Location, location, location
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 24:1-12
The Christian faith is deeply bound up with place. Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, grew up in Galilee, was baptised in the Jordan, ministered in Capernaum, Cana and Jericho, and was put to death in Jerusalem. These were and are real places: they’re on maps, people live there – they woke up this morning in Jerusalem, made their breakfast, took the dog for a walk, and, I’m sure, doomscrolled as many here will have done already. You know – endlessly scrolling through bad news even though it feeds our anxiety.
All Holy Week, we have been gathering for services around the theme Walking with Jesus, reflecting on what happened in particular places in and around Jerusalem in the days before Jesus’ death: the Temple, the Upper Room, the Mount of Olives, the High Priest’s House, and Calvary. You can walk between them in Jerusalem; we walked metaphorically between them this past week. And in so doing, we got a little closer to the history, to the events and actions, the words and the motives, the feelings and the meaning. Of Jesus’s anger in the Temple; of a meal shared in friendship and fear; of Judas’ turning on someone he’d loved; of Peter’s failure of courage; of Jesus’ generous, extraordinary embrace of his enemies.
Which leads us to today, Easter Day, the day of resurrection. What is today’s location we have walked to? Just a few verses before our gospel reading today, we learn that Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross and laid in “a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid.” The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee saw the tomb and how his body was laid there. Many Christians believe that that very site is preserved in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of the oldest churches in the world, which also encloses the site of Jesus’ crucifixion. On a first visit it’s a bewildering site. When I was there, 15 years ago, it was thronged – black-robed priests of every imaginable Orthodox tradition; ancient and tiny local women in headscarves praying; parties of pilgrims in colourful rainwear from Rio de Janeiro, Irkutsk, Manila and Glasgow crowding into particular chapels. It’s dark, with side-chapels, galleries, altars, icons, lit by spindly candles, pervaded by a smell of incense and wax.
The burial site is within the Aedicule – the picture I took of that curious structure is on the cover of the order of service. It’s an ancient tabernacle reconstructed and restored many times, latterly in 2016 after I took my picture. The steel supports are no longer there. Within the Aedicule is Christ’s burial bed itself – the picture I took of that, lit by candles, is inside the order of service.
So is this today’s location, the site of resurrection? Yes – and no. Because surely, what is fundamental about this location is that it is not a location. Jesus’ body may have been there, but the women who went to the tomb did not find his body there. And then, two men in dazzling clothes encountered the women and said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? His is not here, but has risen.”
Every Easter Day from 2002 I have preached a sermon, in St Monans Church, Largoward Church, Abercrombie Church, St Salvator’s Chapel, St Mary on the Rock and once on Zoom. Is it the same every time? Yes – and no. The context changes. Just as we walk with Jesus in his first-century life, the risen Jesus walks with us in our 21st Century life. This Easter we gather in the context of what those doomscrollers discover on their phones, or those curious relics of the past like me discover on TV, the radio, or occasionally when I buy a newspaper. But however we engage with news, it feels a particularly frightening time. The powerful leader of the most powerful country of the world turning on friends, imposing the narrowest of ideological visions on government, law, media, education, science, the environment, the arts, and human nature itself. The interconnected, interdependent world of trade and human movement significantly damaged. Country after country in which Power acts with scant care for the life and death of fellow human-beings and other creatures in Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere. A climate out of control – wildfires in Los Angeles in January only one example. Universities near and far struggling to have enough money to pay for people to research, to teach and to support students. Students struggling to manage the demands of work, and people, and how to think in such complicated times. And, of course, in a year when we have been reflecting on the locations of Jesus’ life and death – the ongoing, brutal and devastating war on Gaza just a few miles away, leaving 50,000 dead, hostages still in captivity, and the almost complete absence of trust.
Isaiah’s hope seems further away than ever:
I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight,
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it.
There is weeping this morning in Jerusalem, in Khan Younis, in Khartoum, in Kharkiv, in Kansas City and, who knows, on the Canongate right here in St Andrews. Did Jesus rise that morning? Is his burial bed empty? Did the angel not say – “Here is the body – your spices will help him rest in peace”? Have we not found the risen Christ and stuffed him back in the tomb?
There’s a story of a church where a five-year old was reading the story from Luke we heard Lia read earlier. The child froze at the line, “He is not here; he is risen.” So the minister whispered the line in the kid’s ear. The child smiled and leaned into the microphone. “He is not here. He’s in prison.” This year, that seems all too plausible.
Perhaps look again at that burial bed. It was the place of burial of a young man, say 33 years old. His mother was still alive. He was a man committed to honesty, to telling the truth to religious authorities who had lost their integrity, to Pilate fearful of Caesar and the crowds. He was a man who gave his love to the sad, the unwashed, the unpleasant, the strange. He was a man who used fiction, artistry and imagination to reveal the reality of human hearts, our compromises, our complacency. He was a man who gave himself up to his enemies, and forgave them. He was a man whose companions came to see was a human being and more, in whom God lived uniquely, whom they came to see was God’s own self. And he was dead, and laid in a rock-hewn tomb.
This is no cheap hope that everything’s really hunky-dory. I don’t advise doomscrolling – but there’s no getting round it, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening right now. But if the Christian faith means anything it means that God has experienced this bad stuff to the absolute last degree. God’s Son was arrested, tried, convicted and crucified, and the dead body of Jesus was laid in a tomb where no one had been laid before.
But he is not there; the tomb was empty when the women came. Christ is not in prison. Evil’s bubble was burst.
And so today is a day of joy. God is alive in Jerusalem, and Djibouti, in Jacksonville, and Jannetta’s. God is there, and here and everywhere. God is present now by the Spirit of his risen Son in homes across the world where people wake, stretch, make coffee, and wonder what the day will bring. God is present in places of fear – of bombs from above, and bombshells by email. God is present in the private places that not even the most dedicated doomscroller will know about – our friend’s flat, our family member’s care home, our own heart.
Isaiah’s hope remains our hope, and is worth holding on to beyond hope. Yes, of course, there are powers at work in our world driven by greed, by arrogance, by a sense of vengeance, by ignorance, by stupidity, by carelessness and by fear. That will continue for as long as we wend our curious way through time and space. But the tomb remains empty. God is faithful. The arms outstretched on the cross continue to embrace our world, not giving up on us despite the shabby, greedy selfishness all around. God is among the living, inspiring, guiding, blessing and bringing the fruits of the Spirit into ripeness in our lives and world: love, joy, peace and all the rest. And that makes all the difference.
Few pilgrims are visiting Jerusalem today, though I spoke last week to a St Andrews student who was recently there, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre nearly empty of tourists. But we can go digitally. The website what.three.words has divided the entire planet into three metre by three metre boxes, each identified uniquely by three words. If you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on the website, there is one particular location under its dome which sprang out to me:
reunion.blesses.quietly.
The women discovered the tomb was empty. There was a reunion between Jesus and his friends. He blessed them with his body, his presence, and his hope. And he did so quietly – not with sword or army, or revolution or war – but with simple words: Look at my hands and my feet – see – it is me.
reunion.blesses.quietly
Doomscrolling will always discover the worst that people can do. But today we celebrate that other news, the good news, the news that we encounter daily in the love of a friend, the truth of a story-teller, the embrace of forgiveness, the justice of solidarity, and the hope for life beyond death. God is no longer located on a burial bed in a rock-hewn tomb in Jerusalem. He is alive wherever we are. Your location. My location. Is God’s location. Hallelujah.
END