Are you ready to have a love affair with the beauty of God?

Peter Seal, 1 April 2018

Acts 10: 34–43; Mark 16: 1–8

May I speak and each of us hear in the name of the risen Lord, Jesus Christ.

This year two important days fall on interesting dates! Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent, was on 14 February, Valentine’s Day. And today Easter Sunday falls on 1 April, All Fools’ Day.

On Ash Wednesday I suggested that God was inviting us to have a love affair, inviting us to be open to the possibility of a new and beautiful relationship – a relationship we had not expected; something that took us by surprise but was absolutely irresistible.

This suggestion can help us to engage with the reality of who God is and what God is like. This is important. We discover that belief in God is not some kind of idea we do, or don’t, believe in. We discover that belief in God is about an ongoing relationship. Each and every day God, as it were, stands at the corner of our road looking for us; longing for our company; hoping for a glance of us; with the hint of a shared, knowing smile; and yes, even the possibility of us being willing for God to take our hand and hold it in his.

That, I believe, is what God is like. I invite you to lay aside all other pictures of God, and in particular those that make you feel you’re somehow not good enough for his attention and love – that’s nonsense.

And so to today, All Fools’ Day. Traditionally we can play tricks on one another up until midday. I recall a newspaper headline of some years ago: ‘Bishop says: Jesus’ empty tomb was just a conjuror’s trick with bones’. What he actually said was that ‘the empty tomb was more than a conjuring trick with bones’.

I want to take you back for a few moments to Friday, just two days ago. I want to remind you of an event which was absolutely no joke, but incredibly real. I have a poem to help us connect with Jesus’ death. It’s by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas and it’s called ‘The Musician’. By way of background: it speaks of someone called Kreisler. Fritz Kreisler is regarded as one of the most noted violin masters of all time. The city of which the poem speaks is Cardiff, where Thomas attended a concert. So here goes; hold on tight.

A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and the one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.

A picture of extreme intensity. Jesus, who came from Nazareth, was executed. This is not fake news; no, this is fact, this really happened. As our Christian creed expresses it, ‘He was crucified under Pontius Pilate’, the Roman governor, in Jerusalem, in the first century.

Jesus was given the death penalty.

Jesus was murdered.

Jesus was killed because of the way he lived and the things he said.

Jesus was killed because no one had ever seen, or experienced, a love like his – a love they could not cope with, a love that was too much for them, a love that they found they had to destroy.

And so to today: Easter Sunday 2018, All Fools’ Day.

Mary Magdalene, who had had such a sad and troubled life and who loved Jesus so much, along with another Mary, the mother of James and Salome, brought spices so that they might go and anoint Jesus. It was daybreak, and as they walked they chatted about who would roll the very large stone away from the entrance to the tomb.

There was no need – the stone had already been rolled away. There’s a figure sitting in the tomb, not Jesus, who tells them that he’s been raised from the dead. This is the crucial point … the point at which we move from the facts of history into the mystery of what we call ‘faith’.

R. S. Thomas again, from his poem ‘The Answer’:

There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

As we dare to peek inside the tomb, we too glimpse our ‘old questions’ … ‘folded … like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body’. If we can but believe it, if we’re open to beginning a new relationship, ready to have a love affair with the beauty of God, we too discover that our ‘old questions’ find their rightful place in the context of ‘love’s risen body’.

If we’re open to beginning a new relationship, ready to have a love affair with the beauty of God, we too discover that our ‘old questions’ find their rightful place in the context of ‘love’s risen body’.

I want to draw to a close by saying something particularly to the young adults here today. It goes like this. Life is not a simple trajectory from one thing to another; it’s not, as it were, the movement in a story towards an inevitable happy ending. You may already be discovering that all things are a mix of light and darkness; of knowing and not-knowing; of believing and not believing; of death and new life; of dying and living again in a new way. This is what gives life meaning … life’s path is really much more cyclical than linear.

Young adults: you have your crucial place in the life of today’s world. In his book The Foolishness of God Bishop John Baker writes: ‘Forms of … cruelty, greed and arrogance may pass in and out of fashion, be checked or allowed by law; but the capacity of the human being for evil in general does not change … Each generation, each single life has to begin again, and to decide for itself what is good in its inheritance, what it will keep, what it will change.’

Finally, I leave you all with a line from the contemporary poet Mary Oliver. She writes, ‘Tell me what you want to do with your one wild and precious life’.