Easter Sunday 07

A Great Shout of Freedom
by Anne Le Bas

That first Easter day, the one we heard about in the Gospel reading, was a
day of great confusion. It started badly. A small group of women set out in
the early morning, with a basket of spices and a vague plan of anointing a
body, three days dead, sealed in a tomb which they had no way of getting
into. But at least they had a plan, even if they had no idea how to put it
into action. When they got to the tomb even that little bit of certainty
evaporated. The stone was rolled away; the tomb was empty; the body was
gone. In its place were angels with a mystifying message. A message which
was met with disbelief and ridicule by the other disciples. What on earth
was going on. What on earth was all this about?

We’ve been celebrating Easter for a couple of thousand years now, but my
guess is that there are often times when we feel just as confused about it.
What have we come here to celebrate? What have we come expecting? What is
it all about for us, today?

Perhaps it is easiest to start with what it isn’t about.

Easter isn’t about chocolate. Not that I have anything against chocolate,
you understand. If you’ve got more Easter eggs than you can manage, just
send them along to the vicarage and I’ll be quite happy to polish them off
for you. But Easter isn’t about chocolate. The feasting isn’t an end in
itself, or shouldn’t be.

Nor is Easter about bunnies, or chicks, or spring flowers – not that that
I’ve got anything against them either. They’re a wonderful reminder of the
resilience of life, a sign of joy and hope. But they can’t be an end in
themselves any more than chocolate can.

Easter isn’t – and you may be surprised to hear me say this – Easter isn’t
even primarily about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Of course,
without that there would be nothing to celebrate. But we can easily get too
hung up on arguing about the facts of an event that happened long ago – did
Jesus literally rise from the dead? How could that be? If not, how did he
rise? Every Easter the media seem to manage to produce some story
challenging the resurrection, or some Bishop who says he doesn’t believe in
it. But my experience is that most Christians aren’t followers of Christ
because of an academic acceptance of something that happened two thousand
years ago. It is what is happening in their own lives that matters to them.
They may not understand how Christ could rise from death, but somehow they
have the sense that he is here, with them, very much alive and well. That’s
what matters, and what makes the difference to them, that’s what convinces
them. If Easter is just an ancient story, to be picked over, analysed and
then forgotten for another year, we have missed the point completely.

So if Easter isn’t primarily about any of those things, what is it about?
It is about one word. If you get this one word, you have got Easter, you’ve
got its essence, you’ve understood why it matters.

That one word is “freedom”.

Jesus’ first followers understood this. It was no accident that Jesus had
been crucified at the time of the Passover feast – when the Jewish people
celebrated God rescuing them from slavery in Egypt. Every Passover the
story was told again; the story of Moses; of their dramatic escape across
the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army hard on their heels, and the journey to
freedom in the Promised Land. The Passover was a feast of freedom.

But by the time of Christ, although the old story was still told, in
reality many people were just as enslaved as they had ever been in Egypt.
They were enslaved by the occupying Roman army, not daring to challenge
their might, terrorised into compliance by the threat of death. They were
enslaved too by the religious authorities. The laws which had been God’s
great gift to them had become ways of controlling and  oppressing people,
sorting out the sinners, keeping at a distance those whose behaviour or
lifestyle was considered to be beyond the pale. The poor, the sick, women
and children, those who had infringed the complex laws of purity – they
were pushed to the margins.

Against this backdrop, the ministry of Jesus came as a great cry of
liberation. He went deliberately to those who had been pushed aside. He
angered the authorities by saying that they were worth just as much to God
as the rich, the powerful and the good. It was dangerous stuff – a message
of freedom to people who were chained down by the attitudes of those around
them. No wonder those same enslaving authorities had him killed.

And having killed him, they thought that was that. It was all over. But
that first, confusing, Easter morning showed them that they were wrong. It
was God who was going to have the last word here. And that last word was
freedom. Freedom for Jesus from the grave. Freedom for those who followed
him from the suffocating constrictions of the religious laws and the
attitudes of their society.  Freedom from the fear of death.

Freedom is at the heart of the Easter message. And I suppose I could, at
this point, sit down and shut up. Isn’t that enough?

Well, sorry, no it isn’t, because freedom, in reality, is never as simple
as it appears.

We’ve heard a lot about freedom just recently as we’ve marked the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Perhaps we thought we knew
what we were going to hear as we re-visited this story. But in fact there
have been challenges and surprises for many of us as we have re-examined
the history. It isn’t a story of one great hero, William Wilberforce,
single-handedly defeating oppression, like an eighteenth century Moses, for
a start. We’ve heard about the wide range of people who campaigned for
freedom. Many of those were black slaves, or ex-slaves themselves. There
were many unsung black champions, and the slaves themselves were vital to
the fight. They weren’t the passive victims that they’ve often been
portrayed as.

Just as we’ve had to broaden our view of those who fought against slavery,
we’ve also had to broaden our view of those who wanted to keep it. It’s no
good us thinking it was just the slave traders who profited. There were
many people with a vested interest in slavery. It created the prosperity we
still enjoy as a nation. All our major institutions – including the Church –
 are tainted by it. And the African nations from which the slaves came were
complicit too – selling people as slaves was commonplace.

It wasn’t the case, either that once the slave trade ended, or once slavery
itself became illegal, all was well. Slave owners were compensated, but ex-
slaves were left to fend for themselves. Slavery has left a long legacy of
racism and poverty which still bedevils our world. And of course modern day
anti-slavery campaigners remind us that slavery is still thriving in the
form of debt bondage and human trafficking.

No wonder this issue is still so contentious. No wonder we are still
arguing about who should apologise to whom, and for what, whether and how
reparation should be made, to whom and by whom. Gaining freedom is one
thing. Living it is another.

Slavery is complex. Freedom is complex too. It isn’t won in one triumphal
swoop. It isn’t all done and dusted in a day. Whether it is freedom from
slavery in a Caribbean plantation, or freedom for modern day slaves, or
freedom from slavery to fear, or freedom from slavery to other people’s
expectations and prejudices it is something you have to live constantly. It
is a journey, made one step at a time. Freedom is hard to find, and even
harder to stick to.

What is Easter about? It is a great call to freedom. It starts with that
empty tomb, with Jesus bursting from the imprisonment of death to the
freedom of resurrection, but it doesn’t end there. Christians sometimes
call themselves “Easter people”, but that doesn’t mean that we should go
around with a lazy assumption that once we have found Christ all is well,
that some magic wand has been waved over our lives and our world. “Christ
is risen, Alleluia!” but are we risen? Is our world risen, set free, as
Christ wants it to be?

Being Easter people means committing ourselves to a long and difficult
road – the road to freedom - working to confront oppression in our own age,
not just rejoicing in its defeat in the past. It means learning to see the
way in which we are enslaved ourselves – enslaved to the opinions of
others, enslaved to the fear of standing up and being counted, enslaved to
behaviour which we know is harmful, enslaved to sin in all its forms. It
means learning to see the ways in which we enslave others too – forcing
them to be like us, to meet our needs, no matter what the cost to them.

There IS a great shout of victory today, and great rejoicing, and feasting.
The signs of spring are all around us, pointing us to the new life God
wants for his people. But today is just the start, not the end. Easter
people are people on a journey, not people who have arrived smugly at their
destination. God’s call to us is not just to CELEBRATE Easter, but to LIVE
it as we learn together to be truly free.
Amen.

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)