Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

In a few minutes, just after the Rector consecrates the bread and wine, we will all join in this great acclamation, which is sometimes called the mystery of faith. On this joyful Easter Day, surely it is appropriate to reflect on these words.

The 1st reading we heard (Acts 10:34-43) is just a part of the story of the baptism of Cornelius - it’s worth summarising the whole of it.

Cornelius, a Centurion in the Roman army and a gentile, is a devout man who fears God – today we might describe him as a God seeker. He is prompted in a vision to send for Peter to visit him, and Peter too is prompted in a dream to go to Cornelius.

When Peter reaches Cornelius’s house he gives the speech that is our 1st reading. In it he tells Cornelius and his family the good news about Jesus – about his life, death, resurrection, and by implication his second coming as judge and forgiver of sins. In fact Peter is proclaiming the mystery of our faith - Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

And Cornelius and his whole family respond to it immediately. The Holy Spirit falls on them, we’re told - they begin to praise God and speak in tongues, just as the disciples did at Pentecost. Peter then arranges for their baptism - they are actually the very first gentiles to be baptised.

What a suitable reading it is for today - because today is not just Easter Day, it is a joyful day of baptism for Molly Sara Shelly and her family!

No human eyes saw Jesus rise from the tomb on that first Easter day.

None of the Gospels suggest any such thing. But they do describe incidents that day in which several different disciples encountered Jesus after he had done so. Let’s remind ourselves of them.

We are told in today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 20:1-18) how Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early in the morning. She sees the stone which sealed it has been moved. She rushes to tell Peter and another disciple that the tomb has been robbed – tradition says the other disciple is John. Peter and John find it hard to believe, so they race to the tomb to see for themselves.

Mary also goes back to the tomb a little later, more sedately perhaps. She sees two angels, as if in a vision, and then a man she takes for the gardener. She does not recognise him at first, until he speaks her name. ‘Mary!’, he says, and immediately she recognises him to be Jesus and answers ‘Rabbouni!’, which means teacher. She goes to embrace him, but he forbids her – why is that I wonder? Instead he says, ‘go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’

Mary is the first to see the risen Christ.

Let’s go back to Peter and John running to the tomb - John gets there first. From outside he sees the winding sheets lying there, but he does not go in. Peter, brave Peter, goes in first, followed by John. They confirm with their own eyes that the body is gone. But they do not see Jesus, nor do they yet understand that he has risen from the dead.

Peter must have seen the risen Christ later in the day, though, because Luke’s Gospel tells us so. When Cleopas and his friend, the two men who went to Emmaus, return late at night, the disciples in the upper room tell them, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon’ Peter.

Cleopas (Luke 24: 13-35) then recounts the story of their journey to Emmaus, and the stranger who walked with them. When the stranger spoke their hearts burned within them. They persuaded him to stay and eat with them. And it was only when ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’ – as he had done three nights before at the Last Supper - that they recognised the risen Christ.

Later still that night - as the disciples talk about these amazing events, trying to make sense of them - Jesus suddenly appears again to a large group of them, gathered behind closed doors in the upper room.

Throughout that first Easter Day, God gradually opens the minds of Jesus’s disciples to understand that Christ is risen.

What are we to make of these appearances of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day?

On the evidence of the Gospels the risen Christ is rather different to the man Jesus. His close friends do not recognise him by sight, but by such things as a tone of voice or a characteristic action like blessing bread. He appears and disappears, unlike any human being.

For the disciples who knew Jesus before his death, meeting the risen Christ seems as much a spiritual as a physical experience. But whatever the nature of their experience, it changed them completely – it drove them to go out and preach the good news, even at the cost of their lives.

They described it as Jesus risen from the dead, and we might as well call it the same thing.

Christians ever since continue to meet the risen Christ, as a spiritual if not a physical reality.

It is a dynamic process that goes like this, I think:

• God prompts those who seek him to investigate the good news about Jesus;
• they come to faith, accepting Jesus as Christ their saviour, through the witness of his disciples - that's you and me;
• God responds to their faith with the gift of his Spirit;
• and the Spirit leads them to understand that Christ is risen, and what this means for them.

In other words: We come to believe in the resurrection because we first believe in Christ – rather than the other way about. We do not come to believe in Christ because we first believe in the resurrection.

This process is displayed in the story of Cornelius. And Christian disciples still seem to be made by this process today. So I believe it must also be true for Mary Magdalene, for Peter & John, for Cleopas and the other disciples too - though their faith came not from the witness of disciples but from personal knowledge of Jesus.

Before his death Jesus promised his disciples that he would come again (John 14:3)

He tells them that he is going away to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, but that he will come again and take them there to be with him.

Christians sometimes imagine the second coming as Christ returning in glory at the end of time, in a last great judgement of the living and the dead to usher in God’s kingdom. But I think the end of time is better seen as a metaphor for any & every time - a typical time if you will. I prefer to imagine that Christ will come again to each one of us, at just the time that is right for each one of us personally.

In our hearts we will hear his voice. He will speak our name. And we will reply as Mary did,
‘Rabbouni – my teacher.
Now I understand -
Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!
Let me be your disciple now and always.’

Living Bread

An address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on 9th Aug 2009, Trinity 9

One of life’s greatest pleasures is to share a meal with loved ones and friends, isn’t it?
It is for me, and I'm quite sure it is for you too – good food, good drink and good company! And it must have been so for Jesus as well, since so often in the Gospels we find Jesus sharing meals with others. He shared table fellowship not just with his disciples and friends, but also with tax collectors and sinners, and with Pharisees and scribes – with all kinds of people.

When Jesus himself broke bread as the host at a meal, he had a special way of doing so – first he took the food, then he gave thanks or blessed it, and finally he broke it and shared it out. It was so distinctive that only when the disciples on the road to Emmaus saw it did they recognise Jesus, after his death and resurrection. Today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:35, 41-51) comes just after Jesus shares a meal with others on a grand scale – the feeding of the 5000 – a gigantic outdoor picnic. There too in his special way, he took, blessed and shared the five barley loaves and two fishes to feed the crowd.

We can recognise this same sequence of actions – taking, blessing and sharing - in the Last Supper as recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And that of course is the model for Holy Communion - the Eucharist - which we with all other Christians continue to celebrate in his memory. The Last Supper can be seen as an acted parable – and so, I think, can all the other meals Jesus shared in his Eucharistic way of taking, blessing and sharing.

But what does the acted parable of Eucharist mean? In today’s reading John opens out for us the spiritual significance of Eucharist for Jesus himself, in Jesus’s own words. The last verse (John 6:51) sums up what Jesus meant:

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Today I’m going to share with you my own reflection on these words.

First, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven’?
Jesus says ‘I am’ many things on different occasions, among them ‘I am the good shepherd’, ‘I am the door’, ‘I am the way’, and ‘I am the true vine’. He is of course talking in metaphors, about his relationship with those he is talking to, but also his relationship with God, who he calls his loving Father.

Jesus has just been responding to hecklers in the crowd who want him to display earthly power as Moses did by sending bread from heaven - manna - to feed the people in the wilderness, so naturally the metaphor Jesus uses on this occasion is about bread.

As Jesus tells the hecklers, it is God who sent the manna, just as it is God who sends the food we all need to nourish our bodies. But Jesus wants his listeners to look beyond the physical to the spiritual. God also provides what we need to nourish our spirits – by analogy with the bread which feeds our bodies, this is bread from heaven.

And Jesus knows that his loving-father God is calling him, by his every action and every word, to offer this spiritual nourishment to all people. So he uses metaphor to describe himself as the living bread which comes down from heaven.

The hecklers in the crowd knew quite well who Jesus was - the son of Joseph the carpenter from nearby Nazareth. They chose not to understand the metaphor – and they ridiculed the idea that Jesus came down from heaven.

Second, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’?
I suppose people since the dawn of humanity have dreaded death and had fantasies of living for ever. But we all know, as Jesus did, that our physical bodies are doomed to die and decay.

Yet for Jesus this is not what truly matters. What does matter is our relationship with God. It is those who believe that God is like a loving Father, enfolding and protecting them, that are released from dread of their own mortality. So he says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life’. Eternal life is surely another metaphor for a loving relationship with God.

And more than that, Jesus knows his own importance. Working in and through him, God reveals his own nature as loving Father to those who listen. Those who feed on Jesus’s words and actions, as on bread from heaven, have eternal life.

'This is eternal life,’ says Jesus, after the Last Supper in John's version, ‘that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’

Third, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’?
Jesus goes on to equate bread from heaven with his own body, his own very flesh. He does so again at the Last Supper, when he says ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you’, words we still hear every time we attend Holy Communion, when the priest consecrates the Eucharistic bread.

What a shocking thing to say, with that suggestion of cannibalism! It certainly upset the hecklers in the crowd. And it also upset many of Jesus’s disciples, who, we are told, ‘turned back and no longer went about with him’.

And it still causes problems for some of Jesus’s disciples today. On the one hand we have those who accept - perhaps with difficulty - the medieval doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby in some miraculous way the essence of the Eucharistic bread is actually transformed into the essence of Jesus’s flesh. On the other, we have those who are disturbed by the idea that the Eucharist involves eating human flesh.

I think that perhaps some Christians interpret these words of Jesus too literally, as the hecklers in the crowd did. For here surely Jesus is extending the metaphor of bread from heaven, and to understand it we need to look behind the literal words.

Christians have wrestled to understand Jesus’s metaphor of his flesh as bread ever since. They have come up with many different ideas – and perhaps this is part of the strength of the metaphor, that it can be understood in so many ways. For myself, I wonder if the point is simply this - that Jesus is expressing the depth of his commitment to God’s saving work for us. He is ready to give up his life, his human existence, his very flesh for it. For that is what he did for us on the cross.

These words of Jesus are difficult, and you’ve sat patiently through my reflections on them, poor as they are.
But why don’t you take a little time to ponder them for yourself? Take out your copy of the Bible and read John Chapter 6. Jesus's words may speak to you in a quite different way to how they speak to me. And that is alright – it is alright if you disagree with me - metaphors often bear many different meanings at the same time. God will surely grant you the metaphors that are right for you.

To finish, let's listen again to what Jesus says:

'I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Mothering Sunday

An address given on Sunday 22 March 2009, Lent 4, at Shinrone and Aghancon.

A Simnel cake - a traditional Mothering Sunday gift

Mothering Sunday is such a lovely opportunity for us to make a fuss of our Mothers, isn’t it?

And if they are no longer with us, to remember them, and to recall how much we owe them. We’ll all be doing so today, I’m sure, and it’s right that we should.

I want to start by reflecting a little on how much I owe my own mother:

• I owe her my very life, of course, as we all do our mothers. She carried me safe in her body for 9 months, and nurtured me, from the time when I was just a bundle of cells until I arrived squalling into the world.


• Then throughout my childhood she was there, to love me as only a mother can, to comfort me when I was hurt or frightened, to encourage me to be brave and to be ‘a useful engine’. And still she nurtured me – even when I was away at boarding school, every fortnight I received a fruit cake in a parcel through the post from her.


• As I grew to adulthood she let me go, to make my own way in the world. But she was still always there to love, to comfort, to encourage, and, yes, to nurture me, whenever I needed it.


• And it was she who taught me the first elements of her Christian faith. One of my earliest memories is of learning my first prayer at her knee: ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on’.


• I am very blessed to have had such a mother, and I give thanks to God for her. I expect you are too. But we need to remember that not all children are so blessed. And also that there are women who yearn for children who cannot have them.

In the rest of this address, I’m going to reflect a little on the origins of the Mothering Sunday tradition, and then focus on the mother themes in today’s OT and Gospel readings – the good compilers of the lectionary have of course carefully chosen ‘mother’ readings for the day that’s in it!

The Mothering Sunday Tradition

The 4th Sunday of Lent was not originally a celebration of motherhood. From at least the C16th in England, it was the day when people returned to make offerings in their “mother church”, the main church or cathedral of the area. Hence it came to be known as ‘Mothering Sunday’.

If children had moved to neighbouring towns and villages, this would be one of the few occasions when whole families could get together. Remember, not much more than 100 years ago, very many children would be sent away from home to work at no more than 10 or 12 years old.

According to historians, this was the origin of the English tradition that children and young people working away from home should be given the day off on Mothering Sunday, to visit their mothers. I’m not sure if this was an Irish tradition too - we may just have borrowed it from the Church of England!

I imagine that as the children walked along the country roads, the boys would stop and pick a bunch of violets or other flowers as a present for their mother. And equally the girls might bring their mother a present of a cake they had made. Hence the old traditions of bunches of flowers, and the delicious Simnel cake.

That was the ancient tradition, at least in England. Like so many other old traditions, it was just about extinct after WW1: killed off by social changes and industrialisation. But it got a new lease of life, under the impact of the American invention of ‘Mother’s Day’, which was designated by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to be held on the 2nd Sunday of May. Mother's Day has now become something of a commercial opportunity, to sell cards and flowers and boxes of chocolates, but I think it’s rather nice that we have managed to retain the ancient traditional Church day for it, on this side of the Atlantic, and I cherish the old name Mothering Sunday.

The Mothering Sunday traditions, and the emotions they evoke, are warm and tender and comforting.

But in case we are in any danger of getting carried away by sentimentality, today’s readings from Exodus and John’s Gospel provide the antidote. They serve to remind us that being a mother is not just about flowers and cakes and loving hugs. It is also about heartbreak, and separation, and even death. Thank God that giving birth in Ireland today is not so dangerous for a woman as it once was, though a very few still do die in childbirth here. But in the 3rd World it remains frighteningly common for mothers to die in childbirth.

In the OT reading from Exodus, we heard the strange little tale of Moses in the Bulrushes.

The background to the story is that Pharaoh decreed that Hebrew boys should be drowned at birth in the Nile, because he feared the Hebrew minority becoming too strong in his kingdom. The girls were allowed to live: no doubt they would have been married off to Egyptian men, and their children would be Egyptian. A rather nasty ancient case of ethnic cleansing.

Moses’ mother saved him from this fate by hiding him, until he was too big to hide anymore, and then she made a little boat for him from a basket, and left him to be found in the rushes by the river-bank. He was found by Pharaoh’s daughter, who took pity on him, and decided to adopt him. Moses’ own mother was employed to nurse him, but when he was weaned, she had to give him up to Pharaoh’s daughter.

Two things strike me about this story:

• 1st, how completely torn the emotions of Moses’ natural mother must have been, to be compelled to give away to another woman the child to whom she had given life, and whom she had saved and nurtured. But she knew that was the only way to show her love for him.


• But 2nd, the strength of the love of Pharaoh’s daughter for this little Hebrew boy. She no doubt risked the wrath of the state to save his little life, even though he belonged to a hated minority. The love of a foster mother, or of an adoptive mother, is just as valuable in God’s eyes as the love of a natural mother.

In the Gospel reading we heard John’s poignant story about how Jesus, even in agony on the Cross, expressed his love for his mother, and the disciple he loved.

Public execution is an ugly thing, but the prolonged torture of crucifixion must have been particularly gut-wrenching to watch. Yet Mary his mother found the strength to stay close by Jesus in his agony. How torn she must have been, too: repelled by his ghastly death, yet drawn to be near her beloved son in his last hours. We see an image of the eternal love at the heart of motherhood in Mary at the Cross.

Mary the mother of Jesus was supported in her vigil by four others: her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, as well as someone described as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. It is an ancient tradition of the Church that this disciple was John, one of the sons of Zebedee and Mary’s sister Salome, and the author of St John’s Gospel. If so, this John too, like John the Baptist, would be Jesus’s cousin.

I find it very moving that on the brink of his death, Jesus should think to commit Mary to the care of his cousin John, and John to the care of his mother Mary, to look after each other, and to comfort each other in their loss. A truly practical example of the love of God at work in evil times.

So, to conclude, it is surely very right for us, on this Mothering Sunday, to thank God for our mothers and for their love for us, whether they are our natural mothers or our foster or adoptive mothers.

But let us also remember those mothers whose hearts are broken by death or separation from a child.

And let us not forget all those women who long to have a child but cannot, and all those children who for whatever reason cannot give thanks for a mother’s love.