Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15: 19-26; John 20: 1-18

“Death is the last enemy to be destroyed.”

-- 1 Corinthians 15:26

Since I plan to retire on the 13th of June next, this is probably the last Easter sermon I shall preach in this lifetime. So I feel an added weight of responsibility to try to make clear one last time what is the reality of Easter. May the Holy Spirit who alone convinces of the truth of the Gospel be especially merciful on this day!

What is the first, bedrock item in the Christian faith? It is that Jesus, a young Jew who was crushed by the government and judicially murdered, rose from the dead and became a spiritual presence in the world. The way to gain access to this spiritual presence is called faith, and the result of gaining access to it is eternal life.  The first, bedrock item of the faith, therefore, is the conviction that for us who believe in Jesus death holds no fear because when we die we share in the power of God that raised Jesus. Paul calls this power the new creation and John calls it the re-birth. “ Death is swallowed up in victory. Where O Death, is your victory? Where your bitter sting?” (1 Corinthians 15: 54-55).

So the reality I have in mind in the title is, firstly, the reality of human life, which is death. This insight is not the result of a morbid pessimism, to be countered by an infusion of American optimism. It is the settled stance of at least 50% of modern philosophy, that half that is not what used to be called analytic philosophy and is now artificial intelligence and computer science. It is the first principle of the school of current philosophy known as “Phenomenology,” whose motto is “to the phenomena of consciousness themselves” and whose most influential exponent was the German Martin Heidegger. This philosophy begins its thinking, where Christianity began two thousand years ago, with the acknowledgement that the basic and overwhelming phenomenon of human consciousness is anxiety in the face of death. Anxiety in the face of death! Do you wish to deny that? OK, but know that you are disagreeing not just with 2000 years of Christian thought but also with much of current philosophy.

How do we react to this reality? For the most part we avoid it. Phenomenological philosophy focuses on it and despairs, Christian theology regards it and rejoices, the former because it has no answer, the latter because it has a faith. But let us stick with the avoidance strategies; the most widespread is probably entertainment – half our affluent society seems made up of entertainers and the other half of spectators. Then we have drugs and alcohol; I think the AA adages, “One day at a time,” “Easy does it,” refer to ways of controlling anxiety. Anxiety leads some of us to drink, or to drugs. Overeating, currently the darling affliction of the media, is clearly also a symptom of anxiety.

An individual case of anxiety has many causes, but I suggest the root cause of all anxieties is the same fear of death, which takes many forms, and attaches to many items in our experience. Basically, however, anxiety is the general sense that I am insignificant, I am nothing, and no one wants me, no one will miss me when I go, and if I do wrong or displease those near to me they will desert me and leave me alone – the threat of loneliness. This is how I would describe anxiety. The description is far from exhaustive, and there are many other ways of representing anxiety – the whole range of human expression and representation in fact -, but the basic experience is constant, that I am ultimately insignificant and will inevitably cease to be. I shall sink beneath the waves of time and disappear without a trace. So let me be brilliant, let me be beautiful, let me achieve great things, let people take notice, let all love me, and thus let them give me the eternal life I crave, let their praise deliver me from death.

That is, feeble to be sure, my attempt to describe the bedrock principle of human existence, the fear of death. It is also known as “nihilism,” and is basic in much current philosophy. It is the unacknowledged reality behind our spiritual deviousness, behind the-hide-and seek we play with authenticity, the reason why day by day we find ourselves less and less real, farther and farther away from ourselves, stranger and stranger to our own hearts, very busy, chattering and chasing around, spilling emotion and leaking life… and then our flailing stops and we sink beneath the waves of time, without a trace!

Now that I have given you a psychological description of our human reality and our flight from it into unreality, let me turn from psychology and the philosophy that supports it to the Easter faith.  The first question we have to face is, ‘Is not the Easter faith itself a great evasion of the reality of death?’ This question must be taken seriously because we are all susceptible to self-deception, especially in the face of death. There is a case to be made that religion in general and the Christian faith in particular is a structure of self-deception that serves to insulate us against anxiety and the fundamental fear. I, of course, deny that the accusation touches the Christian faith. I maintain, on the contrary, that we Christians face death most rigorously. How then might we deal with such a suspicion?  I have two evidentiary events to suggest and one general principle. Let me state the principle first.

The Resurrection of Jesus is not simply the resuscitation of the corpse of a young Jew whom his government murdered. It is at least that, but it is so much more as to render that alone misleading. Misleading because it might suggest that what God offers in Christ is just more of the same, life going on and on in this world, like current regenerative medicine companies, Geron Corporation for instance, promise. Such banality will exacerbate not assuage our existential anxiety. That this ongoing life is a horror is recognized by Eastern religions. If you read the Tibetan Book of the Dead you find that the purpose of that religion is to help us get off the wheel of rebirth, avoid being condemned to more life in this world and enabled to enter blessed nothingness. Judaism, as far as I know, is unclear about the expectation for a life hereafter, preferring a good life in this world. Only Islam and Christianity make the next life a major theme, and we Christians make it central.

For instance, the first building the Christians ever erected is the catacomb of St Callistus on the Via Appia Antiqua in Rome, that is, the first church was a burial place, like those great mausoleums we might see at Skylawn or other cemeteries, where one might buy a niche for the loved one’s urn. When Christian worship moved out of private houses it moved to catacombs and mausoleums. The art in the catacombs portrays Christ as the guide of the soul to heaven. From this fact we conclude that our faith was originally and fundamentally a belief and practice that facilitated the facing of death, by promising passage out of this life to another, different and more gloriously satisfying life. This probably explains why those first Christians were so brave in the face of lions and gladiators, torture and rape, choosing to die with Christ rather than to live with Caesar. We know that some of the Muslim suicide bombers are currently motivated by a comparable expectation.

So the principle is that the resurrected life we are talking about is not more life in this world but the life of the new creation, the perfect life of heaven. We have a hint of this fact in the Gospel lesson for today, where Mary does not recognize the risen Jesus, thinking him to be the gardener, so transformed was he by the life of heaven.

If that is the principle what are the two evidentiary events I offer? The first is the quality of the Gospel narratives as historical sources in the common-sense meaning of ‘historical,’ that the event narrated actually happened, more or less as told. The circumstantial nature of the Johannine account we read, the fact that women are the primary witnesses when women were not permitted as witnesses in Jewish law at the time, are indications that this story is not fiction, but is controlled by undeniable external facts, and the overwhelming undeniable fact is that God raised Jesus and that he is alive after the experience of what we humans call death. We do not have time to evaluate the evidence now, but many of us think it is sufficient to warrant acceptance of the fact that this young Jewish man, Jesus, actually and in fact, passed into heaven and returned alive with heaven’s life, to vindicate the way of life he had lived, specifically its non-violence and law-transcending compassion, and thus restore our confidence in God who did not leave his righteous one to see corruption. Along with this confidence, also called faith, this Jesus brings us eternal life. Therefore, on this accounting there is a dimension of perfect life called eternal, and Jesus is the one who can take us there.

The second evidentiary event is what used to be called subjective, but in these days of post-modern theories of knowledge we no longer use that distinction between subjective and objective. In any case, there is the evidence of the experience of millions down thousands of years, ordinary mundane believers and extraordinary mystical personages, the evidence of the now century-long accumulation of data by societies for psychic research, the witness of our own experience, to confirm this interpretation of the event of Jesus’ resurrection, namely that Jesus is the guide to heaven. I have been at the bedside of people in the throes of death; I have whispered in their ears that it is time to let go of this life and to go on to Jesus, who is waiting to take you home. I have heard the dying talk of the overwhelming love they feel as they leave this world. I know this love in my own experience, here and now, and I conclude that the source and substance of that experience is the same power as raised Jesus out of his terrible suffering and shameful death and showed him to be God the creator, who in this amazing way was recreating the human race, and recreating me.

Amen.