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Sermon for Easter Day Year A

By Rev Charles Royden

Encountering the Risen Christ  

In his book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes about a fictional land called Narnia where it is always winter. Always snowing. Always cold. Always winter, but never Christmas.

If Christ had not been raised from the dead on that first Easter morning then that is how our faith would be. As far as our knowledge of God, without Easter we would be out in the cold. Our faith would be pointless and we would know nothing of the warmth of God’s love for us.

That is how the disciples were that first Easter when they left Jesus in the tomb. Out in the cold. That is how many people are today, living lives in perpetual Winter, 'out in the cold.'

Significantly Easter comes about in the season when Winter is about to change into Spring. So it is an encouragement to have faith and believe and move our spiritual lives into the sunshine.

But

1. Today is not about jollying people along and helping them to understand the Christian faith so that they can ease their doubts
2. Today is not about helping people to grapple with understanding the mysteries of faith
3. Today we do not urge people to put their trust in a great teacher who lived 2,000 years ago
4. Rather we gather to share in the praise of Jesus, not a figure of the past, but our risen Lord, who is present with us as we sing praises to God and pray.

• Easter is not about believing

• Easter is about encountering the risen Christ in our own lives

• We too with Mary are able are able to meet and talk with our risen Lord

I have to say that if I had no faith whatsoever I would be extremely challenged by Christians who living by faith, discover the power of that faith to sustain them throughout the course of their lives and through the midst of extraordinary difficulties and suffering. This alone should cause the undecided to ponder what is going on in the hearts and minds of believers.

This is not to say that Christians do not have doubts, but doubt is not a problem for faith, it is part of the process of believing.

Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, wrote, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.”
And Rene Descartes is often quoted as saying “I think, therefore I am”
whereas what he actually said was

‘I doubt, therefore I think.
I think, therefore I am.’

So doubt is the friend of faith helping us to work out what we believe about things. But the Christian faith is not about what we believe, it is about who we believe. We do not need reassurance of the circumstances of the life of Jesus. It actually doesn’t matter if people try to tell us that Jesus, never lived, died or rose again. Our faith is not a matter of academic study, weighing the probabilities. Our faith is not faith a leap in the dark.

Faith is the process by which God sets up home in our hearts. We believe the truth of the resurrection because we know his risen life. We believe not because somebody has told us about it and it sounded believable, but because it is a living reality in our midst in our Christian community, we see Jesus in the lives of people around us. If God in Christ was not alive today as he was 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, then we would all have packed up and gone home long ago.

A film entitled “The Body” is a drama about an archaeologist who discovers what he believes to be the bones of Jesus in Jerusalem. For much of the story the evidence builds toward a belief that this probably is the body of Jesus and that the idea of resurrection is unreal. At the end of the film, however, it becomes clear that the bones are not those of Jesus.

But before this is known, much earlier in the story, a Jesuit priest delegate from the Vatican, played by Antonio Banderas, who was sent to investigate the issue speaks about why he has faith in Jesus and about the reality of the risen Christ: He says

“I believe that Jesus Christ is God because I spoke to Him this morning in my prayers. And I've known that He was God since I was a boy. He has always been my best friend even though I haven't always been His. In Him, I have peace.”

For Christians Easter is not a time when we believe in Christ, we do not believe things about Jesus, we meet with the risen Jesus

We cannot explain the resurrection, we can only encourage people to share in the miracle of Christ’s risen life. Easter is not an event which took place in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Easter is an event which is repeated over and over again as Christ is born in our hearts and brings his life to us.


I believe that the seeds of faith are buried deep inside all people, sometimes those who object most strongly to faith are those who are closest to faith itself.

That faith can be brought to life just as Christ was raised from the dead.

The resurrection of Jesus assures us of life after death, yet it does much more than that. By the power of the resurrection we are enabled to know not just life after death, but Christ’s presence in our lives before death.

Today we gather and we meet with the Risen Christ

1. We share in his banquet in which he is present in a communion of bread and wine; take his body and his blood and share his risen life
2. We draw close to Jesus as seek God in prayer. As you pray, know Jesus to surround you with his life giving love, which cats our fear.
3. We meet with the risen Christ as we read the stories of his life death and resurrection in the scriptures written by those who lived at his side. And we seek to show our faith as we follow his example and teachings.

Today we are fortunate above all, for we know the closeness of God in Jesus and we share his risen life.