Sunday 17 April 2022

Easter Sunday: Witnesses

 

Acts 10.34-43, Luke 24.1-12

 

“We are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem”. That’s what Peter says in our first reading. “We are witnesses”. That’s partly just a statement of fact, of course. Peter had seen Jesus at work. He’d travelled with him, lived with him, eaten with him, had his feet washed by him. He’d seen Jesus speaking to the crowds, healing the sick, and he’d seen him exhausted, asleep in Peter’s boat, frightened in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter had been with Jesus almost till the end. He was the only disciple who’d followed Jesus when he was arrested, but his nerve had failed him at the last minute as he stood in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. When people started asking him if he knew Jesus, he denied it all and hid as Jesus was led away to be crucified. But after the crucifixion, Peter was one of the first to see Jesus again – in a locked upper room, on the lakeside in Galilee welcoming his disciples to a breakfast of barbequed fish.

 

He wasn’t the only witness we hear about in today’s Bible stories though. The first to see the Risen Christ were a group of women, who had supported Jesus’ ministry. They had watched Jesus die and seen him buried in a borrowed tomb. That’s why they knew where to go with their spices and ointments. That’s why they were the ones who discovered that there was no body to anoint that the tomb was empty, that Jesus was risen.

 

At first the other disciples didn’t believe them. They were women. Women’s testimony didn’t count in a court of law in their culture. Nor, it would seem, did it count in the court of the disciples’ opinion – their words were dismissed as “idle tales”. But Peter decided that he ought at least to go and check it out for himself, rather than writing it off, and he found that it was just as they had said.

 

“We are witnesses” he said. He spoke of what he knew, and that was what gave him and the other disciples of Christ authority when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. No one would have believed it otherwise. You couldn’t make it up, and you wouldn’t want to either. After all, many of these same disciples ended up being persecuted and killed themselves because of what they said they’d seen. There was nothing in it for them – no power, no glory, no status. If they knew it was a lie, if they knew they hadn’t seen it, there would be no conceivable reason to make it up. People may choose to die for a mistaken idea, but if we don’t die proclaiming a deliberate falsehood about an event which we know is untrue.

 

They could have followed the way of Jesus as a dead hero, a wise man whose teachings brought wisdom to the world – history is full of them, people whose stories inspire others. There would have been nothing wrong with that. But these people, who had been there, insisted, even at the cost of their own lives, that he wasn’t a dead hero, but a living friend. I can’t explain it, and I have long ago given up trying to. I don’t know what we would have seen if we had been there in first century Jerusalem with a video camera, but I know that these witnesses were sure that Jesus, who had died, was now alive. To them that was the proof that God hadn’t deserted him when he died on the cross, that he really was who he said he was, God’s chosen one, doing God’s work, and because of that, the message he had proclaimed, about God’s love being for everyone, really was true.

 

“We are witnesses” says Peter.

 

Of course, we can’t say the same thing, at least in the sense that Peter meant it. We haven’t seen the risen Jesus appearing in a locked room or on a lakeside, or trudging along the road with us on the long road to Emmaus.

 

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t bear witness to the resurrection. Those of us who call ourselves Christians today do so because in some way we have discovered the power of the resurrection in our own lives. It’s a different sort of witness, but just as important – perhaps more so. A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, once got into a lot of trouble in the press for saying that the resurrection was “more than a conjuring trick with bones”. But he was right, despite the furore. If the resurrection was only about something that happened  2000 years ago, thousands of miles away, seen by people who are now long dead, it would be an amazing story, but nothing more than that. Christian faith proclaims, though, that the resurrection of Jesus is a living event, happening in our lives day by day, for us to discover anew.

 

Peter is talking, in the first reading we heard, to a Roman centurion called Cornelius and his household. Cornelius has heard about Jesus and his message, and wants to know more. Think about that for a moment. He is a Roman centurion. It was the Romans who had crucified Jesus, Roman soldiers who had driven the nails into his hands, who had hoisted the cross up, with the weight of Jesus’ body on it, who had watched and sneered, gambling for his robe at the foot of the cross, until he died. Roman soldiers were the enemy. To be fair, Peter had really struggled when Cornelius had asked him to come to him, as I expect any of us would. It had taken some pretty heavyweight intervention from God to get him to go. But Peter knew that Jesus had proclaimed that God’s love was for everyone. He knew that even as those Roman soldiers were driving the nails in Jesus had prayed “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”, and he knew that by raising him from death, God had affirmed that message, had proclaimed that love was stronger than hatred, so in the end, he found the courage he needed, went to Cornelius, and, to cut a long story short, Cornelius his whole household were baptised and became followers of the way of Jesus in their own lives. Peter was a witness to the physical resurrection of Jesus, but Cornelius became a witness to the power of that resurrection to break down the barriers of suspicion and hatred which ought to have made Peter run a mile from him.

 

That’s what the resurrection is about – not an event that happened to Jesus and to those lucky enough to have been there and seen it two thousand years ago, but something which enables resurrection to happen daily in the hearts of those who follow him, people like Cornelius, who discovered a new way to live, love and forgiveness that should have been unimaginable

 

It's the same for us. We can’t witness that first resurrection in a graveyard in Jerusalem, but we can witness the resurrecting power of God’s love in the graveyard of our own hopes and dreams, in the situations where we feel that all is lost, as we discover that love is still stronger than hatred, and life stronger than death today.

 

It can be hard to discover and hold onto that on our own, which is why we need each other. We need to gather as a church, however we do that. Hearing the witness of others can be vital when our own faith falters.  But when we’ve found the good news for ourselves, it will spill out to those around us who need to hear it too, spreading through our words, our actions, our attitude to life.  It’s not about denying the reality of death or suffering – far from it; It is about declaring that they are not the whole of the story or the end of the story. All around us we see death at work – as the bombs rain down on Ukraine, as our planet faces the threat of climate change, as people are ground down by poverty and injustice, as well as in the personal threats and sorrows we face. Death is obvious, but we are called to bear witness to the possibility of life, where no life ought to be, which brings hope to places where despair seems to rule.

 

“We are witnesses”, says Peter, and that is what makes all the difference to him. He has discovered the power of God’s love for himself.  This Easter, God calls each of us to do the same, because if Christ has been raised from death, then we can be raised from death too.

Amen  

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