Darkness Vanishes Forever
A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce
Easter Day (12th April 2009)
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our king, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendour!
Radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
These are the opening words of a very ancient and extraordinarily powerful Christian text called the Exsultet, the Easter Song of Praise. Those of you who were here for our vigil service last night, when, in the darkness, we kindled the Easter flame and greeted the Risen Christ, will have heard me sing those lines. Christ is Risen! Christ has conquered! Darkness vanishes for ever! So, on this Easter Day new life; new hope; and a new way of being is now ours for the taking. Death can no longer have the final word.
But, hang on a minute. What does that actually mean? What has actually changed? Will the stories that we see on the television news this side of Holy Week be any different from usual? Does it mean the end of gratuitous suffering? Suicide bombings? Childhood leukaemia? Will the endless and unbroken cycles of violence and counter-violence, in which hatred breeds more hatred, and the abused becoming abusers, finally cease? Or will things continue to look pretty much the same out there in the world as they have always done? And if that is the case, what possible difference has the death and resurrection of Christ in fact made? What has actually changed? Are we not in danger of fooling ourselves?
One man who grappled hard with this very question was a man who I suspect knew far more than most of us, about the harsh realities of human life, and human tragedy. His name was Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy. He was the most famous of the First World War army chaplains, who, against the wishes of his superiors, insisted upon living in the trenches amongst his men, sharing all the dangers and the horrors that they had to face, and earning from them the affectionate nickname, ‘Woodbine Willie’? And in an extraordinarily courageous poem entitled ‘The Suffering God’ he faced this issue head on, striving to make sense of what the Easter Hope could possibly mean, amidst the carnage around him:
Peace we were pledged, yet blood is ever flowing,
Where on the earth has Peace been ever found?
Men do but reap the harvest of their sowing,
Sadly the songs of human reapers sound.
How can it be that God can reign in glory,
Calmly content with what his Love has done,
Reading unmoved, the piteous shameful story,
All the vile deeds men do beneath the sun?
The truth is of course, that human evil has always had a habit of gaining a terrible momentum all of its own: violence continues to breed counter-violence; hatred will always generate more hatred – until, that is, the day comes when someone comes along who says ‘Enough!’; someone who refuses to retaliate; someone who is prepared to absorb hatred, rather than fight back; someone who counters evil with love; who counters abuse with pity and understanding. Because when hatred is absorbed, rather than reciprocated, a new kind of living suddenly becomes possible. And just imagine for a moment that the hatred in question was not merely that of a violent and disordered human being – but that of a violent and disordered world. When that happens, a new kind of living suddenly becomes possible for all. And death can no longer have the final word.
I can vividly remember when I was at Primary School (and I remember it because it had quite a profound effect upon me at the time), being very moved by hearing our class teacher quoting a saying of the American Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King: ‘An eye for an eye’, he said, ‘makes all men blind’. ‘History’, he continued, ‘is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.’ When wronged, what most human beings yearn for is revenge – and yet, as King points out, that is a reaction that ultimately gets us absolutely nowhere; and indeed, can end up enslaving us.
The death and resurrection of Christ changed all of that. The death and resurrection of Christ brought something into the world that quite simply had not been there before, a new way of living that meant that death could no longer have the final word. But what does that new kind of living look like?
Let’s stick with Martin Luther King for a bit longer. A couple of weeks ago I came across a story about him that I had never heard before, which was this:
During the darkest days of the American Civil Rights era, when King was minister to a black congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, news came that the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremicists, notorious for their violence and victimisation of black members of the community, were planning to march on the town, intending to terrorise its inhabitants, and cause violence and mayhem. So, how did King respond to this threat? Did he order the members of his congregation to arm themselves and man the barricades?
On the contrary, he gave instructions for them all to put on their Sunday best, to stand on the steps of their church, and when the Ku Klux Klansmen marched into sight, to greet them with cheering and applause. The Klansmen, who were accustomed to striking terror in the hearts of all who saw them, quite simply didn’t know what to do. So they marched into the town, and they then marched out again. Having found that they were unable to engender fear, they could not comprehend what on earth was going on. And they couldn’t cope. So they left. That is what a new way of living looks like. A way of living that means that death can no longer have the final word.
Now, Martin Luther King was no plaster saint; he was a complex man, whose life was by no stretch of the imagination ‘squeaky clean’. Indeed, he would have been the first person to admit it. As he himself once wrote: ‘There is some good in the worst of us, and some bad in the best of us,’ going on to add: ‘When we discover this we are less prone to hate our enemies.’
But he was a man who, in the very thick of a situation in which he and his family were in constant personal danger, recognised that the death and resurrection of Christ not only makes possible a new way of living, but demands it of all who would be his disciples. And I cannot quote this final passage of his too often, because for me it encapsulates and embodies a truth that lies at the very heart of the gospel of Christ. He wrote this:
To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘we shall meet your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you… throw us into jail and we shall continue to love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to love. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appear to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.
The new way of living that Christ makes possible brings true liberation. It brings liberation for the victims of this world: the poor, the violated, the abused, the marginalised, and the abandoned; but it also brings liberation for those who are responsible for their plight. It brings liberation from fear; even from the fear of death itself, because death can no longer have the final word. Now that really is a new way of living. Although it is, of course, a costly way of living. It cost Martin Luther King his life. But the world was a very different place because of his presence within it.
But let’s go back to Woodbine Willie, struggling to make sense of the message of Easter hope amidst the carnage of the First World War. More specifically, let’s hear how the poem I quoted, ‘The Suffering God’ actually ends, as realisation for the poet suddenly dawns. He wrote this:
Peace does not mean the end of all our striving,
Joy does not mean the drying of our tears;
Peace is the power that comes to souls arriving
Up to the light where God Himself appears.
Joy is the wine that God is ever pouring
Into the hearts of those who strive with Him,
Light’ning their eyes to vision and adoring
Strength’ning their arms to warfare glad and grim,
Give me, for light, the sunshine of Thy Sorrow,
Give me, for shelter, shadow of Thy Cross;
Give me to share the glory of Thy morrow,
Gone from my heart the bitterness of Loss.
Christ is Risen! The power of death has been conquered for ever. A new way of life has been opened up for us. But the question remains: are we, like Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; are we, too, ready to work together to make that new way of living a reality?
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our king, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendour!
Radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
For Christ the Morning Star has risen,
never again to set, and is alive and reigns
for ever and ever.
Happy Easter!
Amen