Easter Day

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. The beginning of John’s gospel is usually read on Christmas Day. It’s majestic prose builds until we hear the words ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth’. This is the mystery of the incarnation, the idea that God is with us, God is present to us, God has made his home among us.

And yet, in adopting the little phrase ‘In the beginning…’, words we find at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, John deliberately echoes the creation narrative right at the beginning of his story. With a rather studied eloquence, he then recites a series of events which take place ‘on the next day,… on the next day,… on the next day’. Again we see the echo of the story of creation, which was never a literal story – the great Reformer, John Calvin, in the sixteenth century, would soon disabuse you of such a fancy. The story of creation was always a creative narrative that the ancient Hebrews used to make sense of their existence.

The curious thing about the gospel reading that we have heard today, the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Lord, is that it contains even more intriguing echoes of the Book of Genesis. We will come to that in a moment. But what I want to do before I continue is talk about a little word which I have just used repeatedly. It is a word used rather often in church. In fact it is so familiar, we barely notice it, let alone give it serious thought. The Word is ‘God’.

And here’s the thing. I want to speak about God - but this is not as straightforward as it might at first appear. Thomas Aquinas, arguably one of the greatest philosophers of the Christian tradition, put it quite bluntly: on the whole, theologians don’t know what they’re talking about. They try to talk about God, but they do not, and cannot know what God is. Aquinas has been described as ‘the most agnostic theologian in the Western Christian tradition – not in the sense of doubting whether God exists, but agnostic in the sense of being quite clear and certain that God is a mystery beyond any understanding we can now have’ (Herbert McCabe, A Very Short Introduction to Aquinas, 96).

Aquinas reminds us again and again that God is not a thing. So, for example, it would be a profound error to describe God as a ‘Supreme Being’. God does not take up space in the universe, crowding out the rest of us, competing with us for space. God is the condition for existence itself. God is, according to Aquinas, to drop a bit of Latin into the conversation for a moment, ‘ipsum esse subsistens’, which means that God ‘subsists in the little verb ”to be” itself’. Note that he uses the verb ‘esse’. He does not use a noun. God is the sheer act of ‘to be’ itself.

Aquinas was sure that God is because he thought that there must be an answer to the deepest and most profound question, ‘Why is there anything instead of nothing at all?’ But he was also sure that we do not know what that answer is. To say it is God who made the whole universe, and holds it continually in existence from moment to moment is not to explain how the universe comes to exist. For we do not know what we mean by that little word ‘God’. We use this word just as a convenient label for something we do not understand. For Aquinas, only God understands what God is. But while this may well indicate that Aquinas has good reason to suspect that this preacher doesn’t know what he is talking about, note that he has rather neatly dispensed with most of the arguments put forward by modern atheists. Aquinas makes God impossible to ignore. We can no longer dismiss God as an unnecessary being-among-many…. because God is not a thing.

So God should not be regarded as a pathetic exercise in wishful thinking, a reversion to childish patterns of projection and fantasy, or a Superhero Dad, as the comedian and author, David Baddiel, puts it in his recent book, The God Desire.

But Baddiel is perhaps onto something when he talks about the connection we often make between God, and our awareness of death, our experience of grief. This is perhaps where we can return to the gospel reading for today and the account of the resurrection. The tears of Mary Magdalene could fill an ocean. She is grieving. She knows what loss feels like. She is the one who has come to anoint the body of Jesus. Still shaken by the shocking brutality of the crucifixion, the disorientation, the fear, the panic, of Good Friday, she comes ‘on the first day of the week’ to anoint the body of Jesus. But she does not know where they have laid him. The tomb is empty. She doesn’t run away like Peter and John. She speaks to someone she imagines to be the ‘gardener’ – it’s a word that occurs just this once in the entire story – and that should alert us to the fact that John is doing something quite extraordinary in telling the story of the resurrection. He is connecting us back to the story of creation, and another garden, back to the story which addresses the question, ‘Why is there anything instead of nothing at all?’

There are echoes of Eden in the story that John tells, but the most important moment comes when this mysterious gardener has asked her why she is weeping. She is bewildered, and frightened. And then Jesus addresses her by name, ‘Mary!’ In that moment, she responds with the words, ‘Rabbouni!’ And this moment of mutual recognition is the moment that Mary is able to reach beyond the isolation of grief to recover her true self, in all its beauty and complexity, in relationship with her Risen Lord. And yet the character of that relationship is different. ‘Do not hold on to me’, Jesus says. ‘Do not cling to me’. This relationship is not to be characterised by manipulation or control. It is given freely, and just as freely it can be given away, because it is characterised by love, genuine love. This is the love of the new creation.

St Paul alludes to the promise of ‘a new creation’ in one of his letters. It is a tantalising phrase. But St John, in his gospel, perhaps shows us what this little phrase might mean. For John does not hesitate to speak of God – no epistemological angst for the Fourth Evangelist. He says this: ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.’ For Thomas Aquinas, if God is the cause of all that is, we can at least be sure that nothing can be the cause of God. And this makes for a radical difference between the way we love and the way God loves.  For our love is usually caused by the goodness and attractiveness of what we love, but this cannot be the case with God. He does not love things or people because they are good or attractive; on the contrary, they are good and attractive because God loves them: ‘Our love doesn’t cause a thing’s goodness; rather the thing’s goodness, real or imagined, evokes our love.’ But God’s love is always creative; it is always generative. It brings about the goodness and the beauty and the truth of what God loves. As the book of Genesis puts it, ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’ (Genesis 1.31).

Of course, that does not draw a veil over the reality of evil or suffering. Easter never leaves Calvary behind. In the course of Holy Week, with the help of our preacher, Dan Inman, we have meditated on the reality of evil, the themes of betrayal, brutality and violence, of anger, hypocrisy and hatred. We recognise the horror of the Cross. We see it today in Bucha and Mariupol. But God does not create evil. Evil is the power of nothingness, that sinister system which is opposed to creation itself.

But in the Easter story we discover that in the end, love wins, or as John would put it, love abides. It remains. Through the resurrection, we discover the promise that there is nothing in all creation, not even death itself, which will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Whatever challenges we face, like the doubt of Thomas, the fear of the disciples, or the grief of Mary Magdalene, there is nothing lost that God cannot find again. Nothing dead that cannot live again in the presence of his Spirit. No heart so dark, so hopeless, so broken, that it cannot be enlightened and brought back, warmed back to the life of love: ‘for God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them’.