Sermon by the Rt Rev and Rt Hon Lord Chartres for Easter Day, April 5, 2026

The Rt. Revd. and Rt. Hon. Lord Chartres, GCVO, served as Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017.

Transcript

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Father, all those words and thoughts that come from thee, wilt thou bless them and make them fruitful? And all those words and thoughts that come not from thee, but from our own vanity, wilt thou forgive. Amen. Beloved, Christ is risen. So on the very first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, and she found that the rock blocking the entrance had been removed. Now, never in ancient times was it any other way, any other assertion, but that the tomb was empty. The debate was how it came to be empty. Mary visiting while it was still dark, which is John's way of describing a state of unawareness, Mary jumped to the conclusion that grave robbers had stolen the body. And she ran to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. And the two disciples run to the tomb. The beloved disciple arrives first. A very early commentator on this passage with the marvelous name of Ishodad of Merv ascribes the greater speed of the beloved disciple to the fact that he was unmarried. Well, it's a theory. Because if anyone had removed the body, he wouldn't have stripped it first, nor would he have taken the trouble to remove and roll up the napkin and put it in a place by itself. There's a contrast here with the raising of Jesus' friend Lazarus, in which we hear the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. So this event in the empty tomb, the carefully folded grave clothes, they don't suggest the resuscitation of a corpse. But what was it that the beloved disciple saw and believed? Certainly that the body of Jesus was gone, that the disciple has not yet encountered the risen Jesus, and yet he believes. Now this belief, the dawn of a belief in a questioning mind, is marvelously described in a poem by the Welsh poet priest R. S. Thomas. He says, There have been times when after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone rolled from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled grave clothes of love's risen body. This was the kind of belief that the beloved disciple came into that moment of recognition below the level of words, when the looming questions as familiar and nearby as one's own body simply dissolve and are replaced with what we can only call life or love. The mystery of the body has not been solved, the problem still remains, but its death-like grip has been set aside, and it's been replaced by life and breathing. Thoughts come later. This is as precise an account of the way belief occurs as I know. So believing that something uncanny has happened because of the empty tomb and the grave clothes is for the beloved disciple the beginning of a new understanding, which will later combine with encountering Jesus, rereading the scriptures to lead him into deeper and deeper truth. But meanwhile, he cannot fully articulate his belief, and he and Peter go home, leaving Mary weeping. She looks into the sepulchre, searching for answers, and the two angels are perhaps meant to recall the two cherubim in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, where the invisible presence of God in the most holy place of the temple is represented by the empty space between the two cherubim, just as the risen body of Jesus is indicated by the space between the two angels. She questions the angels, she questions the figure she takes to be the gardener, but prostrate with grief, she doesn't wait for an answer. She saw Jesus standing there, but she didn't know that it was Jesus. And the point is made again that the resurrection event is very different from Lazarus-like resuscitation. The resurrection is not the restoration of some old world, but the breaking in of something new. And then comes the turning point. Jesus asks Mary, Why are you weeping? For whom are you looking? There are various themes in St. John's Gospel. Mark would probably call them Leitmotiven. They're repeated and developed rather like music. And the very first words we hear from Jesus are addressed to some men who would later become his first disciples, and he asks them, What are you looking for? It's a question that many searchers have in their minds. And then again in the Garden of Zethsemane, he asks the posse, who come to arrest him, Who are you looking for? And now in this conversation with Mary, we can see that the truth we are seeking is not so much more ideas in the mind, theories about ultimate reality, but the truth we discover in relationship with a person. He then calls her by name Mary. Just as last night, we named two young children, the latest members of our community. God calls us by name. Mary had seen him, she'd not recognized him, but now she hears his voice and turns herself around and responds. All the way through Scripture. Genuine encounter with God is not a matter of oh conjuring up more and more sublime and sophisticated ideas. Encounter with God is responding to an enunciation, some communication from the side of the word. Adam, Adam, where are you? Abraham, leave your household gods and travel to a land you know not of, but I shall show you. Hail Mary, the Lord is with thee. And he calls Mary Magdalene. He calls her Mary, and her eyes are opened, and we may recall the words of Jesus, the sheep hear his voice, as he calls by name those who belong to him. She doesn't, however, know the full truth yet. She calls him Rabuni. It's an affectionate diminutive of Rabbi teacher. It's a word from the old life. And Jesus asks her not to cling to him, not to cling to memories from the past, because he had not yet ascended to my father. He teaches her, and through her, the rest of his family, the disciples, and us, whom he calls for the very first time in this gospel, brothers, that he is now in place, having ascended to the Father, from which he can freely relate to all times, all places, and all people. Now, this encounter between Jesus, who is identified as the gardener, and Mary, who he addresses as woman, recalls that other garden. In the beginning, in Genesis. This time there is also ascending out from the garden, but not like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, from which Adam and Eve, the parents of a human race, emerged into a life of enity, pain, and drudgery. Mary, by contrast, is sent out with a message of forgiveness and new life in a new family. Mary is the first apostle. It's another sign of a profound transformation at a time in a period when men were always supposed to take the lead. Mary leaves the garden and goes to tell the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and what Jesus had said to her. And Mary's message has reverberated down the centuries till her words have reached us here in Boston, in the Church of the Advent. This is the tide. Christ is risen.