Alleluia, Christ is Risen. Alleluia!

Easter Day, Sunday 5 April

Readings: Acts 10.34-43; Colossians 3.1-4; John 20.1-18.

Theme: Christus Resurrexit, Alleluia!

We have had a particularly moving Holy Week this year in the chaplaincy. It began last Sunday with the celebration of Palm Sunday. Gathering in both churches, we began with the entry of the Lord into Jerusalem for the festivities of the Passover. This was a time of welcoming the King of Israel into its capital and of looking forward to the unravelling of this welcome in the horrific events of the passion. It is a bitter-sweet moment in the liturgical life of the church.

Our Holy Week continued with the celebration of Maundy Thursday at Chaplaincy House in Estepona. A small number of us gathered to place ourselves at the table of the last supper at which Jesus washes the feet of his disciples and leaves them with the Eucharistic meal of bread and wine as a lasting memorial of his risen presence among us.

Good Friday was a particularly creative event this year. Our church warden in San Pedro, Andrea guided around the murals of Estepona helping us to walk in the footsteps of Christ as he carried his cross to his crucifixion. At each stage of the way of the cross, we listened to a passage from scripture that spoke of the last journey that Jesus made to the place of the skull, outside of the walls of Jerusalem.

There is no celebration on Saturday in the Western Church, though it commemorates a particularly mysterious part of the passion of Christ; namely, the descent to the dead to reunite Adam and Eve and all those who have been cast down to the place of death. Holy Saturday, as it is called, it that moment when God enters all that is against life and metabolizes it such that it will be transformed to eternal life.

Today is the resolution of these events in the resurrection of Christ. It is traditionally announced by the Easter greeting: Alleluia, alleluia, Christus resurrexit. Alleluia, alleluia. This traditional Easter proclamation that Christ is risen, and praise, ‘alleluia’ means ‘praise the Lord,’ express the central paschal mystery of the Christian faith. But what does it mean that Christ is risen from the dead and that we should praise him?

It does not mean that Jesus is simply brought back from death to another mortal life, like his friend Lazarus had been. This is not a resuscitation, even a miraculous one! No, it is of a different order. It is a new genesis: a new creation in which Jesus is the first to be raised to immortal life in his embodied glory by the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. In his resurrection, the glory of God is unveiled and patterned for all the new creation in his transformed body.

Therefore, the resurrection of Jesus is not God’s evacuation plan from the world! It is the continuation of God’s work of creation and salvation which will be consummated at the end of time. This is already realized in Jesus, but, as St Paul says in Romans 8.18-23, we await, as with the whole creation, with eager longing for our bodies to be adopted into the resurrection of the freedom of the children of God. By faith through grace, it is our hope as mortal creatures to be granted a share in the immortal destiny of the resurrected body of Jesus.

So, the death of the humanity of Jesus is not a negation of his divine incarnation. It is the glorious sublimation of this humanity into his resurrected body. Jesus is still recognizable, though not at first. Mary Magdalene initially thinks that he is the gardener! And this allusion to the gardener is not unintentional by St John, the Evangelist. Jesus, the second Adam, is the Lord of the new garden of Eden, which is the glorious new creation already patterned in his own resurrection. He is the one who orders the new creation to the glory of God the Father. That is why there is a kingdom to build, and this is the purpose of the church, as the second Eve, to cultivate this garden, under Jesus’s lordship, to the praise and glory of God.

As we read the Acts of the Apostles during Easter, we will encounter the emergence of the church and its work of cultivating this garden through proclaiming and praising Jesus as Lord of the kingdom of God. In today´s reading from Acts, Jesus is proclaimed as “the judge of the living and the dead,” by Peter. A proclamation conveying the reason for our debt of praise due to Jesus who judges us justly and compassionately in curating our own passage from death to resurrected life.

So, as we conclude this period of Lent and begin the Easter season, let me take this opportunity to wish you and all your families a happy Easter. This is a time when nature comes back to life and we can enjoy the longer days of summertime. It is also a period when, we are called to come to the new life of the risen Lord and to share in the mission of the church to build God´s kingdom. May each and everyone of us feel invited to this project of building the kingdom especially as we discern our own future as the Anglican Church of San Pedro and Sotogrande.