ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at Evensong and Benediction on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 25 April 2010.

Readings: Isaiah 63.7-14; Luke 24.36-49

Luke 24: 39. Jesus said: ..a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.

So what happened to the body then? We are the people who doubt what God can do. There have always been disciples like us. So St Luke puts us in his story as the disciples who think they've seen a ghost, or who are not sure what they've seen. St Luke was making a point. The physical resurrection of Jesus was a part of the story he was trying to tell, both in his gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles. Nothing less would do. Why does a physical resurrection matter so much, why can't we get away with something spiritual, like feeling someone is still around after their death? St Luke wanted to place Jesus firmly in the Jewish tradition about resurrection; you will remember the story in Ezekiel of all those bones clattering together and becoming human again. This was God restoring his creation. God's restored creation, like the original creation in Genesis, is physical and material, green grass, blue sky, human beings walking around, like us - not some strange place of super-human spiritual bodies. To put it another way, God is concerned with what is real, with what is - like us, at this moment - rather than with what might just possibly be. Luke could not be clearer. He describes Jesus eating some fish which the disciples have cooked. There's one world, not two. We, and all those disciples Luke is going to describe in Acts, are part of God's restored creation. Luke has no interest in the sophisticated ideas about 'spiritual bodies' which intrigued St Paul. Keep it simple and we might find something to live by, instead of something to worry about. Here is Jesus with his crucified hands and feet, a Jesus who wishes to communicate with us on our level, the human level of sharing a meal and talking. "A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

But what are we to make of all this? We can try to be clever about Resurrection all our lives, often to get out of having to do anything about it. It is true that Jesus was raised from the dead and is now alive in His church and our lives. But these strange post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus contain a different, maybe a lost wisdom about the risen life. Perhaps we should start again, "talking about this", as St Luke describes the disciples doing, and find Jesus standing among us saying "Peace be with you." We spend a lot of our lives trying to be 'spiritual', trying to develop our spiritual side, as if that's a subject we can be good at, another degree gained. What Jesus Christ reveals in his life and death and resurrection is that we are already spiritual, 'in God', part of God's restored creation, and the difficult part isn't becoming spiritual, it's becoming human. That's the bit that needs the work, becoming a human being. We can not split into two people, spiritual and human, good and bad, eternal and temporal. Those are the splits which Jesus Christ came to heal. Christians believe that God and humanity can coexist in the same place. So in the resurrection appearance of Jesus in today's Gospel, whatever the minor inconsistencies of the story might be, there is a human voice, and a physical body. Jesus is the perfect example for us of the integration of divine and human. In effect, he tells us that Divinity looks like Him, and He looks ordinarily human to everybody. We often think of Jesus as having mainly a divine nature, it's easier for us to cope with, and puts him at a safe distance from us and our world. His appearance in the flesh corrects that view. And when we are able to balance humanity and divinity in Jesus, we are well on the way to putting them together in ourselves.

What is this Easter life? It is like this. Each day we start again, from scratch, without any built up spiritual capital, and without that heavy burden of guilt and shame we used to carry around. Each day we go to the tomb, in the freshness of that morning of the first Easter and we find the tomb empty, and our life of hope and forgiveness begins again.That's why the Lord's Prayer is our prayer. Gregory of Nyssa talks about the Lord's Prayer as a way to "remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is 'daily' life. We can, each of us, only call the present time our own. Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow." If that sounds like a programme for recovering addicts, taking one day at a time, then maybe that is what it is. We are recovering from - we are putting behind us - we have been raised from a double life, talking one way, walking another, pretending to be what we know we are not, hiding from the light, getting away with it, just, switching between human and spiritual. We can, if we want, awake to a new life, one life integrated with the life of God Himself. Jesus says in today's lesson, Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. At Easter we awake from that life of doubts and dreams, to a life without death, sharing in His risen life, each and every day.