EASTER SUNDAY
Prayer is always an adventure in the dark. If you attended the Easter Vigil last night, you would have felt what this is like. It is like walking into a house you don’t know and fumbling for the light switch. You can hear and see me give this Homily/Sermon on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnxSnmfTkN8
Since the Resurrection of Jesus, that we celebrate today, is actually an act of God, then working out how to find God, how to walk with God, is the only way to understand this strange event. But the problem is that our walk with God, our discovery of God, will always be hesitant, as we wonder where we are going. It’s a bit like St John hesitating outside the tomb in today’s Gospel, and then he goes inside, and then instead of a great vision, he sees nothing…. and yet he believes. (John 20:1-9) It is the same for us. God is with us – but we wish we could find the switch and switch on the light to be sure. But the Church reminds us that God is more like a flickering candle than a bright LED Bulb; that God’s light will always seem to us rather wavery, even though we wish he would give us a clearer vision of his presence.
Indeed, quite often people say to me, that if only it was clear that God exists, then they would believe. They want certainty, forgetting that almost all the important things in life are uncertain. For example : Can I be certain that I am really in love with the person I think I am in love with, and can I be certain that this is the person I should spend the next 50 years of my life with? Or can I be certain that I will be alive tomorrow, or if I am alive whether the plans I have for tomorrow, or for next year will work out? No. we can’t be certain, but we don’t stop doing these things just because they are uncertain. All we can do is decide what to believe in, what life is for, and get on with it.
I think the other reason why people struggle with their search for God is that they are looking in the wrong place, or looking for the wrong kind of thing. Bible passages can mislead us here. We heard today for example in our 2nd Reading (Col 3:1-4) St Paul saying, “You must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God’s right hand.” And wrongly, we start thinking of heaven as some far away place up there somewhere, and quite forget the teaching of Jesus that the kingdom of heaven is close by, is in our midst, if only we could see. There we are looking for some deep spiritual experience, some blinding light, and completely missing the point. In other words, to find God, to understand the Resurrection, we do not need to look for some “things” that are “spiritual”, rather we need to look at things in a different way.
Now just in case you think I am being very modern, let me share with you what the great St Augustine says about this; because he spent many years searching in the wrong way just like this. In the book that he wrote at the beginning of the 5th Century, his Confessions, a book we can still read, he wrote “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!” And here’s the point I have been making, he then says “Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong… . You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you.”
I am sure you all know the modern question about the glass : do we see it as half-empty or half-full? The reality is not one or the other, it is both; for unless we see both we do not see the full picture. So, if we look at something, and just see it as a physical object, say a flower, or a tree, or a donkey, or the stars, or a fellow human being, and do not see a deeper reality within it, what we might call a view of it from a spiritual point of view, then we haven’t really seen it. We believers would of course say that to view anything or anyone from this spiritual point of view is to see God within it, or within them, and it or them within God; and as St Augustine said, we cannot see things this way if we do not see ourselves in the same way “You were with me, but I was not with you.”
The reason St John can see only an empty tomb, and yet believe and indeed know that Jesus is alive in a new way in the glory of God, is because he has been taught by Jesus to see things in this different way. As he writes in his 1st Letter (4:12) “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us.” Or as Jesus says in St John’s Gospel (9:39) “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.”
We need to remind ourselves that God is calling on us to respond out of love and faith rather than out of certainty. We have to face the reality of a darkened world, the reality of sin and suffering and death, and then find God. So, each year we celebrate the death of Jesus before we celebrate his resurrection, remembering that we cannot see his glory without seeing the sadness of his death. That’s why we see his risen presence with us by putting up on the wall of our churches an image of him dead on the cross. Those who try to ignore the sad things in life, and just concentrate on goodness and love, are creating a fantasy God for themselves, rather than the true God who is with us in the darkness. If the power we call God, the power of the risen Jesus, were obvious, then it wouldn’t be God would it, because God is totally different from us, even though God is in us and around us. It’s rather like light. We cannot actually see light, we can only see what light illuminates. You could not see me if there were no light between us, but you and I cannot see that light, even though we know it is there. The more aware we are that we cannot see, that we are in a way blind to what God is, the more we will be aware that God exists, and appreciate what Easter means.
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