, part of today's gospel reading is a bit tedious and contrived.  The author is at pains to try to establish the primacy of the other disciple over Peter; and so we have these rather boyish and silly details about who ran the fastest, who got there first, who saw what and who understood most.  But the essential details are there.  Above all, no one expected what had happened.  Mary Magdalene had witnessed the crucifixion and the burial.  Confronted by the shock of the empty tomb she wailed, not with joy at the thought of the resurrection because such a thought never crossed her mind.  She cried in frustration because the body had been taken away and she now had no place to grieve.

Then the Good Shepherd who calls each one of his sheep by name called her name, and she knew his voice.  The rest, as we say, is history.

And I say, it is true.  Christ is risen!  Alleluia!