The modern relevance of Easter Sunday

Father Paul Daly

Father Paul Daly, Parish Priest of Saint Joseph RC, Heywood shares the historical background to and the modern relevance of Easter Sunday.

Two Good Fridays ago I was invited by a friend to join him in Albert Square, Manchester, for the Manchester Passion. Not trusting the weather, and preferring the comfort of my armchair, I declined the invitation and watched it from the warmth of Heywood. It came to a climax with Jesus being led into Albert Square, judged, condemned and taken away to be crucified. All that remained was for the presenter, aka Pontius Pilate, to thank us for coming or watching and wish us all a safe journey home.

Then the words rang out across the city ‘I am the Resurrection and I am the Life’. Everyone’s heads turned upwards and there, in front of the clock face, at the top of the Town Hall tower, picked out by the floodlights, was Jesus, crucified, dead, buried and now very much alive. The crowd’s reaction was one of genuine surprise. Yes, the ending of the Easter story was known to all of them but the looks on their faces were ones of genuine surprise, delight and joy. What is for us the expected ending to the story must, obviously, have been for the friends of Jesus genuinely unexpected, surprising, shocking even. Who in those days and these has ever seen a Dead Man Walking?

So how could the Resurrection be a fraud put about by eleven rough and ready men from Galilee (indeed, more rough than ready)? How could it be a mass hallucination that was witnessed by the Eleven, by various women, by more than five hundred disciples, and by Saul, the persecutor of the Church, in different ways and on separate occasions? Implausible as it may sound to some; impossible to others; it must surely be true that God raised the lifeless body of the dead Jesus of Nazareth to life on the third day after he was killed.

When we say that Jesus was raised to life, what do we mean? Well, we don’t mean ‘resuscitation’. Jesus was not restored back to his old life to carry on where he left off after the rather inconvenient interruption of a few hours agony on the cross. Resurrection is to something new, a fuller life, a new way of living. The gospel accounts do not speak of Jesus spending all his time with his friends for forty days after the Resurrection; rather they speak of him ‘appearing’ to them, and, in so doing, showing himself no longer bound by the laws of space and time. He is somehow different; they fail to recognise him. And yet he is the same; he still calls Mary Magdalene by name, he still feeds his friends with bread broken and shared, he still greets his friends as they go fishing, inviting them to put out their nets for a catch, and meets Peter by a charcoal fire, this time to hear him profess his love three times as, just days before by another charcoal fire, Peter three times denied him. He asks them for food and eats the fish. He appears to Thomas, absent when first they met him, and shows him the wounds in his hands and feet, wounds still borne because it is the same Jesus; wounds not taken away but wounds transformed. And his words to Thomas he speaks also to us ‘doubt no longer but believe.’

Believe? Because of the empty tomb? No. Because of the accounts in the Gospel? No. Because of the unbroken witness down the centuries and across the globe? No. These are only the springboards for faith in the Risen Lord. We believe, as the disciples did, when we meet the Risen Lord for ourselves. We meet him in prayer and in hearing the Word of God; we meet him in worship and, above all, in Bread blessed, broken and shared, Wine poured out, blessed and drunk. And when we meet him and know him to be alive, then our hearts, too, burn within us as we recognise him on the road and in the Breaking of Bread. You see, Easter is not about a historical memory of an amazing event long ago; it is about the possibility of an encounter with God, in Jesus, here in the Heywood, Rochdale, Middleton, Littleborough of today that is every bit as real, though different, as those encounters with the Risen Lord that first Easter morn and the days following.

Finally, though, to add a topical note. Whatever else the Resurrection of Jesus was, it was not a flight from this world. It was not an escape. The raising of Jesus was a raising of him back to life in THIS world, life first given to him in the womb of his mother. Easter is about life transformed. It is about the whole of life made holy, because the whole of life is the place of our encounter with God. It’s for that reason that it is not just right, but necessary, that those who exercise the ministry of successors of the Apostles in today’s Church, such as the Archbishops of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, of Birmingham and of Cardiff, speak out at Easter about all that threatens life. Easter is about more than bunnies and eggs; the Resurrection of Jesus challenges us to engage with this world, not to seek to avoid it by making of faith a kind of spiritual comfort-blanket, a cosy cocoon. Using their Easter sermons to warn of the dangers to life proposed in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the Archbishops are not mis-using their position or this feast. They are speaking out for life before as well as beyond the grave in the name of the One who shared our life, shared even our despair and our dying and, in the Resurrection that first Easter, proclaimed the victory of life over death not just for Jesus of Nazareth but for all of us too.