Beyond our Fear

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 31, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 20: 11-18

For the three years I studied in Edinburgh, my father lived in Taunton. I didn’t have a car, so to visit him I had to make an eight-hour train journey down through Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, and Bristol. The hardest part of the journey was the last half hour, when I took the risk of him driving me to his home. My childhood and youth had been littered with moments when I had the box seat for my father’s terrifying moments on the road, so I generally found a reason to give him a break and take the wheel myself. And so it was that when he dropped me in Taunton one day for the Edinburgh train, I actually did the driving, and had the car keys in my pocket. Those keys were still in my pocket when I’d boarded the train, as he and I probably realised at the same precise moment. Unfortunately, that moment was about 15 seconds after the train had left the station. This was a rural area. My poor father had no way to get home. It was 1988. We had no mobile phone with which to hatch any kind of a plan. I had a whole day to reflect on my thoughtlessness and foolishness and prepare some kind of apology.

I want you to think about that feeling I had on the train. Grotesque powerlessness and horrifying separation, each growing inexorably for the ensuing eight hours. It’s a vision of hell. But I want you to reflect on the fact that it’s just one vision of hell, and that there are two others. I’m now going to describe those two others. The other day I was sitting having an intense conversation in the Café in the Crypt downstairs. A woman came up to the table and looked like she wanted to talk to me. I waited till my conversation partner paused for breath, and turned to face the woman. She broke into the kind of ecstatic smile you unveil on meeting a long-lost friend. She said, ‘It’s Sam, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Yes, yes, of course, hello,’ and desperately tried to locate her in the ever-receding inventory of past friends and acquaintances. Finally I arrived at the season of my life where she featured. I tried to choose between hug, shake hands or neither. ‘It’s Charlotte, isn’t it?’ ‘No. Catherine.’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I flustered; but like a fool I blundered on. ‘You were at St Anne’s, weren’t you?’ ‘St Hilda’s,’ she corrected. By this time her joyous smile had crumpled, and she’d started to back away; and even though, desperate to redeem the situation, I floundered on, eventually correctly naming a friend in common, the irreparable damage was done, and she disappeared from view. This is the terror, which she experienced, and I perceived: the terror of being utterly forgotten, erased from memory, as if you’d never been, with no legacy left, no difference made, no abiding impact, significance or mark. It’s a milder version of hell; but somehow more sinister. It’s oblivion.

And so to the third vision. When I was 25, I had my tonsils out. It sounds like such a routine operation, and for a child it isn’t a big deal. But anyone who’s had the operation as an adult will tell you, for a week afterwards it’s no exaggeration to say it feels like every time you swallow, you’re gulping down broken glass, and when you swallow food, it’s like glass with an electric shock. I recall thinking, ‘Imagine if the rest of your life was going to be like this, and there was no prospect of anything short of death taking the hurt away.’ That’s the terror of agonising physical pain, which can come about the illness, through accident, through another’s malice or through deliberate punishment. However it comes, it’s a vision of hell, and the prospect of it getting worse and never stopping is indescribably terrifying.

These are our three greatest fears. We could call them separation, oblivion, and agony. Why am I dangling them before your eyes on Easter Sunday? Because I want to explain how Easter dismantles those three fears. Good Friday, remember, displays all three fears vividly. Jesus experiences utter separation from his heavenly Father, as he cries, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He knows the second fear, of being forgotten, as the bystanders mock the transitory and failed nature of his pretensions to messiahship. And he most obviously feels the third fear, the agony of physical torture, in the cruel nails, the crown of thorns, and the gradual asphyxiation. In doing so he embraces our three fears and makes them his own. We are no longer utterly separated, because Jesus dismantles our isolation. We are no longer forgotten, because we are remembered in the heart of God. We no longer face endless physical agony, because Jesus shares our sorrows.

But then on Easter morning, this very morning 2000 years ago, we find a whole other dimension. It’s depicted in John’s gospel in Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden outside his empty tomb. See what happens in this episode. Mary, remember, is feeling acutely the first kind of hell – the reality of separation, of grief, of loss and profound bereavement. Jesus comes so close to her she can touch him. He’s present to her again. He can be heard, felt, seen. Separation is not the last word. The last word is together. There’s life beyond separation. The hell of separation has been supplanted and surpassed. Then hear Jesus saying that single, transformative word: ‘Mary.’ Here Jesus transforms her fear of being forgotten, eradicated, wiped clean from the slate of existence. He’s been to the other side but he’s back; and he remembers her name. The end of the story is not oblivion. The end of the story is reunion. And then ponder our third fear: agony. It’s not so visible in this story, but it’s in almost all the other stories including the one after this in John’s gospel: behold my hands and my side. In other words, see the marks of physical agony, the nails of crucifixion and the spear thrust into Jesus’ ribcage. But now those scars are still there: but they don’t hurt anymore. That’s what people say when they’ve experienced the transformation of forgiveness and healing, our most tangible earthly experiences of resurrection: the scars are still there, but they are no longer wounds, because they don’t hurt anymore. Our fear of physical pain is dismantled. Not ignored or downplayed – oh no: the wounds and the pain are real enough. But Jesus has gone beyond physical pain to a place called resurrection, where the scars are still there, but now they are tokens not of violence and cruelty but of life and laughter and love.

So that’s what happens on Easter morning. Jesus has embodied and experienced our worst fears on Good Friday; and on Easter Day he goes beyond our fears to the other side of our horror and terror and despair, and outlasts and surpasses and withstands every one of them to stand before Mary as the sign of our common destiny. There is no hell ahead of us. There is precisely this, precisely what we see in the encounter between Jesus and Mary: reunion, restoration, reconciliation.

This is Easter. It’s the centre of all our hopes. But it’s not yet the whole story. Because we’ve missed out the other half of what’s going on. We’ve actually missed out the most important part of what’s going on. Because this isn’t just the defining moment in our lives, in all existence. It’s also a profound moment in the life of God, in essence itself, in that which is above and beyond existence. This may sound incomprehensible, but it turns out to be the key to everything.

See how the three fears relate to God. Take the fear of separation. This is the horror of Jesus’ abandonment on the cross. He says, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ He’s no longer with the Father. But see what happens on Easter Day. The Holy Spirit reunites the Trinity, reconciles the Father and the Son, restores the fellowship of God, and ensures that separation is not the eternal destiny of all things. Take the fear of oblivion. If the Trinity’s integrity has really been ruptured in Christ’s crucifixion, if the essence of all things is truly in jeopardy, then surely everything, not just our own lives, but the whole history and future of existence across the universe, could spiral into nothingness, meaninglessness, incoherence. But Jesus’ resurrection in the power of the Holy Spirit restores memory, reasserts the unity of past and future, literally re-members both God and us. Finally the fear of physical agony. Jesus’ ghastly death takes physical pain into the Trinity: if that is the last word, the Trinity, which is eternal, experiences such agony forever, which is unimaginably bleak. But again, Jesus’ resurrection sheds this fear, transcends physical suffering, and embodies life beyond despair.

So Easter Day is an astonishing moment where we realise two contrasting realities. The bad news is worse than we thought: separation, oblivion and agony come right into the heart of God, and for a moment look like they could become the overwhelming determinants of existence. That’s breathtakingly bad news. But the good news is more fabulous than we grasped. Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Day dismantles all our reasons to be consumed with fear. Unlike my experience on the train to Edinburgh, separation is not our ultimate fate: instead, Mary is in touching reach of Jesus, as we shall be forever. Unlike my experience with the old friend in the crypt, the oblivion of forgottenness is not our destiny: instead, like Mary, the first thing we’ll discover is that God knows our name. Unlike my experience after that frightful operation, physical agony is not everlasting: we shall retain our wounds, but they will now be a source of blessing.

Don’t be defined by your fears. Don’t indulge them, hide behind them, dwell on them. What you fear is real, and the universe came close to succumbing to it. But three words dismantle all our fear, and turn existence and essence from horror into glory. Three words change a story of despair into the prospect of everlasting companionship with God one another and creation. Three words turn sadness into hope, turn despair into life, turn grief into joy: Christ is risen.

Happy Easter.