Sermon preached at Evensong on Easter Day 2025

Confusion must have reigned on that first Easter evening. Over the previous days, Jesus’s followers had seen their Lord and Master betrayed, tortured, mocked and crucified. John and Mary had been commissioned by Jesus to care for one another—a nucleus of hope, at the heart of a scene of bloody disintegration—but then some of them had witnessed the end: Jesus’s last breath, and his burial at the kind hands of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. What could his friends do in such a situation, but flee, or regroup, to try and begin to comprehend what had happened to him and to them. Jesus had been killed at the hands of the occupying Roman powers, aided and abetted by the religious establishment, and those who had had more than enough of Jesus’s seemingly blasphemous and outrageous actions and teaching about the Temple. His followers could easily be next, in a city fizzing with messianic fervour at Passover. Peter had already been recognised in the High Priest’s garden and denied that he was associated with Jesus. St John tells us very specifically about their fear; that is why they were now behind a locked door in the Upper Room. Very few had remained at the cross until the very end—mainly the women. And it was the testimony of a woman—Mary Magdalene—which perhaps was most confusing amidst it all. Mary claimed to have seen Jesus, risen, raised to life, in the garden of his burial. Peter and John had seen the tomb empty. But they had not seen Jesus himself. Confusion and fear must have reigned on that first Easter evening.

It is into this febrile locked-in situation that the Risen Jesus steps, no longer imprisoned by death, and certainly not by doors. He steps right into the heart of their fear and confusion with his first greeting of peace. This is the Easter gift, a deep, profound and abiding peace which will be the defining quality between Jesus and his followers in the resurrection age. It is this gift of peace which reconstitutes Jesus’s shattered followers, which gives them confidence in everything they had witnessed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and which they thought had collapsed at Calvary. St John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, reflects on how St John connects the greeting of peace with Jesus’s showing of his crucified hands and torn side—this conjunction of words and gesture reveals the true nature of the Cross itself as an instrument of peace.

But what kind of peace? There is certainly nothing glib about this greeting—he is not telling them to ‘calm down!’—rather, this gift of peace is one which heals, energises, and forgives. It is insistent. Jesus bestows this peace upon his disciples twice in as many verses. It keeps knocking at the door, and they can’t avoid it. The peace which is offered by the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is not one suggestion amongst many; somehow this gift encapsulates all that Jesus has done, and all that he promises. And it is profoundly linked to the drama of his passion which we have just encountered moments before. This peace is the gift of the Paschal Mystery, the fruit of the Cross.

St John’s Gospel is full of multiple layers of symbolism which help us get to the heart of what is going on. In this scene, just after Jesus has commissioned the apostles—‘as the Father has sent me, so I send you’—he breathes on them, as he gives them the Holy Spirit. In its opening verses, John’s Gospel begins with an allusion to the beginning of the book of Genesis, the creation narrative. Here, as John begins to wrap up his narrative, we have another. St Cyril of Alexandria, writing in the fifth century, noticed how Jesus, the second Adam, replenishes and augments the gift of the Holy Spirit, constituting the New Creation, just as God breathed life into the first Adam in Eden. So, this peace is the new world promised by the prophets, which we have already seen breaking in through the ministry of Jesus throughout the Gospel. At Easter, this is accomplished, and whether the world likes it or not, Christ’s eternal gift of peace is a given. Not the peace of an arrogant victor, for one party, the success of one group at the expense of another. This is a different kind of peace, offered to every single human from the first to the last, and which will be the basis of the life of every Christian community. When we gather together in our Upper Rooms, to worship and encounter the risen Christ, we discover that this peace is the operating system of the new world. 

But how we try to wriggle out of it. We humans do our level best to operate in the old world, where fear and corrosion stalk our cultures with their self-satisfied, puffed-up rumours of victory. Surely, we think, the best we can really hope for is some kind of frozen conflict, where the battle lines of sin and violence remain unhealed and we can stay in the luxury of our trenches, nursing our grudges, only very reluctantly allowing one another to thrive. How we love our prickly alienation from each other and from God. But ultimately that kind of puffed-up isolation is fatal. The writer Ann Lamott describes this in visceral terms: hanging on to alienation is like drinking rat poison, and then waiting for the rat to die. 

Easter sets before us another option. Jesus’s peace is insistent reconciliation, for us individually and corporately. The New Testament bursts with insight as to how to describe this: Christ’s flesh has ‘broken down the dividing wall’ between us, he ‘has entered into the sanctuary once and for all.’ In this light, we can know and love one another, reconciled together, sharing Christ’s peace which will change the way we behave. The gift of Christ’s peace is intimately bound up with the forgiveness of sins—yours, mine, the world’s; a page really can now be turned. This is the message which propels the apostles out of the Upper Room, as they become the sent ones of the Sent One, proclaiming in their own lives and deaths how Christ’s peace is the antidote for our fear, and medicine freely given for a fallen creation. As we look around us, how desperate is the need for such medicine 2000 years on. So often, the world remains sunk in a morass of despair; cycles of violence, jealous anger, the endless drive for dominance and control, exploiting the fragile earth, and some of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters, from Gaza to Sudan, from Ukraine to Yemen. It is into this febrile locked-in situation, too, that the Risen Jesus steps, armed only with the Cross—his instrument of peace—for those whose hearts dare to receive it. 

If we accept the gift of Christ’s Easter peace, we will need to share that gift. We will seek the face of the wounded yet risen Christ in friends and strangers, and most especially in those whose dignity has been trampled down or undermined. If we accept Christ’s resurrection gift of peace, we also need to accept that it will change us so that we no longer live for ourselves, but for Christ and for his Kingdom, reconciled to one another in him. Paradoxically, it is only then that we will fully know ourselves, because we will be living as we were made to live.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!