wfn.org | ACNS3316 Archbishop of Canterbury's first Easter Sermon

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ACNS 3316     |     LAMBETH PALACE     |     23 APRIL 2003 

Archbishop of Canterbury's first Easter Sermon

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has delivered his first
Easter sermon in Canterbury Cathedral. The full text follows:

'Jesus said, "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the
Father."' (John 20 v 17)

Mary Magdalene wants Jesus back as she remembers him; failing that, she wants
his corpse in a definite place, she wants a grave she can tend. Jesus appears
to her - in one of the most devastatingly moving moments of the whole Bible -
and her first instinct is to think that yes, he is back as she remembers,
yes, she has hold of him after all. He has not disappeared, he has not been
taken away to an unknown destination.

But Jesus warns her: he is being taken to a destination more unknown than she
could imagine. He is going to the Father. From now on, there will be no
truthful way of speaking or thinking about him except as the one who lives
alongside the source of all things. These simple, abrupt words already
contain all the mysteries we celebrate when we say the creeds, when we break
the bread of the Holy Communion; they tell us that Jesus gives exactly what
the Father gives - life, glory, forgiveness, transfiguration. Through death
he has passed into the heart of reality; he has returned where he came from.
At the very beginning of John's gospel, we read of the Word of God living
'nearest to the Father's heart' from all eternity. He comes to us in the
flesh and blood of Jesus and shows the glory, the radiant, solid life, of God
pouring out in love: the fullest showing of that love is in his free
acceptance of suffering and death, and if we are able to accept that this
death sets us free !
once and for all, the glory of the divine life is shared with us. Jesus goes
to the Father and from his place next to the Father's heart sends out the
gift of the Spirit of Truth which allows us a share in his own closeness to
the Father.

Yet to realise this is to realise that we cannot have Jesus just on our
terms. After the resurrection, with its demonstration that Jesus's life is as
indestructible as God the Father's life, we can't simply go back to the Jesus
who is humanly familiar; and -obviously - we can't have Jesus as a warm
memory, a dear departed whose grave we can visit. He is alive and ahead of
us, clearing a path to the Father's heart. Christian faith does not look back
to a great teacher and example but forward to where Jesus leads, to that
ultimate being-at-home with God which he has brought to life in the history
of our world.

So: 'Do not cling to me', he says; instead, go and bring others along on the
journey. And Easter always forces us to ask where and how we might want to
cling, where and how we might turn away from the task and the journey. There
are many ways in which this can happen; I want to think about one in
particular, because it has some resonances with where we are at the moment in
our national and international life.

There is a clinging to Jesus that shows itself in the longing to be utterly
sure of our rightness; we want him there, we want him where we can see him
and manage him, so that we know exactly where to turn to be told that
everything is all right and that he is on our side. We do it in religious
conflicts, we do it in moral debates, we do it in politics. We want to stand
still and be reassured, rather than moving faithfully with Jesus along a path
into new life whose turnings we don't know in advance. To have an absolute
reassurance of our rightness somehow stands in the way of following Jesus to
the Father; it offers us an image of ourselves that pleases and consoles,
instead of the deeper and harder assurance of the gospel - the assurance that
whether or not we have a satisfying image of ourselves, we have the promise
of forgiveness and of a future.

But the temptations go deep. For months now, we have witnessed a profound and
disturbing moral argument raging backwards and forwards in this country over
the rightness of the war against Iraq. You'll have noticed the way in which
some opponents of the war insisted that the motives of those in power must be
personally corrupt, greedy, dishonest and bloodthirsty - as if the question
could be settled simply by deciding on the wickedness of individuals. Equally
though, there have been defenders of the war who have accused its critics of
being unable to tell good from evil, of colluding with monstrous cruelty and
being indifferent to the suffering of nations. On one side, people seem to
see an equivalence between Saddam Hussein and the coalition leaders; on the
other, an equivalence between Saddam Hussein and a grandmother from Surrey, a
JP and Conservative voter, who finds herself, much to her amazement, on the
anti-war march in February. 'Imperialists', 'butchers', cries the o!
ne side, 'blood for oil!' 'Appeasers', shouts the other, 'Useful idiots.'

This is not simply about how we conduct controversies (though it has some
relevance to that, to the barbarous superficiality of some of our public
arguments). It is about that odd and not very pleasant tendency in our hearts
to ignore the mixture of motives and the uncertainties of understanding that
lie behind our own decisions, to deny the elements of chance and hidden
prejudice, temperament and feeling that make up our minds, even on the most
profound matters. It is about the fear that if we admit this sort of mixture
in ourselves we fail to distance ourselves clearly enough from what we
believe to be evil. It leads to a further darkening of our minds, as we try
to make out that the effects of the war are exactly what would confirm our
initial judgements. It is a great victory; 'all the problems will disappear
very soon, and reports of regional discontent are much exaggerated'. Or it is
a catastrophe; 'we are on the edge of social and political collapse in the
Middle East!
 and the demise of international law'. It is indeed a clinging, gripping
tightly on to whatever perspective we are comfortable with and allowing no
time to wait for a fuller discernment to be born. The truth is that we don't
yet see clearly. And even if we did, that would not settle the moral rights
and wrongs of the conflict's origins.

We cling to what makes us feel most safely distant from evil. The would-be
peacemaker is often passionate in treating every kind of force as equally
terrible, so that there is a single clear enemy over there to confront - all
those with blood on their hands, American general as much as Iraqi
executioner. The apologist for war is offended and threatened by the - not
unreasonable - suggestion that the motives and methods of modern war are
unlikely to be completely shaped by moral considerations, and that fighting
evil can involve us in imitating some of its methods, even in the best of
causes. Both are afraid of acknowledging that they have something in common
with what they are resisting. And that acknowledgement need not lead to
despair or passivity (every choice is flawed, I can do nothing just or good);
it ought to lead to some kind of adult admission that, even in pursuing good
ends, our flawed humanity creates new difficulties. We can only face the
possible cost, pray, a!
nd trust that God can make use of what we decide and do. Perhaps when Jesus
tells us not to cling to him, one of the many things he says is, 'Do not use
me, do not use any vision of what is true or good, to keep yourself from
recognising the real and potential evil within you. Don't cling; follow. Take
the next step, putting your feet in the gap I have cleared, conscious of how
you may make mistakes, but trusting that I can restore you and lead you
further, that I can deal with the residues of evil in your heart and in every
heart.'

Mary Magdalene tries to cling to a Jesus from the past, her past; her first
outburst of joy comes from a conviction that the impossible has happened -
that history has been reversed. It hasn't. The crucifixion has happened, and
both Jesus's friends and his enemies have made irrevocable decisions in the
course of the events around it. Judas and Peter and Pilate will not wake up
and find it was all a bad dream. Now in the light of Easter, they have to
decide what to do with their sin and compromise, the past that will not go
away, the evil and the mistaken good, the fear and the running away. They,
with Magdalene, have to learn that the risen Jesus promises a transformation
never yet imagined or expected, the possibility of reconciliation and of
sharing Jesus's intimacy with the Father. He is ascending to 'my Father and
your Father'. At that moment, neither Mary nor anyone else could know what
that would mean; she is called on to go with Jesus so as to discover what it
is, and!
 to echo that call in her witness to the apostles, summoning them - and so
summoning us - to the Father's heart. On that journey, we must travel light,
laying aside what one of the desert fathers called the heavy burden of
self-justification, and giving up the image of a Jesus who simply assures me
of my own image of myself as good and right. From now on, my justification is
not that I am proved to have been right all along; it is that Jesus has
promised, irrespective of my success or failure, to be there. He assures me
not of my innocence but of my forgiveness and my hope. He was raised to life,
says Saint Paul, for our justification; he was raised so that we may know his
promise to be with us is never defeated by our failures.

We struggle with the dilemmas of our age; we do our best to test and
challenge our own convictions, to bring them to the truth; but we know too
that they will be shadowed with our own secret needs and frailties, that they
will not simply be a clear witness to truth and goodness. We accept that,
even as we work for good ends, we shall find ourselves wandering or
compromised. We make our decisions about right and wrong, good and evil, as
prayerfully and carefully as we can, and try to find the courage to take the
consequences of those decisions. But we resolve not to see in each other
absolute good or evil; we recognise that the denial of evil in ourselves does
not help the cause of good. And so we follow Jesus, 'justified' by his gift
of love alone. We pray and trust that he will, bit by bit, deliver us from
evil, inside as well as outside. We turn our eyes away from the seductive
image of a righteous, settled soul with nothing more to learn or to repent.
We keep our eyes on !
Jesus and follow his gaze - towards the Father's heart. We stop clinging,
stop demanding that God will serve our need to be in the right. We make our
mistakes and we own them. We are justified by faith, as we resolve to follow
the risen Jesus into the unknown depths of God's life; and if we can begin to
live out such a faith in the resurrection, we shall, with Mary, prompt others
to come and ponder the empty tomb and take the first steps on Jesus's path.

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