Lent 1: Anastasis

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 9.8-17 Psalm 25.1-9 1 Peter 3.18-end, Mark 1.9-15

The late Bishop of Europe, Geoffrey Rowell, was an excellent raconteur, and by the nature of his job spent half his life travelling and schmoozing with minor European royalty on slightly esoteric but grand occasions.  Usually spending time with him was punctured by a series of clangs as names and titles were dropped heavily into conversation. But the story that’s stayed with me from him,  which I’ve probably shared with you before because it shows perfectly the simple intuitive wisdom that children occasionally occupy, and the grace of God, is of him taking a school assembly and asking: ‘where was Jesus the day after Good Friday?’ It’s a good theological question because it forces us to use a bit of imagination, in the light of what we know about Jesus and God. The perfect answer, given by this child, is that Jesus was in the darkest pit of hell looking for his friend, Judas.

Now that might come across as picaresque –  the lovely naïve innocence of children – Or sentimental –  after all I was preaching about romantic comedies on Ash Wednesday –  And now in Lent we’re on school assemblies. Every week’s a family service here.

But there’s a substantial theological point here about grace. The most serious hardline presbyterians are very keen to assert that there’s nothing we can do to merit the kingdom of God. We don’t earn our salvation. But, with equal seriousness, we must also agree that there’s nothing we can do that puts us beyond salvation. We don’t buy our way into hell, even with pieces of silver –So where else would Jesus be on the day after Good Friday, other than in the end depths of the outer darkness – seeking out his lost friend.

Today’s New Testament reading tells us of the Anastasis. (that’s not a doe-eyed floozy with bad taste in men.) Anastasis doesn’t feature as much in the Western church as the East. In Orthodox churches you’ll very often see depicted on their icons and the iconostasis, illustrations of this moment, which we sometimes also call ‘the harrowing of hell’. Peter describes it here as ‘a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey’. Jesus turning around even the fallen angels, the ‘watchers’. Anastasis is now a medical term for recovery, especially from radiation, Anastasis is healing; But it means resurrection. [I would like to call our second child Anastasis – who is due at Easter – but sadly Rhiannon has vetoed this.]

In the Western church we commonly think of resurrection as one man bursting from the tomb – like the Pierro della Francesca painting, with his little England flag and sleepy soldiers. Or like superman. The Eastern church sees it more like Aragorn returning to the battle at Minas Tirith with an army of dead-oath-breakers to overcome the evil hordes. This has the advantage of making it clear that the resurrection is not just the story of one man, but the axial event which defines forever the relationship of God, humanity and creation. In the icons Christ is usually depicted with his hands leading Adam and Eve from their coffins. Not the resurrection of a single person, but the defeat of death and the regeneration of all humanity. What the rainbow means for flooding, the resurrection means for death. It is the victory of God. ‘The kingdom of God has come near.’

This also tells us something about how as Christians we should view time. In the most straightforward way we move forward. It’s now 2021 Anno Domini, or as perhaps we’ll now start calling it 1AC. Anno Corona. But the Church has always also understood time in cycles – so the liturgical year starts with Advent, then Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Ordinary time, marked out by the annual great feasts on perpetual repeat. So we sing every Easter ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’ and at Christmas ‘Yea Lord we greet thee, born this happy morning’ – striking out in the present moment 2000 years, much as we all might enjoy striking out 2020 from our collective memory.

But equally, to God all time is immediately present. So every day is the day of resurrection; We’re connected now, not least by the sacrament, to the harrowing of hell and return of Jesus. In the hour of our death, we too will be summoned forth from the grave on the Easter morning to rise with Christ. This anastasis, this resurrection, is filling the world with life even now. It may not seem it. It may look like a grey February morning where joy and life has gone, (though tiny daffodils and snowdrops now adorn the vicarage garden) And with forward-moving time the dead are still carried off in hundreds and thousands; but our faith tells us that these too are gathered in on Easter morning. Because it’s not simply that 2000 years ago a man finally came along who did something rather special. The incarnation is God plunging a hand into time, and dragging all of it up to eternity. With Christ’s hands effectively reaching back to our first parents but equally to our children’s children. That is the harrowing of hell. Nothing less than the defeat of death and every power that puts itself against God.

Now you’ll say to me “WOW – this sounds more like a Stephanie Meyer novel (she wrote Twilight) than the cold reality I know of clinical trials, G7 summits, England’s opening batsmen, and signing on at the labour exchange. And it’s the test of the modern mind to hold these two things together. The dull statistics of science, the shifting gears of technology, the concrete and steel; with the hidden knowledge of the unity of humanity.

But do we know nothing of eternity? Of transcendence? Something heard, something read, a moment in the rain, the crisis felt in love and heartbreak, the connected power of being part of something bigger; the resonance of generations in a place like this, the weight of history; that little shiver you feel when you hear Churchill speak of ‘defending our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.’ When you hear Martin Luther King dream of a day ‘in Alabama [when] little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.’ When by words, or music, actions or love, you know the unity that exists, however scarred, in a nation, in humanity, in creation. When we know in our bones that love is strong as death. Then you are touching that spiritual force by which we were one in Adam and are one in Christ. This is a resurrected body; a connected body that is more than an outgoing circulatory and respiratory system, beating and breathing its way to a standstill. But a body that has dragged itself through hell and into the light of Easter morning, and pulled with it all the sons and daughters of Eve.

Now where was Jesus the day after Good Friday? He was in hell looking for his friend Judas. Can we be that bold? Were we to see Hitler or Stalin slink in together to the back row of heaven and awkwardly join in with the hymns – could we let it go? The bloke who bullied us at school, the disappointing parent, the unworthy son-in-law. Dominic Cummings? How will we greet them on Easter morning? How much more grace do we need? And for ourselves, the hidden faults we don’t speak of, the angry resentment that is barely contained, the shame we can’t admit, can we let in anastasis, healing, here? What will it take for us to forgive and allow ourselves forgiveness? What is keeping us from fully rejoining the unified body of Christ?

Anastasis: Healing. Reconciliation. Resurrection.
‘Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.’ Amen.