Perfect love casts out fear (Easter Vigil)

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: genesis 1:1-5, 26-31; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18; 8:6-18; 9:8-13; genesis 22:1-18; Exodus 14:15-31; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 31:1-5; Romans 6:3-11; Matthew 28:1-10

‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.’

Celebrating Easter means confronting fear. “Feeling the fear and doing it anyway.”

I am arachnophobic. Really quite badly. It began when I was 7 after getting bitten by a spider. In a moment of childhood depravity that St Augustine would have delighted in, I was pulling its legs off at the time, so it was well-deserved and my suffering has lasted longer, with less intensity than the spider’s. In school I was once chased around a classroom by another depraved child clutching a money spider; and I have had many panic attacks provoking instant mindless fleeing, crawling into a ball, and violently and hysterically flailing. Just the sight of a cobweb can make me imagine that my hair is full of spiders and give me nightmares, sometimes for days (nights).

 In a particularly hellish moment after hiking up a mountain in Australia, I turned a corner to see a cobweb the size of a door with a spider, literally the size of my head, demonically suspended in the centre. I mindlessly sprinted all the way down and plunged myself into the deadly-jellyfish infested sea to cleanse myself from ‘the horror, the horror’.

 But the odd thing about this phobia is that although it is irrational, inconvenient - especially once when I was forced to sleep on the couch because a house-spider had selfishly taken over my bedroom, I don’t want to be cured of it. I’m attached to this fear - I feel like the fear protects me – I’m actually afraid of losing the fear.

Now there’s a lot of fear and horror in today’s service. Noah’s flood turns properly apocalyptic. When I read our Abraham story on Good Friday, I felt almost overwhelmed with emotio reading it for the first time as a father; we have the sacrificial lamb whose blood is smeared on the door posts while the angel of death sweeps up the Egyptian first born. In the valley of the bones we have something like the white-walkers rising up; and after Jesus' grizzly torture and execution he returns baring his wounds like a Hammer-horror zombie.

 The resurrection is about the joy of a returned friend, but the accounts are all peppered with fear and trembling at the return of the dead. And, if you can forgive the anachronism, it is not too much of a stretch to see in the resurrection the beginning of the modern genre of horror.

 Horror villains all in different ways exemplify what mainstream society rejects. So vampires come from Transylvania in Romania (also, where Paul comes from), where the civilized West borders the barbarian East. They bring with them the dreaded fear of immigration, and the uncivilised world. From their beginning with Bram Stoker in 1897, they’re also portrayed with unacceptable sexuality – camp male vampires and sexually aggressive females, when demure and submissive was all the rage. More generally, villains of horror are associated with the mentally ill, the criminal, the physically deformed, the unnatural and above all the dead. All those who are pushed or forced out of polite society but return with violence.

 Society has always had its margins - those it prefers to keep out of the way. And we are good at keeping our margins out of sight. So the very elderly, the mentally ill, the very sick and dying live at a slight remove, while vagrants and criminals mostly get locked up or moved on. Good society after all depends upon keeping its margins in the margins. The margins raise fear and trouble our security. Beyond good society the rules change and it’s this anxiety that horror plays upon. What if we fell into this world? What if this world rose up and consumed polite society?

 These questions are at the heart of the Gospel. Jesus associated with prostitutes and poverty. He was himself homeless and somewhat eccentric. He was tried as a criminal. He was mutilated and killed.

 But then he was resurrected. He returned to society bearing wounds that show the violence that good society’s anxiety is capable of. Where he deviates from horror is that he’s not out for revenge. Figures of horror want their pound of flesh - they want Old Testament justice. But Jesus stands among those who had betrayed and deserted him and said ‘peace be with you’. Jesus puts himself in solidarity with the marginalised in order to bring to conflict a resolution – to raise up the poor in such a way as to end both suffering and anxiety.

As Christians we try and live in the hope of this promise; to refuse the boundaries that make people feel excluded or rejected, whatever their misfortune or their choices – to end suffering and anxiety.

 It requires considerable effort not to make assumptions about people, or to close yourself to the needs of others. Above all this means not reacting to people with fear. We can think that being fearful of people will protect us, that we are right to be generally distrustful of people different from us. But while caution is sometimes appropriate, fear gives in to what is irrational, to prejudice. As with my phobia we become attached to our fears, we believe they protect us we don’t want to let them go. But Jesus said, “Do not be afraid”. Let go of fear.

 Easter night, like Christmas Eve, is a liminal time - an in-between time, whether the late evening, or the pre-dawn. It is a time when we’re more aware of our fears and anxieties; when we hear more clearly the voice of our shadow, our unconscious, with its repressed anxiety and fear.

 Following Christ to the cross means confronting this shadow, realising our weaknesses; facing our fears. The resurrection is the promise that we will not be left in the shadow world to which society pushes the ill, the dying, the bereaved, the mentally unwell, the homeless; the fearful figures of horror; that madness, sickness and death are not the end of us all. 

The resurrection though is not the obliteration of what we fear. Christ keeps his wounds. He’s part Zombie, part superman. God is not about perfection; redemption is for all creation. But fear will pass away. Because fear is the refusal of the hope of resurrection, the peace of Christ. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’

Easter is reconciliation – in confronting our fears, as the angel of death passes over, as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death - we have the assurance of God’s love with us and the end of it all will be Christ’s peace. So as we contemplate our own fears, phobias and anxieties, Jesus says: “Do not be afraid”. Our life is hidden with Christ - and if God is on our side - of what then can we be afraid?

 In this virus Good Friday is all around us – it has raised in us anxieties.

What if we can get no food?
What if we cannot leave the house?
What if we are utterly depleted by illness?
What if we lose our job?
Become destitute?
What if we reach the point of death?

All society has been dragged into the margins and we will do well only if when we come out we bring those who were there all along with us. 

Easter is the promise of hope. When we say “Jesus is risen. Alleluia!” we are affirming Christ’s victory: of good over evil, of life over death and of hope over fear. Of the margins returning to the centre. Perfect love casts out fear. Amen.