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Sermon: A Sermon for Easter Sunday

 
Preacher:
Chris Hollingshurst
Date:
Sunday 20th April 2025
Venue:
Guildford Cathedral
Service:
6pm Choral Evensong

Let us pray.

This Easter Evening, help us O Lord to open our hearts and minds to what you would have us receive from you, and strengthen our faith in the power of your resurrection. Amen.

As someone said, a lot can happen in seven days – and it has been quite a week here as, once again, our pattern of Holy Week services has commemorated, and symbolically re-enacted, the last days of Jesus’ earthly life.

We have opened our hearts and minds to his Passion, his suffering and his death, before, yesterday evening and this morning, claiming the promise and the reality of his rising to new life and God’s revealing of the power of resurrection to the world.

That resurrection is real is indeed a weighty claim to make. So it was helpful that, right at the beginning of the week, our Holy Week preacher, Fr George Guiver, reminded us that understanding and embracing of faith as a whole is not simply a matter of what we believe, but also of what we experience – and not principally as individuals but, more deeply, as church, as family, as pilgrims together throughout life.

Fr George’s encouragement resonates with this evening’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah. Here the prophet is speaking to the fear and isolation of the exiled people of God.

Their city and their temple have been destroyed, and they have been carried away into captivity in Babylon. Whatever they now believe, what they are experiencing has undermined their sense of identity as the people of God. They have been suffering for such a long time, with little prospect of their old life being restored and going home.

So Isaiah reminds them of the character of God: the Lord, the One whom they have failed but who loves them still. His words echo God’s past rescuing of his people, not least though the waters of the Red Sea when God brought Moses and the people out of an earlier Captivity.

Appealing to shared memory and experience, Isaiah encourages the people to see that God who was faithful then remains faithful now; that God who loved them then loves them still; that there is now no need to fear any longer. Isiah prophesies that their captors, the Chaldeans (that is, the Babylonians), will encounter the power of God and God’s people will set be free again.

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name, you are mine.

and

I am about to do a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Things will change. God’s people will be given back their core identity.

There are some similarities here with the situation St John portrays of the disciples in the Upper Room. They can’t begin to comprehend what has happened. Their Jesus has been executed on a cross.  Like the Exiles, their way of life has been torn down, their hope destroyed, and their identity shattered.

Now they are trying to process the incredible possibility that, albeit as He promised, Jesus has been raised. That morning they have heard from the women, and Peter and John have seen the empty tomb. But understandably they are struggling to fathom its implications.

And as wild rumours begin to circulate in Jerusalem, that the tomb is empty, that something has happened to Jesus’ body, the disciples now know themselves to be persons of interest. That’s why they are hiding, for fear of the Jewish authorities. Putting all this together, no wonder they are frightened.

Many commentators have noted that this upper room encounter is where resurrection begins to take effect in the disciples —not so much in the morning’s glorious event, but at evening in a room thick with fear.

Their understandable shock and fear then give way to rejoicing as Jesus appears. He shows them the bodily marks of crucifixion; for this is not a resurrection that forgets the pain of the cross; rather, it is a resurrection that transforms it.  

Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for hiding. Instead He equips and commissions them to carry his work of forgiveness out into the city and beyond. They, too, are redeemed, called by name, and they begin to perceive that God really is doing a new thing.  Their past identity had perished with Jesus, but in the upper room they begin to see that it is being raised with Jesus.

We know that there is much in the world around us which can give rise to fear in even the most confident. We know, too, that different personality types will always respond differently to fear and anxiety.

Even if we know ourselves, some of us – let the listener understand – might sometimes fall prey to anxiety when others remain calm. For some, fear can be truly debilitating, shutting them down, narrowing their vision, affecting physical and mental health. 

In the case of the disciples locked in the upper room, fear has been the air they have been breathing. They have not just been physically enclosed but spiritually confined. Yet God was doing a new thing par excellence.

So when the risen Jesus breathes on the disciples in the upper room, a new humanity is formed—one an existence defined by fear, but a life animated by the Spirit (what St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, would call a new creation).

And the same thing happens when we receive the promised Holy Spirit, as Jesus breathes new life into us. God is still doing a new thing par excellence.

There was a time in my life a few years ago when I was swamped with exhaustion, pain and fear. Through rest, care, and the ministry of others, God’s new life was slowly breathed into me once more.

Looking back, I have come to see this in terms of resurrection after death. I learned on a new level that God does not stand at a distance, waiting for our belief or readiness. Rather, God comes through locked doors—especially the ones we’ve sealed shut.

For the breath of Jesus doesn’t merely calm nerves. It changes our consciousness, and it encompasses all that needs forgiving in the forgiveness of Christ.

What of now? What do we want resurrection to look like at Easter 2025? What will transform our fears into joy? How will we change if we accept that peace which comes in knowing the power of life over death? How will it change how we pray and what we pray for?

What is there in our life together that needs the breath of the risen Christ to be raised with Him? With whom can we – do we need to – be reconciled through the showing of scars and the sharing of stories? Through the giving and receiving of forgiveness?

And what will others here, the town, the County, the wider Diocese, and even the world discover in us that is life-changing?

What indeed?

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name, you are mine.

I am about to do a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

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