The Archbishop of Armagh’s Easter Sermon 2010
'...While it was still dark…'The Archbishop of Armagh’s Easter Sermon 2010
The following is a full transcript of the Easter Day Sermon by the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh.
I cannot recall, except when the Troubles were at their worst, an Easter-time when things seemed so unrelievedly black; and yet there is something wholly appropriate in that experience of dark days and dawning. The story of the glorious resurrection of the Son of God begins in darkness. Yes, dawn is at hand but that star around which our earthly home orbits - our Sun – has not yet risen on the tomb in the garden where the body of Jesus had been laid.
Some say that the night is at its darkest black just before daybreak. At this, the darkest hour, Mary Magdalene approached the tomb and, for her, the darkness of night was about to deepen. The stone that should have sealed the entrance to the tomb was rolled back. The body that should have been lying therein was missing. Mary retreated, she fled, she ran from the scene: things that were already bad had suddenly become even worse.
I share something of that black distress as I look upon the immense burdens that currently afflict our national life:
• The evidence, the full story, of the horrific extent of decades of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and the systemic failure to respond appropriately hangs over the whole of our island like a heavy cloud.
• The disgraceful extent of the corruption and venality in our national public life, exemplified by the scandals over expenses and political influence for hire within the very precincts of the ‘mother of parliaments’, exposes how far many of our legislators have fallen short of acceptable standards of behaviour in public life.
• The calamitous state of the economy in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland can hardly be exaggerated. The cost of the greed and hubris of bankers and fund managers who have, literally, sold us short, that cost is being paid not once but twice: first by the tax payers who were called upon to bale out the banks in order to save the system from collapse; and then a second time by businessmen forced to the wall and their employees forced into unemployment by the policies of those same bankers who starve businesses of liquidity and divert the money the tax payer has provided from those who need it to survive towards alternative arms of banking, rewarding themselves the while with huge bonuses. My indignation reaches the highest levels when I see hard working people thrust into despair – even to the extent of suicide – by the very institutions that they, the tax payers, saved from ruin. The price of failure by the fallen ‘masters of the universe’ is being paid not by them but by you and me.
These leaden skies obscure the moon and the stars, making the darkness of our night doubly sombre. Where then may we look for the first glimmerings of a new dawn? What will tell us that resurrection is a 21st century reality rather than merely a 1st century historical event? What did resurrection look like on that first Easter Day? What might it look like for us?
It started with a woman discovering something amiss, a stone rolled away from dead man’s tomb, natural and reasonable expectations out of joint.
It continued in the incredulity of two men, one of them, at least, a fisherman by trade.
Witness to resurrection was entrusted to plain, unremarked and unremarkable people. Gradually it became a shared experience as belief in better and shared hope began to bloom. This experience, this belief, this hope engaged neither the political nor the religious leadership of the day, they tried to suppress it. Yet, steadily, incrementally, otherwise unremarkable people became emboldened by the experiences they shared of the transformed and transforming life of Christ. They conquered their fear of ridicule. They overcame their paranoia about being rounded up or picked off by the powerful and influential. They took their stand!
In the power of their commitment to living in the new reality disclosed to them in the resurrected one, they began to live out with conviction the life, the agenda, the ethics of the Christ. He who patiently opened to them an insight into the mind and purposes of God as he opened the scriptures to them also gave power to their proclamation – a proclamation not so much expressed in words as in living deeds that spoke in plainest terms to the farthest reaches of the earth and changed the lives of those who had neither seen Him nor heard Him nor themselves experienced his resurrected presence.
Such was the resurrection in its first manifestation – not just a rising of one man from the dead but a resurrection of purpose and hope, a reassertion of the good, the creative, the compassionate and the positive in dark and dangerous days. What of resurrection in 2010? Where are the hints of a resurrection of hope? Is the darkness of the night all enveloping and unrelieved?
I believe it is not.
I see the fruits of resurrection day and daily:
• In the depths of a recession I see it in groups, volunteers, selfless people who come together to stand alongside people crushed by the crisis of debt in order to help them through the tangled webs of hopelessness to find order and a new structure in their lives.
• I see resurrection in self help groups that seek to mitigate human suffering, to stand alongside the bereaved and bewildered and to walk with them through the nightmare of their trouble.
• I see resurrection in those brave souls who take on powerful and wealthy, entrenched interests, to battle for justice and compassion; who fight to change unjust structures; who confront corruption and so often are rounded upon for ‘rocking the boat’. These are uncomfortable people who comfort the disturbed but do not shrink from disturbing the comfortable!
• I do not see resurrection in blind obedience to the machine but I do see it in self-less obedience to conscience.
• I see resurrection in a wrestling to come to terms with new or newly revealed realities. I do not see it in slavish and unexamined devotion to the past assumptions and the status quo of the prevailing culture or tradition.
• I see resurrection in both the failures and the successes of artists struggling to bring to birth new work or to shed new light on old.
• I see resurrection as both a sign and an outcome of incarnation – in the efforts of people transformed by the grace of God to bear witness to a living reality that is imbued with and discloses the unfathomable richness of the being of God.
Therefore, I do not see resurrection as the least bit rare, it is an everywhere occurrence because it is the work of God opening windows of transformative insight before the eyes of ordinary folk. Resurrection involves a little death clearing the way for there to be, incarnate in the same person, new life and new living.
Despite the lowering skies, then; despite the corruption; resurrection is all around us, most commonly of all in the common people, the very folk who are the most vulnerable to the forces unleashed by the collapse of moral frameworks and public trust.
My faith is restored, Sunday by Sunday, by the people I meet in the anonymous pew; the steadfast ones who keep the faith; the pilgrims, valiant for truth; the whistleblowers and martyrs for justice. These are the equivalent of what the astro-physicists identify as the dark matter and the dark energy sustaining the universe: invisible and unsung people who do good in great ways and in small, not motivated by self interest but motivated by the desire to make a difference, to change things for others and for the better. They seek no special reward. They do what they do not because they are important but because the cause is important.
It is in the selfless commitment to making a difference for good that resurrection is disclosed among us. And for that I say: Thanks be to God.
ENDS