Rev Andy Braunston

Sometimes, it seems to me, we look in all the wrong places for the things we want.

It’s not surprising, it’s probably part of human nature to look in the wrong places for the things we think we want.

On that first Easter Sunday the women disciples were looking for consolation in the graveyard as they went to say their final goodbyes to Jesus. He had been buried with great speed due to the approaching Sabbath and there was no time to clean his body from the brutal wounds it suffered nor anoint it with oils and spices according to custom. They wanted to be near the one who had touched their lives so profoundly and to feel they were still doing something for him. The fact they went to early shows they were hoping to avoid unwelcome attention and were longing to get there as soon as possible. Jesus’ death had plunged them into inconsolable grief. They were looking for some relief to their pain – as we often do in graveyards.

If all had gone as planned on that first Easter morning, the women would have embalmed his body, closed the tomb up again, and come away more convinced than ever of the dreadful events of the first Good Friday. They would know it wasn’t a bad dream and would have started to come to terms with their terrible all-consuming grief. But things didn’t go to plan.

God of Surprises

At the tomb they found the stone rolled away, the grave clothes left cast aside and they failed to find Jesus. A little after this part of our reading they are asked by two angels “why do you look for the living amongst the dead”. Those two women were the first to receive the message of the resurrection, the first who were told to stop looking in the wrong places for their Risen Lord.

Their lives were forever changed with the surprise of that Easter morning. Their surprise continues to change the world as each of us comes to believe that Jesus is alive. Yet we can fall into mistakes in our Christian life depending on our own temperament and backgrounds.

Good Friday & Easter Sunday Christians

Some of us are Good Friday Christians; we focus on the pain and the passion. As a child I was taught to “offer it up” with any suffering or pain. Why God might want my sufferings confused me.

Many Christians find it easier to focus on the pain that Jesus’ endured, and stress the cross in their thinking more than any other aspect of Jesus’ life – for example his birth, his teaching, his miracles, or his resurrection. Others are more concerned with the joy of the resurrection. They leap from Palm Sunday and all the joy of the entry into Jerusalem straight into the resurrection without ever pausing to consider the awful events in between.

This is more than theology or liturgy, but about our inner most attitudes. Some of us like to dwell on pain, others like to avoid it at all costs. Yet the truth is in our life, as well as in the Easter story, both pain and joy are present and it’s difficult to have one without the other. The joy of Easter Sunday is tempered by the reality of the pain that Jesus endured, the horror of Good Friday is tempered by the reality of our knowledge of the resurrection.

Some of us have had very long Holy Weeks.

My friend Jean is battling with pancreatic cancer and her Holy Week is very long indeed as she yearns and hopes for the triumph of Easter and all it means. Yet through the pain, worry and negativity of illness she finds she has hope.

Some of us here battle with chronic illness, fear of hospital, isolation from family and monetary worries. In all these “Good Friday” moments we also fix our eyes on the possibilities unleashed by Easter Sunday.

A friend of mine is very low, almost suicidal at the moment. He is finding ways to force himself to be distracted by Easter Sunday, to change his focus from Good Friday to Easter Sunday; but it’s difficult despite his many successes in turning his life around.

Hope

Easter means hope.  Hope that justice will prevail.  Hope that death is not the end.  Hope that illness, pain, poverty and evil do not have the last word, but that, to use C S Lewis’ phrase, a “deeper magic” is at work bringing that which is dead to life, relief to pain, justice to oppression and good to evil.So today we celebrate hope, the hope of new life, the hope that Jesus is the first-fruits of the great harvest that we shall experience, hope that we can make this a better world as we build the Kingdom of God.

Amen.

(Rev Andy Braunston)