There are two sides to Easter Sunday.
There’s what actually happened and how people saw it and see it today.
In the account we just heard from St John’s Gospel something happened outwardly and something happened inwardly.
Simon Peter...went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie; and the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. Then went in also that other disciple...and he saw and believed.
Easter is about an event for which there is clear evidence. Something happened that just got summarised for us in the words of the Creed. And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.
This event makes Jesus Christ the only founder of a world religion without a grave. His resurrection is said to be as well attested as any event in history. The low key tone of the accounts of Easter in the four gospels would be absent in any made-up tale. The, what was then, remarkable and controversial role of women as witnesses would not have been included in any made up story. There was a new confidence found among frightened disciples and eventually even a new holy day as the first Jewish believers changed their weekly celebration of Sabbath from Friday night to Sunday morning. All of these things are accepted history. They confirm something happened outwardly that first Easter Sunday.
When we look at the accounts we see that some believed, some didn’t.
There are two sides to Easter. There’s what actually happened and how people saw it and see it today.
How you see the resurrection of Jesus makes all the difference in the world because how you think about the greatest things in life determines how you do the things that are least.
If you believe Jesus is the risen Lord, the Son of God and Saviour, that affects everything – take three examples: the way you treat other people (since Easter we know that human beings are sacred), the way you fill in your tax return (Easter is such a truth it makes untruthfulness a wasted space), the attitude you have to growing old (this life is just the preface to the book of life Jesus has written for us and age brings us nearer to this).
If the fact Jesus rose from the dead is one side of Easter the other side is the brightness of faith.
For many people it is too good to believe so their faith is dim. At the beginning of Christianity the apostles didn’t want to believe did they? The women’s words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them St Luke writes.
We human beings have an inner blindness that Jesus touched upon when he once took mud and put it over the eyes of a blind man so that he could see again. There may be some of us, even in church today, who need the brightness of faith to dispel the darkness of unbelief. Jesus can do this if you ask him to.
The fourth century writer Ephrem the Syrian writes ‘Blessed is he who gave the mind’s eye – which we have managed to blind.’ He goes on to describe how, just as God made us first out of clay, Jesus made new eyes out of mud for the blind man and will ‘open the eyes which our own free will has closed’. We need to exercise our free will to gain the brightness of faith and let both sides of Easter ring true.
Through such a choice for him may the risen Lord open our inner eyes this morning in Communion so we see new brightness in our faith!
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