It has been quite a week. Last Sunday we celebrated Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem as the Messiah. People were celebrating, waving branches in the air, and in a few days the same crowds were shouting that He should be crucified. It’s quite something of a reversal. Jesus is tortured and killed, and laid in a nearby tomb. All the disciples’ joy and hope has evaporated. Mary of Magdala goes to the tomb early in the morning, to be close to Jesus, to anoint the body for burial. She gets to the tomb and sees the stone rolled away. Where’s Jesus? He’s not there. So she runs to Peter and John to tell them. 

Mary sees the stone rolled away, in the darkness, she doesn’t understand but says to Simon Peter ‘they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre and we know not where they have laid him’. Her concern is for the dead body of Jesus. She does not know, she does not yet believe. As Mary has run away from the tomb, John and Simon Peter run towards it. John sees the cloths but does not go in. Peter goes in first and sees everything. Then John sees and believes: he believes that God has raised Jesus from the dead. It is his love for Our Lord and Saviour which allows him to see with the eyes of faith, to make sense of the impossible, of the incomprehensible.

Peter and John go back home, but Mary stays there, weeping. She sees the angels, and finally she sees Jesus, but does not recognise Him. It is good that this takes place in a garden, as it was in a garden that Adam and Eve ate from the tree and sin and death came into the world. Now, in a garden, Christ the second Adam, having conquered sin and death on the Cross, rises to new life. The first tree was a tree of death, whereas the Cross is the Tree of Life, and through it, we as Christians, through our baptism share in Christ’s death and His risen life. 

It is extraordinary and wonderful news. Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death. Humanity is reconciled to God, and given the hope of eternal life in Christ. It should cause us to celebrate because God who took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and was born in Bethlehem, has died and risen again for us. For you and me. We do not need to be afraid of death, because we are assured that beyond it there is life in God. Love has conquered, love has won, and we are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our song. Because of what happened today Christians celebrate on every Sunday, and have for nearly two thousand years, on ten thousand successive Sundays, the fact that Christ is risen, and nothing can be the same because of this wonderful fact.

Death and hell could not hold Him, and so we rejoice. Our hearts are filled with joy because the tomb is empty, and Christ is risen. In dying and rising again, Jesus has changed history; he has changed our relationship with God, and with one another. He has broken down the gates of Hell to lead souls to Heaven, restoring humanity to the loving embrace of God, to open the way to heaven for all humanity, where we may share in the outpouring of God’s love, which is the very life of the Trinity. His death means that our death is not the end, that we have an eternal destiny, a joy and bliss beyond our experience or understanding: to share in the life and love of God forever –- this is what God does for us, for love of us.

WE are people loved by God, loved so much that there is nothing God would not do for us. He rescues us from death to give us life, life with Him, forever. So we should celebrate this most wonderful news, and it should affect us and change us. Nothing can ever be the same because of what happens today. We are changed by it, and called to live Christ’s risen life in the world. We are called to be something different, something out of this world, living by different standards and in different ways, living lives of love not selfishness, self-satisfaction and sin. In our baptism we died with Christ and were raised to new life with him, we are to live this life, and to share it with others: ours is a gift far too precious to be kept to ourselves, it is to be shared with the whole world, every last human soul, that they too may believe, perfecting creation, and bringing all of prodigal humanity into the embrace of a loving Father, filled with His Spirit, conformed to the pattern of His Son. This is our life, our calling, to have the singularity of purpose of those first disciples, who saw and believed, who let God in Christ change their lives and share this great free gift of God’s love.

So let our hearts be filled with joy, having died with Christ and raised to new life with him. Let us take that new life, and live it, in our thoughts, our words, and deeds, and share that life with others that the world may believe, that what happened outside a city two thousand years ago has changed all of human history and is still changing lives today. Christ died and is alive so that we and all the earth may have life and have it to the full, sharing in the life and love of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.