Easter Sunday: Witnesses

 

Acts 10.34-43, Luke 24.1-12

 

“We are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem”. That’s what Peter says in our first reading. “We are witnesses”. That’s partly just a statement of fact, of course. Peter had seen Jesus at work. He’d travelled with him, lived with him, eaten with him, had his feet washed by him. He’d seen Jesus speaking to the crowds, healing the sick, and he’d seen him exhausted, asleep in Peter’s boat, frightened in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter had been with Jesus almost till the end. He was the only disciple who’d followed Jesus when he was arrested, but his nerve had failed him at the last minute as he stood in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. When people started asking him if he knew Jesus, he denied it all and hid as Jesus was led away to be crucified. But after the crucifixion, Peter was one of the first to see Jesus again – in a locked upper room, on the lakeside in Galilee welcoming his disciples to a breakfast of barbequed fish.

 

He wasn’t the only witness we hear about in today’s Bible stories though. The first to see the Risen Christ were a group of women, who had supported Jesus’ ministry. They had watched Jesus die and seen him buried in a borrowed tomb. That’s why they knew where to go with their spices and ointments. That’s why they were the ones who discovered that there was no body to anoint that the tomb was empty, that Jesus was risen.

 

At first the other disciples didn’t believe them. They were women. Women’s testimony didn’t count in a court of law in their culture. Nor, it would seem, did it count in the court of the disciples’ opinion – their words were dismissed as “idle tales”. But Peter decided that he ought at least to go and check it out for himself, rather than writing it off, and he found that it was just as they had said.

 

“We are witnesses” he said. He spoke of what he knew, and that was what gave him and the other disciples of Christ authority when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. No one would have believed it otherwise. You couldn’t make it up, and you wouldn’t want to either. After all, many of these same disciples ended up being persecuted and killed themselves because of what they said they’d seen. There was nothing in it for them – no power, no glory, no status. If they knew it was a lie, if they knew they hadn’t seen it, there would be no conceivable reason to make it up. People may choose to die for a mistaken idea, but if we don’t die proclaiming a deliberate falsehood about an event which we know is untrue.

 

They could have followed the way of Jesus as a dead hero, a wise man whose teachings brought wisdom to the world – history is full of them, people whose stories inspire others. There would have been nothing wrong with that. But these people, who had been there, insisted, even at the cost of their own lives, that he wasn’t a dead hero, but a living friend. I can’t explain it, and I have long ago given up trying to. I don’t know what we would have seen if we had been there in first century Jerusalem with a video camera, but I know that these witnesses were sure that Jesus, who had died, was now alive. To them that was the proof that God hadn’t deserted him when he died on the cross, that he really was who he said he was, God’s chosen one, doing God’s work, and because of that, the message he had proclaimed, about God’s love being for everyone, really was true.

 

“We are witnesses” says Peter.

 

Of course, we can’t say the same thing, at least in the sense that Peter meant it. We haven’t seen the risen Jesus appearing in a locked room or on a lakeside, or trudging along the road with us on the long road to Emmaus.

 

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t bear witness to the resurrection. Those of us who call ourselves Christians today do so because in some way we have discovered the power of the resurrection in our own lives. It’s a different sort of witness, but just as important – perhaps more so. A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, once got into a lot of trouble in the press for saying that the resurrection was “more than a conjuring trick with bones”. But he was right, despite the furore. If the resurrection was only about something that happened  2000 years ago, thousands of miles away, seen by people who are now long dead, it would be an amazing story, but nothing more than that. Christian faith proclaims, though, that the resurrection of Jesus is a living event, happening in our lives day by day, for us to discover anew.

 

Peter is talking, in the first reading we heard, to a Roman centurion called Cornelius and his household. Cornelius has heard about Jesus and his message, and wants to know more. Think about that for a moment. He is a Roman centurion. It was the Romans who had crucified Jesus, Roman soldiers who had driven the nails into his hands, who had hoisted the cross up, with the weight of Jesus’ body on it, who had watched and sneered, gambling for his robe at the foot of the cross, until he died. Roman soldiers were the enemy. To be fair, Peter had really struggled when Cornelius had asked him to come to him, as I expect any of us would. It had taken some pretty heavyweight intervention from God to get him to go. But Peter knew that Jesus had proclaimed that God’s love was for everyone. He knew that even as those Roman soldiers were driving the nails in Jesus had prayed “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”, and he knew that by raising him from death, God had affirmed that message, had proclaimed that love was stronger than hatred, so in the end, he found the courage he needed, went to Cornelius, and, to cut a long story short, Cornelius his whole household were baptised and became followers of the way of Jesus in their own lives. Peter was a witness to the physical resurrection of Jesus, but Cornelius became a witness to the power of that resurrection to break down the barriers of suspicion and hatred which ought to have made Peter run a mile from him.

 

That’s what the resurrection is about – not an event that happened to Jesus and to those lucky enough to have been there and seen it two thousand years ago, but something which enables resurrection to happen daily in the hearts of those who follow him, people like Cornelius, who discovered a new way to live, love and forgiveness that should have been unimaginable

 

It's the same for us. We can’t witness that first resurrection in a graveyard in Jerusalem, but we can witness the resurrecting power of God’s love in the graveyard of our own hopes and dreams, in the situations where we feel that all is lost, as we discover that love is still stronger than hatred, and life stronger than death today.

 

It can be hard to discover and hold onto that on our own, which is why we need each other. We need to gather as a church, however we do that. Hearing the witness of others can be vital when our own faith falters.  But when we’ve found the good news for ourselves, it will spill out to those around us who need to hear it too, spreading through our words, our actions, our attitude to life.  It’s not about denying the reality of death or suffering – far from it; It is about declaring that they are not the whole of the story or the end of the story. All around us we see death at work – as the bombs rain down on Ukraine, as our planet faces the threat of climate change, as people are ground down by poverty and injustice, as well as in the personal threats and sorrows we face. Death is obvious, but we are called to bear witness to the possibility of life, where no life ought to be, which brings hope to places where despair seems to rule.

 

“We are witnesses”, says Peter, and that is what makes all the difference to him. He has discovered the power of God’s love for himself.  This Easter, God calls each of us to do the same, because if Christ has been raised from death, then we can be raised from death too.

Amen  

The Kindness of Strangers

 

Good Friday 2022

 

A couple of nights ago, on the BBC Ten o’clock news, Clive Myrie commented in a report from Ukraine that it was very wearing to begin almost every film he introduced with the warning that “viewers may find some scenes distressing”. The strain of reporting from a war zone was obviously taking its toll on him, because, distressing though it is for us to see these things on our television screens day after day, it must be far worse to be witnessing them in person, to see the bits that are blurred out for viewers, to hear the stories which the editorial team cuts out, knowing they are too grim to broadcast. And, of course, it is even worse for those for whom these things are not stories in a news broadcast, but lived experience, those who have buried their loved ones in their own back gardens with their own bare hands, because there is nowhere else to put them, those who have suffered rape or torture, and seen all they have and all they love destroyed.

 

We have the luxury of being able to turn off the TV, and I suspect that sometimes we may be wise to do so, but the suffering doesn’t stop because we can’t see it.

 

It really does seem at the moment as if there is nothing but bad news; as well as the war in Ukraine there is a pandemic still raging, a cost of living crisis, and a climate emergency which is ticking down to the point of no return.

 

And here we are on the solemnest day of Holy Week, piling on top of all that a story which is just as grim as anything we might hear on the news. An innocent man, arrested on trumped up charges, deserted by his friends, mocked and beaten and subjected to an horrific death. Telling this story year after year might seem like a perverse thing to do, deliberately depressing us even further than we are by the realities of our world – wouldn’t it be better for our mental health just to avoid it, think of something pleasant instead – bunnies and chocolate and fluffy chicks?

 

And yet, for two thousand years we have circled back to this story, telling it again, looking at it from every angle. Why would we do this to ourselves?

 

Perhaps it gives us a lens, a framework, to look also at the suffering around us now, and the suffering we go through with new eyes. People often ask why we call this day Good Friday – how can it be good? But we proclaim that it is, and that somehow it strengthens us.

 

As I looked at the story again this year, in preparation for Holy Week, one of the things that struck me was that, for all the cruelty and hatred in it, there are also acts  of love and kindness too, often from people who are either right on the fringes of Jesus’ world or even complete strangers to him. I’ve explored some of those stories in the display in front of the Lady Chapel, which I have called “the Kindness of Strangers”. There are the stories of people like the person who owned the donkey and gave it gladly to Jesus to ride into Jerusalem – I hope you like the Donkey we made at Messy Church this morning -  or the penitent thief on the cross, who defends Jesus when the other thief crucified with them rails at him. There’s Simon of Cyrene too, who is forced to help Jesus carry his cross, but is evidently changed by the experience and becomes a disciple. We wouldn’t know his name or where he comes from if he hadn’t. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea feature as well, stepping out of the shadows after Jesus’ death for the first time and helping with his burial, a gesture that must have seemed to them too little, too late, until the resurrection changed everything. And then there are the women who watch the crucifixion and the burial, when all Jesus’ male disciples have run away. They witness, and bear witness to his crucifixion, and later to his resurrection too. They may not be able to do anything to prevent it, but it makes a difference to us when others see and take notice of our suffering, and I’m sure it did to Jesus too.

 

What did it feel like to be one of those bit-part players in the story? They probably felt that what they were doing was pointless, but they knew they had to do it. Somehow, this man Jesus had drawn out of them love and courage they didn’t know they were capable of.  And as it turned out, their kindness wasn’t pointless after all. It has been remembered and celebrated in the words of Scripture ever since, to inspire us to love and courage too.

 

When you look at this terrible story, you find golden threads of kindness woven through it. They don’t negate the suffering and hatred, but they are every bit as important as them. They remind us that evil is not the whole of any story, that, if we have eyes to see, there is always hope and love, like those stubborn weeds that force their way up through the toughest concrete.

 

The kindness of strangers is as precious now as it was then.  It counts. It matters. It makes a difference. And we can see it all around us if we have eyes to look, in those who helped their neighbours through the lockdowns, stepping forward in their thousands to offer support, in those who have offered to host Ukrainian refugees or have given generously, in those who have protested about the treatment of refugees from other parts of the world – protest can be an act of kindness too. In every small gesture of love, even if it seems pointless, especially if it seems pointless, we proclaim the power of God, the God who doesn’t let hatred have the last word, ever.

 

Ultimately, all our kindnesses are rooted in the greatest kindness of all, the love of God, for us. God who didn’t  have to come and live and die with us in Christ, but he chose to do so, because we needed him, even if we didn’t know it. It is sometimes hard to see the good in Good Friday, just as it is hard to see the good in the world around us now, but that is what we are called to do, today and everyday, to see it and to be it, for friends and strangers, and even enemies, because that’s what God did for us.

Amen