Easter Day sermon by Sarah Coakley delivered at Salisbury Cathedral
Easter Day, Salisbury Cathedral, March 31, 2013
by Sarah Coakley
Romans 6. 3-11; John 20. 1-18
‘Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “ I have seen the Lord” ’ (John 20. 18)
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In the light of this Easter morning that is now dawning, I want to ask you, especially those of you gathered here to make your new commitment to Christ in baptism or confirmation: Do you expect, do you long, with Mary Magdalene, to ‘see the Lord’ in this life? And if so, what can this mean? What is it so to ‘see’ the resurrected Jesus, to commit yourself to a belief in him, and his life beyond death? What is it to assert, with this, that there is a divine, transcendent force in our universe which rises beyond death, tragedy and failure, which captivates our hearts and minds and turns our lives out of darkness into light?
Everything hangs on this question for us as Christians. If there is no resurrection, if ‘one did not rise from the dead’, then our faith is indeed ‘in vain’, as St. Paul puts it. The problem only comes – let us be honest – in clarifying what, exactly, we are being asked to do in believing this. For if we set off in the spirit of a good detective to find out what exactly happened to Jesus’s dead body all those centuries ago (and there is nothing wrong with that: it’s a vital part of our questing), we shall nonetheless discover that such a purely historical approach only ends with an alluring, suggestive question mark.
No, something else has to happen first: something has to happen so us, the investigators. Only then will the fragments of the detective story look different.
Let me put it to you that, far from asking you to believe ‘three impossible things before breakfast’, our Scriptural texts from this morning, taken together, ask you only to believe three possible – but admittedly extraordinarily demanding – things; and not only to believe them but more importantly to practise them, with soul and mind and body, on and on up to your life’s end, until you too come to ‘see Christ’ face to face.
First, you must learn to practise death, as St Paul puts it in the Epistle to the Romans when he asks us ‘die with Christ’, ‘to be baptized into his death’. This seems to be a very strange idea, one powerfully symbolized by plunging you into the dark waters of baptism before rescuing you again. But what it means is that only by handing ourselves over, as Christ was ‘handed over’ by his betrayers in the Passion, into a seeming loss of selfhood, day after day as we give ourselves to God in prayer and sacraments and service, will we find our true selves, the living Christlike selves that God longs us to be in his Son. This is a particularly difficult idea for us moderns, because it challenges everything that our education teaches us: that we should aspire to be accomplished individuals, and autonomous ones at that. But when in all the difficulties and agonies that authentic prayer brings, we realize that persevering in it means ‘handing over’ the reins of control to God and just letting Christ’s Spirit pray within us, then we begin to see that our false, conscious, striving self has to go; and as it is worn away in a process that feels like death, something unimaginably mysterious starts to emerge – the new Life of selfhood that is Christ’s own and which transcends all individualism. To be a Christian is to ‘practise death’ in this way, then, till we are no longer afraid of death; and when we are no longer afraid of death we are no longer afraid of Life, the ecstatic, abundant Life that Jesus holds out to us.
Then second, and coming to the gospel from John we have just heard: we must not only learn to die but to ‘turn’, and ‘turn’ again, as Mary Magdalene did twice before she saw that it was Jesus right there in front of her in the garden. Have you ever wondered about the fact that the first witnesses to the resurrection, supremely here Mary, did not recognize him at all in the first instance, and some – according to the gospel of Matthew – even continued to ‘doubt’ when they were in his risen presence? This is another very strange thought: that the risen Christ, being God’s Son, is here all the time but that we have to ‘turn’, and keep ‘turning’, towards his gaze, until our senses and mind and soul and heart are so attuned and magnetized to his presence that we too can say ‘Rabboni’ – not to grasp and hold him, not to constrain him into our restricted human categories, but to worship and adore him. St Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, rather ruefully acknowledges that the women in the gospels understood this better and first because, as he puts it, of their ‘greater capacity for love’, their resoluteness in not abandoning Christ on the cross and in following him even to his place of burial. To ‘turn’ is to keep longing for and loving him, even in despair, as these women did - to keep discerning the wind of Christ’s Spirit and leaning into it, until love and knowledge and sensuality all align and we can know as we are known in him.
And thirdly, and finally, only thus shall we learn to ‘see Christ’, as Mary saw Him, through tears to be sure, but with absolute conviction and certainty. Many think that this doesn’t happen any more; but let me tell you (as one who was once a hospital chaplain, ministering to the dying), it does: only ‘die’, only ‘turn’, and you will also in due course ‘see’ the beloved Christ, as your senses and mind and desire are attuned to his presence: there He is, in a thousand faces of the poor; in those whom you love beyond measure and those whom you hate and spurn; in bread and wine and water and oil and all the glories of the earth; and finally waiting for you as your life ends. This isn’t, to be sure, as Mary Magdalene found, a Christ who can be constrained within our grasp. But this is the Christ who has put suffering in its place, who has gone through it and beyond it and made us his own.
So here is the great truth at the heart of Christian faith: resurrection. Stake your life on it, struggle with it, and everything will change. Die, turn, see ... and live in this mystical body, which is the blessed company of all faithful people, who, in its Salisbury manifestation, has turned out here this morning in the cold and dark to start you on this great adventure of the Christian life of redemption, joy and fulfilment, and will hold you in it in all your frailty and glory, unto your life’s end. For Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.
This homily was delivered as part of Holy Week Meditations offered by Sarah Coakley at Salisbury Cathedral. For index to her 9 meditations click here.
The Revd Canon Prof. Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and an Honorary Canon of Ely Cathedral. She is the author of God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity and The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God, both due to be published later this year. In April 2012, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen on the topic "Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God."
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum