Creaton Second Sunday After  Easter, 1 May 2011
This Jesus hath God raised up whereof we are all witnesses

For me this is the best and most exciting  time of year.  The dark days of winter are a memory and there's  a lot of movement in the air.  Gardens are springing up and there is a feeling of rebirth and challenge of the new.  In our secular affairs we have the referendum looming this week with the campaign in full swing,  and politicians getting a bit tetchy.   

And then there has been that Wedding, the sense of change there is palpable.   A new generation in our Royal family is emerging.   In yesterday's paper there was a special supplement which seems to bear out the 19[th] century constitutional commentator Walter Bagehot's views   that   " A family on the throne is an interesting idea.  It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life......... A princely marriage is a brilliant edition of a universal fact and, as such, it rivets mankind.  A Royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of  nice and pretty events.  It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government but they are facts which speak to men's bosoms and employ their thoughts. "     

Thank goodness for that I say.  What with public expenditure  cuts and all that's going on abroad, we, the 24 million British people who watched the wedding on television yesterday,  needed those irrelevant facts.  Not least the lesson from Romans so beautifully read by the bride's brother.  The message about how to conduct ourselves   "Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.  If it is possible, so far as depends on you, live peaceably with all.  "   

To me that reading in its entirety was the most important part of the Service because within the context of the marriage  it conveyed the essence of Christianity to the estimated two billion people who were watching, and in a way that could be understood by all. "      

On this Second Sunday after Easter, however,  we concentrate on another very relevant fact:  the hope of renewal presented to us by the Resurrection of  Jesus Christ.  When Mary Magdalene and her companions  arrived at the tomb on that Easter morning and found it empty, they must have been shattered. As  someone once said that "life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away".   And those who looked into the sepulchre that must surely have been one of those breath taking moments. 

Belief in the Resurrection a fundamental to our Christian faith.  Yet,  it's been controversial since the beginning, as Thomas's doubts showed.  First there are the differing versions of what happened n that Easter morning.  It is easy to point to discrepancies in the Gospels.++ 



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Every one of us will face death one day.   We know that it is coming  and as Christians can handle it  that with equanimity because the Easter story is, of course,  the story of defiance of death.  All heroically good people feel that defiance deep down.   That is why over the centuries, and now on this very day in the Middle East, people defy bullets, secret police and oppression in every form to gain justice from tyrants: that is why we have to fight the terrorists, for example, in Northern Ireland,  the drugs gangs in Mexico and warlords in Afghanistan,  wherever they are so that there can be a new beginning.    

As one newspaper put it A sarcophagus ordinarily consumes a body but here at the empty tomb in Jerusalem it is death that is devoured.  Jesus went about doing good and was killed for his work 
The  Easter message is a the antidote to the deterrent effect of the crucifixion
