The strangeness of the Resurrection - a sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Luke 24: 13-35

Avengers: Endgame brings to an end the third phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film focuses on the efforts of some of the Avengers – namely The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Ironman, Blackwidow, Antman and Hawkeye – to defeat their alien foe Thanos. The film picks up after the end of Avengers: Infinity War where Thanos had gathered all the infinity stones and used their power to remove, with a click of his thumb, half of all the living creatures in the Universe, including some of the best loved of the Avengers.

However, using a time machine which allows the remaining Avengers to shrink to a miniscule form to travel through the quantum realm they are able to collect the infinity stones before Thanos was able to find them in that time line and portion of the multiverse. Once collected they are able to recreate Thanos’ gauntlet of power and use the infinity stones to resurrect those who had been previously killed by Thanos. Then, in the final battle, Ironman sacrifices himself to use the infinity stone to finally destroy Thanos and his armies of darkness.

Simple really!

You don’t need to know anything about the Avengers, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe to get a sense of the deep story of love and sacrifice and resurrection that so many of these films speak of. So many of the stories in our popular imagination – from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia to the heroes of superhero stories – draw on the themes of sacrifice and resurrection which imbue our faith and the stories of this season. All of these in their different ways – although none with quite the brashness of Avengers: Endgame – reflect on the themes of death and rebirth, in our language of cross and resurrection, in simple and bold ways we can't fail to miss.

However, as we come to the source texts – the gospel accounts of the Resurrection – we find that the stories are so much stranger, so much odder and beguiling, than these big budget derivations. As we come to these weeks after Easter, and we hear the stories of the Resurrection appearances one by one I am always struck by just how strange they are. Given the magnitude of the Resurrection, the world changing and reality altering power of this moment, you would imagine that it would be told differently. Perhaps not with the brashness of Avengers: Endgame, but still with grand gestures or displays of power.

But as we learn of the Resurrection there is no stirring soundtrack and fanfare of off-stage trumpets. Rather we have the sight of a man walking alone along a road towards evening drawn into conversation with two confused friends. Instead of appearing in triumph in front of his accusers proclaiming his victory before their shocked faces, Jesus quietly listens to his two shell-shocked travelling companions and patiently explains to them how all that they experienced had been promised by Moses and the prophets. And perhaps most beguilingly of all, Jesus proclaims this great truth and they don’t even recognise him until he sits down with them at a way-side inn and breaks bread with them.

The story of the Emmaus Road shares with the other resurrection accounts this overwhelming strangeness. Never told with the straightforward boldness and clarity of a Hollywood blockbuster, they tell of an experience so disorientating that even those experiencing them did not know what or who they were seeing.

This is not only a reality that we hear of in the pages of scripture. In my experience the moments of rebirth and resurrection we glimpse in this life seldom appear like the finale to a great film. Instead, they come to us in beguiling and strange moments of understanding that we very often, like those first disciples, fail to recognise.

One of the great privileges of ministry is that one is very often privy to these moments, these glimpses of the Resurrection hidden in plain sight. I’ve recently finished reading a clergy memoir which is full of such glimpses and insights. It’s called Touching Cloth, written by The Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie.

If you have heard him speak, or have read any of his other books, you will know what an engaging and funny speaker he is. Like many who use humour with care and deftness he uses his wry insights not just to make us laugh, but to point to the deeper truths that many of us fail to see. What runs through all these stories is not only a deep love for the people he encountered, even in the most extraordinary occasions, but how in these encounters we so often find the strange and beguiling power of God’s resurrection love revealed in the most unexpected way. 

Reading this book, I was reminded again how our lives exist in a constant relationship between the twin poles of this season. Not between scientific cause and effect, or self-righteous right and wrong, but between cross and resurrection. That through all the small experiences of death which pepper and mar our normal, ordinary and broken lives God’s love is constantly breaking through in ways which surprise and revive our lives, even if – like those disciples on the Emmaus Road – we don’t at first recognise what is front of us.

There is one encounter where he describes a moment when he had reached a peak of self-righteous anger at the end of Lent which he was seeking to keep piously. But then he comes to realise that in focusing on his own self-indulgent needs he was failing to see the realities of the true wildernesses, the true places of death that those he was encountering in his ministry in central Liverpool were living through. Then through the divine ministrations of a scratch card – you really have to read the book for this all to make sense! – he encounters “Chris”, a man who had struggled in life. It is Chris who reminds Fergus of the ways in which his small acts of kindness had brought him to life in the past. Not because of his super-human holiness or self-righteousness, but because of the life that comes as a divine gift in those beguiling moments of friendship and holiness revealed, on that occasion, in a ten-pound win on a scratch card.

Towards the end of the book he reflects more deeply on this theme. He recognises that this truth emerges in the truth of the cross, in the reality of death. As he goes on to say:

I'd been preoccupied by dying to self, dying to the past, dying from heatstroke. I suppose what that year - full of joy and disappointment, festivals, funerals, chaos and Christ - taught me is what I ought to have known all along: that death isn't an end but a beginning.

As we move through this Easter season it would be understandable to hope that we would see signs of the Resurrection painted with the dramatic palette of a Hollywood movie so that we could not miss them even if we tried. But what the gospel accounts of the Resurrection tell us again and again is that this truth is stranger and odder and more beguiling than we can possibly imagine. 

As R.S.Thomas - another Anglican priest who also had a gift for seeing the beguiling strangeness of God’s resurrection love all around us - tells us, we need to become:

        travellers upon the road

who have heard music blown

from a bare bough, and a child

tells us how the accident

of last year, a machine stranded

beside the way for lack

of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

Our Easter faith is about seeing the power of that love, the strange truth of the Resurrection, reveal itself before us in the oddest and most unexpected of places. Whether in the flowers covering a rusted tractor of R.S.Thomas’ poem; or Fergus Butler-Gallie's recognition of the grace revealed in a scratch-card; or as in our gospel story of a meal shared by an unexpected stranger with two bewildered and confused friends at a wayside inn. 

In all these ways, and so many more, we discover that the strange power of the Resurrection – in all is odd and beguiling glory – is all around us, we just have to be willing to look.