We are not told that Jesus ”˜survived death’; we are not told that the story of the empty tomb is a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people; we are not told that the message of Jesus lives on. We are told that God did something ”“ that is, that this bit of the human record, the things that Peter and John and Mary Magdalene witnessed on Easter morning, is a moment when … we see through to the ultimate energy behind and within all things. When the universe began, prompted by the will and act of God and maintained in being at every moment by the same will and action, God made it to be a universe in which on a particular Sunday morning in AD33 this will and action would come through the fabric of things and open up an unprecedented possibility ”“ for Jesus and for all of us with him: the possibility of a human life together in which the pouring out of God’s Holy Spirit makes possible a degree of reconciled love between us that could not have been imagined … for the Christian, the basic fact is that this compelling vision is there only because God raised Jesus.
As always with ABC’s sermons, one must plough through a lot of verbiage to find the nuggets of gold, but they are quite good when you get to them!
[blockquote] “When all’s said and done about the newly acknowledged social value of religion, we mustn’t forget that what we ultimately have to speak about isn’t this but God: the God who raised Jesus and, as St Paul repeatedly says, will raise us also with him.” [/blockquote]
Amen.
I would like to suggest this as the centre of his sermon…
[blockquote]But for the Christian, the basic fact is that this compelling vision is there only because God raised Jesus. It is not an idea conceived by the spiritual genius of the apostles, those horribly familiar characters with all their blundering and mediocrity, so like us. It is, as the gospel reading insists, a shocking novelty, something done for and to us, not by us.[/blockquote]
It highlights the quality of grace in what has happened and undermines the Pelagian quality of most exhortations. It also underlines the point that he makes throughout the sermon the resurrection is not a metaphor it is something that occurred.