This sermon was preached on Easter Sunday 31st March 2024 at St Peter and St Paul Church, Langham.
Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18
Alleluia, Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!
Today is the heart of our Christian faith, what our lives are all about. Today we remember that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, rose from the dead on the third day. In his resurrection, he overcame the power of sin and death on our lives to bring us to eternal life with him. We are brought to share at Christ’s table, which our reading from Isaiah tells will be laid with ‘a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.’[1] Super Yum. 😋 This is why we rejoice and celebrate with shouts of Alleluia. Jesus is alive.
But now that Jesus has risen from the dead and is alive, what do we do next? What happens now? We turn to look at Mary Magdalene and the life of the disciples and the early church in the book of Acts. On Easter Day Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus’ tomb to find it empty. She runs and brings the disciples Peter and John to come and see the empty tomb. They go and Mary is left crying outside the tomb. It is there where she is met by the risen Jesus. She is elated and overjoyed. She clings tightly to him, not wanting to let go. But Jesus says to Mary, do not hold onto me but go and tell the disciples. So, Mary went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’ Having seen the risen Christ, Mary went out to tell others that she has seen and known the risen Christ, that Jesus is not dead but is alive. This is the heart of our gospel message and the good news that we celebrate at Easter and in the Christian life.
This same call that Jesus gave to Mary to go and tell others that he is risen, is the same call that we share now as Jesus’ followers today. As people who have come to know that Jesus is the risen Lord, we are called to be witnesses to his resurrection. As Peter says in our reading from Acts, ‘[Jesus] commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.’[2] Our call as believers, is to act as witnesses to Jesus being alive and to preach this good news of Jesus Christ to others.
But how do we do this? How do we preach the good news, how do we share the gospel, how do we tell others about our faith? We often think we must come up with elaborate arguments and apologetics, and though at times that could be helpful, that wasn’t how the gospel was first shared. Mary Magdalene ran and told others that she had seen the risen Lord Jesus. That was it. She didn’t explain how it had happened or give a deep theological explanation of what it meant that Jesus had risen from the dead. Mary’s sole aim was to simply tell others that Jesus, who was once dead, is now alive. This was the first act of sharing the gospel and the good news. Not an explanation or a compelling argument, but a testimony, a witness account of seeing that Jesus is alive. The disciples would go on to explore the big theological questions later in the life of the early church, as seen in the book of Acts and the letters of the Early Church. But the good news starts with the news of Jesus being alive. And this is how we share our faith too. We don’t need to give other people deep theological explanations or make sophisticated arguments. We begin by simply testifying to what we see and know, that Jesus is alive! What do we do next, we go and tell others that Jesus is alive.
This Easter, especially as you gather with family and friends, gather with those who don’t know the good news of Jesus Christ, and remember Christ’s call to tell others that he is risen. So let us go from here and tell the world that we have seen the Lord Jesus, he is risen! Alleluia.
Amen.
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[1] Isaiah 25:6 [NRSV].
[2] Acts 10:42 [NRSV].
Shakeel Nurmahi 