Sermon: Easter Eve Confirmations

Preacher:

Andrew Watson

Date:

Saturday 19th April 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

Easter Eve Baptism and Confirmation Eucharist

Luke 24:1-12

Easter Eve Confirmations, Guildford Cathedral, 19.4.2025

‘So here are three things I’ve learnt’, she said, as she came to the end of a brief but rather harrowing description of her faith journey: ‘Life is hard. God is good. Heaven is real’.

‘Life is hard’. It certainly seemed that way for the small, dispirited group of women who quietly made their way to Jesus’ tomb very early on the first Easter morning.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and a few others too: here were women who had broken with convention and travelled round Galilee with Jesus and his male disciples; women who had supported Jesus’ mission practically and financially; women who had had faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God; women who’d placed their hopes in Jesus as the One who would free Israel from its Roman oppressors; women who above all had loved Jesus for the extraordinary man he was and the respect and dignity he’d bestowed upon them.    

Faith, hope and love. They’d all been there in abundance. And now their faith had been shattered and their hope destroyed, just one thing remained: love. For the greatest of these is love.

Of course it wasn’t just the women who loved Jesus. One of the men who did so had been placed in an almost impossible position earlier that weekend – outvoted in the Jewish ruling council and forced to watch his Master being sentenced to death on the flimsiest of evidence. His name was Joseph, he came from the small town of Arimathea, and following Jesus’ execution he took the courageous step of offering a tomb as a burial place for his Lord, braving the disapproval of his colleagues in the process.

The tomb, we’re told, had only just been cut out of the rock-face – one of thousands of burial caves that even now pepper the countryside around Jerusalem. Jesus’ body was the first to be buried there and would – by convention – be left to decompose for twelve months before the bones were removed and placed in a chest, ready for the tomb to accommodate a new body. And along with Joseph’s own act of courage and love, the women now proposed to perform an act of courage and love themselves: to anoint Jesus’ body with sweet-smelling spices – frankincense and myrrh among them, which had seemed such a surprising gift to give to a baby just thirty years before.

And so to the greatest story ever told: the story of a large stone, rolled away from the entrance of the tomb; of two men in dazzling clothes speaking words of radical hope: ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen!’; of a whole range of powerful emotions, with terror and bewilderment at the beginning of that day giving way to joy and elation by the end; of any empty tomb which proved to be just a chrysalis from which the butterfly had flown; and then of a series of encounters with the Risen Christ involving Mary Magdalene, a couple on their way to Emmaus, the disciples in the upper room, and – eventually – more than five hundred others, whose courageous witness would change the world forever. For without the resurrection of Jesus, let’s remember, there would be no baptism or confirmation candidates this evening, no service, no cathedral, no Christmas, no Easter, no Church. Without the resurrection of Jesus, there would be no good news, no assurance of God’s love and forgiveness, no hope in the face of death – in fact ultimately, no hope at all.  

There’s one storyline here that should have been destroyed for good: that the Messiah would be a great military leader, who would take on the might of Rome and re-establish Israel’s independence, whatever the brutality required along the way. It was a narrative that the disciples had imbibed with their mother’s milk, a kind of nationalistic groupthink. And Jesus had regularly told them a very different story, as the women in our gospel reading were reminded:

‘Remember how he told you… that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again’.

But it just hadn’t got through to them, or to the male disciples, so deep-rooted was the groupthink – so strong their belief in the conquering Jesus with the righteous fist.

Only the events of Good Friday would destroy that storyline, as Jesus hung there, humiliated and helpless on a Roman cross. Only the disciples’ complete disillusionment - their faith and hope, if not their love, in tatters - would open the way for a new story, the story of God’s great plan of salvation for the world He so loves, to find its fulfilment in the crucified and risen Christ.

Disillusionment. We tend to use the word in a negative way, as we sigh deeply and hold our head in our hands and say, ‘I’m feeling thoroughly disillusioned about the whole thing’. And yet, the opposite of disillusion is illusion – and illusion might be all very comforting, a kind of security blanket that we wrap around ourselves, but it’s not real, it’s not the way things are. It may sound harsh, but Mary Magdalene, Peter, James, John, needed to be disillusioned on that Passover weekend. Because they were the ones who were called from illusion through disillusion to the Truth: called to be ‘Easter people’, to share the message of their crucified and risen Lord to a waiting world with conviction, humility and grace.

It would be the first peaceful missionary movement that the world had ever seen, and the most successful too: a movement which now has an estimated 2.4 billion followers from every nation under the sun, who even today and tomorrow will be joining us in worshipping the Risen Christ. If we were all to hold hands this Eastertime, we would encircle the world 90 times over!

And our society has its own groupthink as well, as do the societies in all those nations - perhaps the idea that it’s money or fame that will bring us fulfilment; or that science has the answer to everything; or that our first ambition in life should be to look after number one. And most of us have fallen for that groupthink at some point in our lives – in fact, like the disciples, we may struggle to shake it off. That’s why it often takes a crisis to help us to do so.

And so we identify with the upheavals of that first Easter weekend, with all its weakness and cowardice on display, its denials and betrayals, injustices and agonies, confusion and bewilderment. Because we can be weak and cowardly, confused and bewildered too. But if disillusionment is not the last word – if even death itself has lost its sting, and God is Good and Heaven is Real – then it’s hardly surprising that Easter Day has Christians all around the world singing from the rooftops!

True, we may need to be disillusioned before we get to that point – with precisely that disillusion setting us on the path of spiritual searching which leads us to the hope we find in Jesus. Perhaps it’s for that reason that sales of the Bible in the UK have increased by 89% over the past five years, now topping 5 million a year; or why those in their twenties are far less likely to describe themselves as atheists than their parents or grandparents, with 62% now self-defining as ‘spiritual or very spiritual’; and for that reason too why we’re shortly to confirm these 26 wonderful candidates tonight.   

So yes, we may well need to be disillusioned. But the experience of those first followers of Jesus speak of a journey that leads beyond that to the Truth – in fact, to the Way, the Truth and the Life that we find in Jesus, and to a faith, hope and love that are stronger than death itself.

Christine – not her real name - has been on that journey. I met her on Easter Eve 2019, half an hour before she and her husband were confirmed here in the Cathedral, and she told me of some of the sadnesses that they’ve been through. Along with their two sons, she told me, she had given birth to twin daughters, who were both stillborn. Their names appear in the Book of Life here in the Children’s Chapel, which is part of the reason why she and her husband wanted to be confirmed in the Cathedral. In more recent days she’d been battling a life-threatening illness herself, and at times had wondered whether her faith would survive quite such an onslaught. But not only had it survived – it had been transformed into a remarkable and courageous trust in the crucified, risen Jesus, who has been with her every step of the way. 

‘So here are three things I’ve learnt’, she said, as she came to the end of this brief but rather harrowing description of her faith journey: ‘Life is hard. God is good. Heaven is real’.

For Halleluia, Christ is Risen!

He is Risen Indeed! Halleluia!