I love the fifty days of Eastertide. They balance and outweigh the forty days of Lent lending our lives a dynamic of life, growth and movement which is well captured in today’s readings.
‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ we just heard in John 10:10 at the end of the Gospel - what a summary of Christianity!
That life has its origin in the events of Holy Week as the second reading reminds us, especially its last two verses 1 Peter 2:24-25: ‘Jesus Christ bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness… for you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’.
To know you can be freed from sin is life giving. I had the joy of giving someone one to one assurance of God’s forgiveness last week. The man arose with new energy, a lighter speedier step to his life. That’s an occasion when priests very much act as ‘under shepherds’ for the Good Shepherd to bring his sheep healing into righteousness, literally right living.
Life, growth and movement. We see that movement and growth in the Acts Sunday readings of Eastertide as today, Acts 2:42, 47: ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’.
Then lastly in our Gospel from Saint John in Chapter 10 that movement is captured in the action of the Good Shepherd, earliest image of the risen Christ, who: ‘calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice’.
We Christians have life, and have it in abundance, and its a life on the move which draws others into its dynamic since we follow the risen Lord who gives us that life through scripture and the Breaking of Bread through his ‘under shepherds’, we priests with the bishops and, thinking of Saturday, Christian leadership in our nation.
This morning as we ‘devote ourselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ we gain like my friend earlier in the week, a new spring in our step. We leave Church with a new eagerness as resurrection people who know more surely that our risen Lord the Good Shepherd treads before us out through the Church door. We, his sheep, ‘follow him because we know his voice’. As today’s Post Communion prayer implies we believers are ‘kept always under his protection, and given grace to follow in his steps’.
That’s our Christian faith, knowing the promise of God to give life to the full and forever in Jesus Christ was fulfilled on Easter Sunday! Its something infectious, just as it was seen to be in the Acts of the Apostles when ‘day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’ (Acts 2:47).
As you may have read in the weekly bulletin I’ve been busy on a series for Eastertide being broadcast on Premier Christian Radio Freeview 725 every Sunday 7.30pm until 21 May.
‘Finding Joy in the Lord’ has five 20 minute episodes with Easter hymns and readings. The second programme is tonight and all episodes will be available on listen again at premierchristianradio.com/joy. The first episode is already available at that address. I mention this series because it was motivated by the love for the fifty days of Eastertide I mentioned earlier which balances and outweighs the forty days of Lent lending our lives a joyful spiritual dynamic.
This first episode centres on joy as the gift of the risen Lord Jesus to all who believe and trust in him. I’ve been reflecting a lot on joy as we have a family member struggling with Alzheimer’s. It's a learning curve for us all in which we feel hurt by circumstances in which someone we love is growing in forgetfulness. Happiness eludes our grasp many times so far as our emotions go but we possess a joy which goes deeper than happiness.
Jesus Christ is risen - that’s our faith - and in his presence is the fullness of joy. The joy sustaining us links to our belonging to the Christian community, a community founded on the resurrection whose existence can’t be explained without it. The New Testament record of how Christ’s sad and defeated disciples were changed into fearless missionaries is hard to explain without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives. The abandonment by devout Jews of a weekly tradition of Friday Sabbath to keep Sunday as the day of resurrection has no rival explanation. There is no grave venerated for the founder of Christianity compared to founders of other religions, only the empty tomb in Jerusalem. These considerations are brush strokes painting a picture of an event pointing beyond itself to the unique action of God in raising Jesus from the dead, pledge of an imperishable hope and source of joy to a third of the world’s population today.
We may not have Alzheimer’s but each one of us will one day develop a terminal illness and life is either totally meaningless or totally meaningful, depending on the vantage point we have on that fact. Thornton Wilder paints the dilemma of two vantage points, one without and one with the perspective of the resurrection of Jesus: ‘Some say that…to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day. And some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God’. What we see about death depends upon our vantage point. The atheist Bertrand Russell had this to say about life and death: ‘There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment and then nothing’. Contrast this sad vision of death with a joy-filled statement of resurrection faith from the writings of the nineteenth century theologian Kohlbrugge who once imagined someone finding his skull a century later: ‘When I die - I do not die anymore, he wrote. If someone finds my skull, let this skull still preach to him and say: I have no eyes, nevertheless I see Him; though I have no lips, I kiss him; I have no tongue, yet I sing praise to Him with all who call upon His name. I am a hard skull, yet I am wholly softened and melted in His love…All suffering is forgotten’.
Finding joy in the Lord links to such a conviction about the love, truth and empowerment that lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ witnessed to by the New Testament. Our joy as Christians is founded upon the supreme power of love seen in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that by dying Christ destroyed the power of death, and by rising again opened up a new and imperishable life to all believers and says to us ‘I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly’. That life is all that matters ultimately. Yes - the only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death - not what but who! In Jesus Christ we gain not ideas, doctrines, rules but Life, life that breaks out beyond this world in the joy of the resurrection - alleluia!
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