Sermon Archive
The empty tomb
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on Easter day, 31 March 2002
Jeremiah 31 1-6; Acts 10 34-43; Matthew 28 1-10
The important part of a window, La? Tse tells us, is not the frame but the hole that lets in the light. It is a great strength to be able to value emptiness without needing to fill it.
When the women got to the tomb it was empty. At Jesus' birth there had been no room at the inn; at his death he lay in a borrowed tomb and now the tomb was broken open, and it was empty.
Easter begins with an empty space. How tempting it is to fill it again! But this would be a terrible mistake. Hebrew thought conceives of redemption as God making space for his people. Yasha is the word - being without compulsion - total acceptance of you without wanting you to be anything other than you. This is the heart of Easter too - that there is space for humanity, for each of us, in the purposes of God.
But we are often uncomfortable with this space, for the Easter promise is not a static one. God calls us to enter into life through the emptiness of the tomb - to find that Jesus has gone ahead of us and, if we are to meet him, to press on to the space, the void beyond the tomb.
It is tempting to forget this, to allow Easter to become a golden happy ending in which the wrong of Good Friday is put right, rather than an invitation to us to undertake a journey. Its joy, consequently, is superficial and impersonal, even cold, rather than an excitement that involves us. We settle, if we are not very careful, for a set of beliefs or opinions, even a sense of ourselves which is stagnant, complacent, lacking in adventure.
It is as if we are given a house full of rooms, each of them different and fascinating, but instead of wandering through them and enjoying the variety we lock all the doors, and stay put. At least, we think, we can keep one room tidy and in order.
This is why prayer is so important. Prayer is the way we enter into the void at the heart of our faith. By prayer I do not mean the saying of prayers, however helpful that might be. I mean the willingness to approach God in silence, to face up, without flinching, to the possibilities and the terrors of a God who suffers and dies.
Through this kind of prayer we learn that Easter is not a soft option. Rather it is an invitation to a fearful place of disorientation where our complacencies are undermined and subverted' where we have to face our self-delusions, our little conceits' where we are taken apart and reconstructed. This is a place where doubts are heightened not resolved, where knowledge always is partial and truth always provisional.
Easier then, perhaps, to fill the void, limit it, and push the stone back across the tomb. But what use would Easter be then' Some of you are here today after a Lent made painful not by the denial of chocolate or alcohol but by bereavement, the denial of the presence of someone you love and miss with all your heart. What comfort would Easter be to you if resurrection were merely confined to springtime, and bunnies and eggs and daffodils' No one needed to be crucified to draw those to your attention. What comfort would such an Easter be to our Royal family as they mourn the death of the Queen Mother so soon after Princess Margaret and seek to do so on this Easter Day in the context of their own faith'
This Easter, indeed, families await with dread news of their missing children, whole communities struggle in the aftermath of earthquake, others live with the daily terror of bombs and attack. If we are to say, as we do, that Easter means something to them, that it has universal significance, that it provides reason to hope even when there seems to be no hope, then we have to suggest that yasha, God's space is able to encompass them too.
Isn't it ironic, in the light of that, that so many of the conflicts in our world arise because others are denied space' This may be geographic space, land and territory, or it may be ideological space to do with culture and religion. We become instruments of redemption when we offer our brothers and sisters of whatever faith or race the dignity of their own space - allowing them to be without demanding that their being be trammelled or confined. In effect this is what intercessory prayer means. As Bonhoeffer put it, 'to make intercession means to grant our brother the same right that we have received, namely to stand before Christ and share his mercy.'
But more than this, the spiritual insight afforded by the empty tomb quickly becomes also a political imperative. In an instant, the void I mentioned before in personal terms becomes a political reality too as we wrestle with apparently intractable problems. How can we find a way of allowing Muslims to live spaciously within British society' How can Israeli and Palestinian share the same land' What about Catholic and Protestant' And when others invade our space, limiting our freedoms, to what extent are we entitled to invade theirs'
I don't mean that Easter gives us the answers. On the contrary, it is the very prayerfulness that takes us into a deeper contemplation of the empty tomb, the void at the heart of our faith, that also presents us with the problems and helps us to see them as neither black nor white but as shades of grey.
How then do we keep a hold on hope? The answer is that we are not alone in our searching. Firstly, because our prayer is not solitary, it is marked by a public structure, by places, symbols and liturgy. These act as fixed points where we can get a firm grip, where we can retell the stories of faith and reflect together, formally, on their meanings. Nowhere is this more evident than in the eucharist, where we eat and drink the death of Christ until he comes - where we celebrate the life of Christ in us.
Secondly, and most importantly, we are not alone because God comes to meet us in our human nature and is prepared to suffer in the process. Without such a God our faith would be stripped of meaning. The whole story of Jesus overflows with a sense of the graciousness of God, who comes to find us in our lost-ness and our death and to go before us into life.
All else flows from this - the church, the faith, everything! The tomb was empty because God had been there first. The tomb was empty because God was too strong to fill it. So, we have hope and therefore we cry, 'Hallelujah!'
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