This morning, we can allow the great reality of the Lord’s Resurrection to break upon us. Like the dawn, like a warming sun climbing the sky as the day unfolds, like a rising tide, like a good brandy filling our veins. Let’s let it resound, reverberate, echo, repeat itself in us like a musical motif. We can soak in it, linger in it. “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” “God has raised him from the dead.” “Christ is risen. He is truly risen.” “He is risen from the dead and he is Lord.” “[He] who took the toss. And rode the black horns of the cross-. But rose snow-silver from the dead!” (Roy Campbell). Alleluia! Perhaps before our minds or even our imaginations can really register this, our bodies can. How often, inspired by our choir, dancing follows this Mass!
Today, as far as his poor health permits, through a cardinal perhaps, Pope Francis, the Successor of Peter, will proclaim the Resurrection, Urbi et Orbi, to the city and the world – a wonderful testimony to a faith that continues through all the upheavals of history. Today, in union with the Bishop of Rome, the bishops of the world, successors of the apostles, in some three thousand plus dioceses in the world, will proclaim the same. This year happily, providentially amid so much conflict, Eastern and Western Christians can sing the same song on the same, shared day. And so what the women heard from the angels; what the beloved disciple, reaching the empty tomb before Peter, intuited from the folded linen cloths and face cloth; what Mary Magdalene would realise in the garden at the sound of her name; what the two disciples on the road to Emmaus would learn when the stranger broke bread in the inn what Thomas would profess at the touch of his wounds, what Paul would later learn on the road to Damascus; what the New Testament would confess: this dawning, rising truth rings out. This is our faith. On the third day after his crucifixion and death, Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead, not a reanimated corpse, not a ghost or a spirit, not a consoling idea, not a fuzzy feeling he was still around, but transformed in his body and soul, raised to a realm beyond the reach of death, present to his Father, present to us. Present in his Church, in the sacrament of his Body and Blood, in the lives of humble believers, in the suffering, someone, though now unseen, able to be known and loved. The Conqueror of sin and death and the hope of the world.
It’s this Today has to say.
In us, I think, once heard and believed, this Easter message, music, light, has two directions of travel to take.
The first is into our hearts and minds. As human beings, we are continually occupied in securing our lives, our selfhood, our identity. What is it that does this best? Is it my rationality? “I think, therefore I am”. But one day I may be unable to think any more. Will that be the end of me? Is it just my health then? But will that last? Is it money? Is it my work? Is it friends? Is it power and influence? Is it family, clan, tribe, society, country, the collectivities I belong to? Perhaps the experience of love gives a further clue. Perhaps I am most myself, most alive, when I am loved? But someone elses die too, and so do I. But what if there is someone who loves me and doesn’t die, who doesn’t belong to the past, who “is” in the fullest sense, imperishably so? And has such love that he can overrule even my death. Every real love looks for eternity. And if such a love exists, wouldn’t that mean that I really am, that I can live, love, hope, not just be a leaf on a tree waiting for the wind that will blow me away to the compost heap, but part of something that lasts? What if our life, in a powerful phrase of Pope Benedict, “is not a waiting room to a void, but the beginning of eternity”? Because He has died and is risen, we are and I am. May all this travel deeper and deeper into me, be my centre, my inmost conviction and hope. “Fear not”, he said to the prophet John on the island of Patmos, “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev 1:17-18).
And once this Easter faith has travelled in, it can also travel on, and, like the Apostles, out – out into a life of humble love, the path of the saints, a share in the love of the Christ which, in the light of the Resurrection, is not afraid to give its life. Today possibilities unfold.
“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it and be glad.”
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 20 April 2025
