Sermons
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Easter
Sunday
4th April 2010
Romans 6:3-11; Luke
24:1-12
A church in New Zealand
has an Easter billboard
showing a cartoon Jesus
on the cross with the
caption, ‘Well this
sucks. I wonder if they
will remember anything I
said ...’ The vicar of
St Matthew’s in
Auckland, Glynn Cardy,
says, ‘There is a great
tradition in the Eastern
Church of cracking jokes
at Easter. Laughing
proclaims that despite
the realities of
suffering and death, the
power of life, love and
liberty is stronger. The
tenacity of the human
spirit is God-given, and
will not be overcome by
the forces of
oppression. This
billboard, expresses in
a humorous way both the
reality of pain and the
will to overcome it with
the power of life and
laughter. It also
reminds us’, says Glynn
Cardy, ‘that Easter is
about more than a rugged
cross, a supernatural
miracle, or a chocolate
bunny. It is a time to
reflect on all the words
and actions of Jesus and
how he disrupted his
world through
self-giving love, and
how we might do
likewise.’
There will no
doubt be those who will
see this as a totally
inadequate proclamation
of the Easter mystery,
but I will not be found
among them. In fact, I
would say this takes us
very close indeed to the
heart of the Christian
Passover. Regardless of
what some might think,
we are not here to
celebrate the
resuscitation of the
dead and buried Jesus.
This third station in
our three-day journey
from the supper table to
the cross to the empty
tomb is not a little
amateur exercise in
archaeology, attempting
to prove that the raised
Lord has a working
digestive tract.
Whatever the
Resurrection actually
is, it is far more
wonderful and much, much
stranger than anything
so spectacularly
irrelevant. ..
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