Easter: the Horror!
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.’
Easter is a confrontation with fear. When I was 22 I went swimming on a hot day in a pool in remote Queensland. We’d hiked for a day to what is the tallest waterfall in Australia. It was beautiful – eirenic. The water refreshing. Natural curiosity and that irrepressible desire to flirt with disaster led me to swim close to the waterfall. At which point I looked up at that 200m of water that was falling with the force of concrete on the churning waters below; It was as if a mad axe-murderer had broken into my paradise. Being an average swimmer, I naturally reverted to the only stroke I can do to a textbook standard: the flailing windmill, also known as the drowning man; Only to find myself being sucked backwards into the waterfall. Reader I survived. But only by inching my way out with a furious energy that only terror creates.
Fear changes with age. When we are young fear is very often about what is overwhelming. There’s a book called “How Loud is a Lion” that I’m banned from reading. “Too scary, daddy” But children also play with fear. A little fear is delightful before it becomes too much and you’re plagued with parental regret and a child who won’t go to bed. Teenagers I think face fear at its most elemental. As adults we’re mostly so tethered by formalised relationships, property and possessions, a career history, debts and savings that there’s a sort of security. Putting the bins out, paying the mortgage, the school run. Even if one aspect of our lives falls apart there’s enough terra firma to prevent our lives dissolving too quickly. But, and you’ll know this if you’ve watched shows like Skins or Euphoria – or Sixteen Candles – Teenagers have fewer fixed points, less resilience, more vulnerability, more dependence; As a teenager, feelings of being overwhelmed, of being totally untethered to the world come quite naturally.
But adults are not immune. An accusation of crime, a fatal diagnosis, can plunge our lives from the gentle warmth of sitcoms and period drama to the ice-cold of Kafka and Dostoevsky – where our life is no longer our own; Where the pull of the waterfall dragging us back in and under has become inexorable. And even if, for now, the thrum of the waterfall is gentle, the scene idyllic, our stroke – elegant, the mood – period drama, The undertow is there. It is coming.
The Easter story is about fear. The disciples have gone through the stuff of nightmares – night arrests by the secret police. The torture and mock-trial of their leader. It’s all very twentieth-century. And after Jesus' grizzly execution he returns baring his wounds like a Hammer-horror zombie.
The resurrection is about the joy of a returned friend, butthe accounts are all peppered with fear and trembling at the return of the dead. Freud’s definition of the uncanny – a big influence on literature and film – was of something familiar that had been repressed, which has now come to light. There’s nothing more uncanny than a friend returning from the dead. You might say, the resurrection is the beginning of the modern genre of horror.
Horror villains in different ways embody what we reject. So vampires come from Transylvania (also, incidentally, where St Paul comes from), where Europe borders with the barbarous East. They bring with them fear of immigration, and otherness. “Send them back to Rwanda!” I hear you cry. Since Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, male vampires are mostly camp, females sexually aggressive, when demure and submissive was all the rage. More generally, in villains of horror we find mental illness, physical deformity, foreigners and above all the dead. All those who are forced out of polite society, but return with violence.
Society always has margins – the people who make us uncomfortable. And we are good at keeping them 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. Seeing the margins casts doubt about how good, how civilised we really are. In the margins it’s the rule of strength not the rule of law, and it’s this anxiety that horror plays upon. What if things fell apart and we fell into this world? What if this world rose-up and took us on? Probably something like what it feels to live in parts of Ukraine right now.
These questions are at the heart of the Gospel. Jesus associated with prostitutes and lepers. He was homeless and somewhat eccentric. He stood trial as a criminal. He was mutilated and killed.
But then resurrection. He returned bearing wounds that show the violence our anxiety is capable of.
BUT Jesus is not out for revenge. Figures of horror want their pound of flesh - they want Old Testament justice. But Jesus stands among his killers and says ‘peace be with you’. Jesus comes from the margins in order to bring to conflict a resolution – to raise up the poor; to show that love casts out fear.
Our faith asks us to refuse to make people feel excluded or rejected, whatever their misfortune or their choices – to try to heal suffering and anxiety; to not react with fear. The words Jesus says more than any other in the Gospels, “Do not be afraid”.
Following Christ to the cross means confronting this shadow, 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 is not the obliteration of what we fear. Christ keeps his wounds. He is part Zombie. God isn’t about perfection; redemption is for things that are broken. The body of Christ is a broken body. But fear will pass away. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’
So as we face our own anxieties, Jesus says: “Do not be afraid”. Our life is hidden with Christ – and if God is on our side – of what can we be afraid?
The 2020s remain in the shadow of Good Friday. Caught in the undertow of sickness, war, death, and the cost of living. In the last two years, we have all had to confront a little horror – Do we still believe? Do we love enough to lead someone else out of the tomb?
Easter is about 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 despair. Of society made whole – the margins returned to the centre, restored. At Easter, perfect love casts out fear. At Easter, love is stronger than death. Jesus is risen. Alleluia.