Listening to the readings again on Easter Sunday with the women going to the tomb to prepare Jesus’s body reminds me of something I read recently about Mary – Jesus’s mother.
It is interesting, is it not, that Jesus’s mother – arguably His greatest disciple, a woman of tremendous faith, who stayed by Him to the bitter end, is not listed amongst the women going to attend to Jesus’s body.
And this poses the theory that the first person Jesus appeared to may well have been His mother and that this is why she was not among those going to the tomb at dawn. Such an appearance would be part of completing her participation in the essential parts of the paschal mystery.
Mary suffered above all others in the suffering and death of her son. Christ kept the commandments. He honoured His heavenly Father, His earthly father and His mother, so it makes sense that he’d visit her first.
If a son lived far away and his mother was told he’d died but he was actually alive and healthy and he returned to the area, it would highlight that he was not a good son if he visited his friends first and his mother last.
Jesus was the perfect son. So, why would He not visit His mother first. There’s also her faith, which, despite the apostles losing theirs at Jesus’s passion, Mary had in abundance. Scripture tells us that the Lord shows Himself to those who have faith in Him. And, of course, she loved her son so much and scripture tells us that those who love Him will be visited by Him.
How joyful she must have felt at seeing her son alive once more.
There is a special kind of joy at Easter. It’s not just the spring flowers springing up into life or the longer days. What it is is a deep, radiant joy born from our Lord’s victory over sin and death so that we might have eternal life with Him.
Jesus leaves the darkness and rises to new life. Through God’s grace, this gives us the gift that, no matter what our past was, we have permission to leave it behind and embrace the hope and joy of new lives in Christ. His sacrifice and act of intermediary reconciliation grants us forgiveness of our past sins, our present sins and our future sins.
This morning we have two key elements. We have the good news which is the gospel and we have Remembrance.
Our gospel1 this morning recounts an event which took place at the Sea of Galilee. Now, in Jesus’s time this was the centre of a prosperous fishing industry. The importance of knowing this will become clear shortly.
And the event Mark is recounting is the pivotal moment of Jesus calling His first disciples. Relevant both then and now is that the call to follow Jesus was a call to BE with Jesus as well as to learn and be Jesus’s representatives, carrying out the ministry He gives. The disciples were with Jesus and learning directly from Jesus.
So Jesus calls to those He had chosen, and immediately they left their nets, their boats, their fishing businesses, their families, everything. No hanging back, no hesitation, no requests for extra time to finish what they were doing or to pack their equipment. Immediately! Leaving everything! To follow and be with Jesus!
These were just ordinary men, the same as you and me. They heard the call, calling to something deep inside them, and they knew they must heed it. They followed Jesus. They made mistakes just like all of us and they learnt from these, repented and were forgiven. They went on to do great work spreading the good news of Jesus all around the world and this was not without suffering and death but Jesus was with them and had prepared them for this work. They did not follow blindly but with eyes which had been opened.
God calls every single one of us and our whole lives must come under His rule. Our money, our relationships, our work, our time, our everything should be under the rule of Jesus – not because we accept Him as king but because He IS king. And what we are called to do is to repent and believe. To turn away from sin and accept the forgiveness freely offered to us by Jesus.
Believing that Jesus is king who brought God’s kingdom to us and embracing it in faith, turning from sin and embracing forgiveness is the very starting point of discipleship. We are unable to move forward without repenting and submitting to the rule of Jesus.
Belief is not merely accepting something as true. Belief involves a response from our whole being in complete obedience.
Just like in Jesus’s day when the people trusted in all sorts of things: their ancestry, land, temple, and laws are just a few examples of many, people today trust in many differing things. Jesus was calling them and calls us to trust the good news that God was and is doing something new through Jesus. To be part of His kingdom requires letting go of all these earthly ties that distract us and putting our whole trust in Jesus. Repent and believe because God has come and you can belong to His kingdom and have your sin taken away.
But that doesn’t mean we have to forget.
Remembrance Sunday is an opportunity to remember and honour those who have lost their lives in conflict and those who were left physically and emotionally scarred.
It is an opportunity to all join in the silence together and allow our remembrances to help us face more honestly what it means to be human and to deepen our commitment to peace.
In all of this we seek God’s everlasting and all encompassing love.
War brings much death and trauma. There are those who cannot speak of the horrors they experienced. The silence we hold today also honours them.
As we struggle to find words to speak into the silence and horror of loss and trauma, we make Christ known. In the depths, we discover, He gives us words to speak of healing, forgiveness, and the knowledge that in Christ death is not the end and that love not violence is the final word.
God takes from us all our raging and bitterness, if we just let Him, and in the resurrection He shows us the way to peace.
The hard won, costly peace of the sacrifice of His son, who faced war yet did not respond with retribution and retaliation but with mercy, forgiveness and love.
We hold silence and remember, not so we can forget for the rest of the year, but so we can be reminded of a call to speak and recommit to live as peacemakers, as people who through the love and passion of the self-offering and sacrifice of Christ, God has come near.
And we live into the hope of a world where war will be no more.
Just because 