Sermon at the
Easter Vigil, Saint Peter le Poer, 19 April 2014
I expect I’m not the only
person here who like detective stories: Hércule Poirot perhaps, or Inspector
Montalbano.
It’s very gripping reading the
stories and trying to work out who dunnit. That can be a challenge. There are
of course lots of clues scattered through the story, but many of them are
misleading and there are also distracting leads and red herrings.
It’s usually only in the last
chapter that we find out who dunnit, when all the clues come together and are
explained. And in a well written detective story, we don’t just find out who
dunnit at the end. We also quite often find out, for the first time, what was
done. That what seemed to be an accident was really a slice of victoria sponge
laced with arsenic, or that the person we thought was the butler is really the
long lost cousin and heir of the estate.
At the end of the story all
kinds of things come into the light, hidden relationships, secret motives,
concealed identities. All of them explain who dunnit, and why. They were there
all along in the story, but we didn’t see them for what they were, we didn’t
understand what they meant, because we didn’t know what the end of the story
was.
If you re-read a detective
story knowing what the end is, suddenly everything becomes clear. It’s almost
as though you’re reading a different story. The end of the story changes
everything that happened before, as well.
Well, as with detective stories,
so with the Bible. The end of the story changes the whole story, and nothing
will make complete sense unless we read it in the light of the end. The key to
understanding the Bible is to read it the right way round, and that is to read
it backwards. We have to start at the end to find out what the rest of it
means.
What is the end of the Bible
story? We have just heard it. It is Jesus, the victim, raised from the dead.
The Resurrection changes how we see Jesus and how we read the Bible. And
because the Bible is the story of humanity as well as of Jesus, the
resurrection changes our story too. It is the end of the story which changes
the story of everyone.
The Resurrection changes
everything, because up until now humanity has lived as if the end of the story
was death. Death has seemed to be the ultimate reality defining human
existence. Not just putting an end to life, but tarnishing every moment of it.
Life is limited, it will run out, grab what you can, while you can, and make
sure no-one else takes it from you. And so humanity has been living from the
beginning in rivalry and fear and violence.
This has even tarnished all our
ideas about God. Our death-bound existence and our fear have been projected on
to the heavens, and enacted in cults of sacrifice, ritual violence and
exclusion. This is exactly what happened to Jesus – he was put to death for
blasphemy, a religious offence, by people who had not yet begun to imagine that
there could be no death in God.
But the Bible actually has been
trying to tell us the true story all along. The God who is entirely light and
life and love is there on every page, and stands out clearly if we read the
Bible from the end, that is, in the light of the Resurrection.
If we read a story like that of
Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, from the end, in the light of the
Resurrection, then we will see it truly. The victim is innocent, God does not
deal in death, and Abraham’s testing is about seeing whether he will emerge
from the old imagination of a god bounded by death into the new imagination of
the true God who is utterly vivacious loving generous life.
Of course if we read it the
wrong way round we will get into all sorts of muddles. If we think that Abraham
and Isaac is the key by which we are to understand Jesus, then we will end up
with odd ideas such as thinking that God requires death as a punishment for sin
and so he killed Jesus instead of us. But read the Bible the right way round,
from the end, read Jesus as the key to interpreting Abraham and Isaac, and you
will not end up with that story.
Because the end of the story
changes the whole story. The structures of violence that have been running the
world since the beginning turn out to be not
where God is. In fact, God has come among us in Jesus to liberate us from them.
In the resurrection account
from Matthew the guards stand for that old way of living, bounded as they are by
fear and death. What are they? Soldiers, armed men, standing guard over a dead
man, to make sure he stays dead. What could be more absurd? But that is the
story of humanity, focussed on the fear of death, using violence to keep death
in its place, that is, with someone else.
But the earthquake which shakes
them – it is the same word – is a seismic change in our understanding. Suddenly
everything is seen the right way round. The guards become like dead men.
Humanity, as long as it is focussed on death, is dead. But Jesus, the dead man,
is not there, because he has been raised. And the angel says, “do not be
afraid”.
Death and fear are no more. The
new reality, the true story, bursts into the world. Jesus, the victim, is
raised from the dead, and is where God is. God is transparently, radiantly
alive, and there is no death in him. And Jesus has been taken completely into
that ultimate reality. Not alone, but as the new and representative human, so
that where he is we might be also.
The end of the story changes
the whole of the story. It changes, for a start, the people we want to
victimise and cast out. The people who have wronged us, the people who have
made us afraid, the people we hate for dark reasons we can’t even fathom. We
can’t do that any more, because that place of the outcast is where Jesus is!
But it changes too our own
story. All the stuff that’s gone wrong in our own lives, the history of sin and
failure, wrong turnings, wasted opportunities, broken relationships, regrets.
Now, those aren’t the story any more. The risen Victim is the story, and his
story is our new story.
Jesus has opened for us the new
imagination of God in whom there is no death. He has opened the way to the
Father who is utterly different from anything we had imagined, whose love draws
us into his own overflowing deathless life. The end of the story changes the
whole story, for each one of us, here and now, as it has for believers down the
ages, and will do to the end of time. Alleluia, Amen.
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