In his sermon, he looked at the power of the Resurrection and the darkness and light. Drawing on the Gospel of St John (Chapter 20) he observed that there is no light without darkness pointing out that John was theatrical about darkness and betrayal and both the betrayal of Jesus and his arrest happen at night.
“Overall, Jesus’s acceptance most vividly in the Gospel of John of the need for him to die is an expression of light shining in darkness and his being true to his birth and its purpose. For all of us, I imagine, this takes us into a place both of elation and of alarm because death is not really on our agenda while we live. And why should it be? Yet Easter makes us face the interplay of death and life, darkness and light in ways that take us forward from the drama of Christmas to the drama of Easter and Ascension. We are given by God a hope that death and life make sense together,” he said.
The Archbishop said that for him to dwell excessively on the places and people of destruction and badness in today’s world would be to capitulate to darkness instead of embracing light. “Instead, I am going to invite you in the spirit of Easter to go and find the Jesus who has gone ahead of you into today’s Galilees wherever they are for you and in your lives, wherever other people lead you to Galilee. Look for the good. Give the good and you will find the good. This is where Easter hope will confound even, if not especially, an optimism. It will give us instead the divine gift of The Holy Spirit who is also an Easter gift to the world. This is the invitation to follow in a new way,” Archbishop Jackson concluded.
You can read the Archbishop’s sermon in full below:
Easter Day March 31st 2024, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
St John 20.1: Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb …
THE POWER OF RESURRECTION
There is no getting round the truth claim of St John 20.1, once you have decided that Christianity is the path you want to take in life. A situation confronting us that looks like the work of grave robbery and skulduggery turns out, with the eyes of faith and with the ears of hope, to be the full flowering of the life of God and of a life with God all rolled into one. The story, like so many good stories, needs to be told again, year after year, if we are to appreciate the journey in discipleship, the camino in companionship, that the first followers of Jesus Christ had to take early on the first day of the week … They were formal and informal. They were men and women. They were strong and faint. But they are the people of God then as now. Faltering beginnings lead us through pictures of fear and flight, grief and comfort, misunderstanding and recognition right the way through to the point where Mary Magdalene simply announces to the disciples: I have seen the Lord. Innocence, clarity, joy and hope combine to tell the story of faith to all nations. These are virtues for which we should search in our own empty tomb on this Day of Resurrection.
So much happens in this short story in the early morning light. It culminates in a statement that is the honourable envy of all of us who follow Jesus Christ today: I have seen the Lord. Many of those inside the church are tormented by the reality of their para–belief and therefore they fear to embrace the freedom given us by obedience to Christ Risen. It seems the polar opposite of evidential living and regulated belief that our highly sophisticated and highly wasteful societies have made a norm in everyday life.For such a reason, the leap of faith is too much of a risk, too invisible a dividend. It is not even any longer that it is not worth the effort. It is the fact that for many of us, it simply no longer adds up to the lives we find ourselves living and being forced to live.
THERE IS NO LIGHT WITHOUT DARKNESS
St John’s Gospel begins with a breath–taking story of creation and Christmas combined. It is birth without a maternity ward. The Spirit moves over the void and The Spirit moves over The Mother of God. Emptiness and energy come together. Darkness and light meet and they come to some working accommodation. While the darkness cannot be expected to go away for good, nor should we want it to, the light triumphs to our eternal earthly relief. This points us to God and to heaven. This, after all, is orthodoxy, not Gnosticism. Here again, there is a warning for us as Christians living in the wilderness of the world today. Optimism, aways an attractive holding bay for the anxious, can be a pale shadow of something else: reflective truth, a recognition of reality, a development of potential. Sometimes, high functioning pessimism is a better option!
Survival, for the majority of people, is an attainment and a success. About this we need to be honest. I give you a cautionary tale of the potency of too much light, if it is light that we constantly crave – and all that comes with it. Scipio Africanus, the Roman General, was captured by the Carthaginians after the disastrous outcome for Rome of The Punic Wars in the second century BCE. As often in times of war, as we see today with inhuman and inhumane results in, for example, Russia&Ukraine and in Israel&Gaza, nations and states overstretch themselves. Long before either of them is defeated by the other, they have effectively become their own enemy and are easily picked off in terms of irreparable harm to their own citizens. Scipio was crucified with his eyes propped open facing the sun and looking toward his native land. This was to ensure that he would die directly from the light itself; and not see his own country as he departed life on earth; and that he be a timely warning to his defeated compatriots. And so he proved.
St John is extremely theatrical about darkness and betrayal. The departure of the iconic Judas to betray Jesus is concluded by the words: And it was night. The arrest of Jesus happens by night, in the dark, in the Garden of Gethsemane. Overall, Jesus’s acceptance most vividly in the Gospel of John of the need for him to die is an expression of light shining in darkness and his being true to his birth and its purpose. For all of us, I imagine, this takes us into a place both of elation and of alarm because death is not really on our agenda while we live. And why should it be? Yet Easter makes us face the interplay of death and life, darkness and light in ways that take us forward from the drama of Christmas to the drama of Easter and Ascension. We are given by God a hope that death and life make sense together.
THERE IS NO FUTURE WITHOUT SURPRISES
Easter Day is a day of the future living and shining in present time. We are catapulted out of the predictable into the possible and, once again, out of the possible into the projections of ourselves as participants in an Easter Life. Resurrection is here to stay. Resurrection is the realization of the reconnecting of earth and heaven in the person of Jesus Christ and so it is the fulfilment in a very special way of something as simple and so precious as the clause in The Lord’s Prayer: … on earth as it is in heaven … The circle of creation is complete. So also are those prophecies of The Kingdom of God, for example the prophecy of Isaiah as embedded in The Gospel of Luke (4.18, 19) which some of us will have heard on Maundy Thursday in this very cathedral: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
The Year of Jubilee remains a mirage beyond the grasp or the dream of the optimists among us. … on earth as it is in heaven … remains a hope which is a Godly voice and a work in progress. The earthly life of Jesus, committed to us for its fulfilment through the operation of our hands and feet, is incomplete and it is the work of God in our hands.
For me now to dwell excessively on the places and the people of destruction and badness in today’s world would capitulate to darkness instead of embracing light. It might even go further and feed a sense of superiority on the part of religious people over those who do bad things as if we ourselves do not also do bad things. I am not going to do this. Instead, I am going to invite you in the spirit of Easter to go and find the Jesus who has gone ahead of you into today’s Galilees wherever they are for you and in your lives, wherever other people lead you to Galilee. Look for the good. Give the good and you will find the good. This is where Easter hope will confound even, if not especially, an optimism. It will give us instead the divine gift of The Holy Spirit who is also an Easter gift to the world.
THIS IS THE INVITATION TO FOLLOW IN A NEW WAY