Jeremiah 31.1-6; Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18

A rather grouchy husband made it into heaven along with his wife.

Strangely, though, he still seemed to be rather grumpy.

“What’s wrong now?” asked his wife. “Can’t you see, we’re in heaven? This is beautiful — the music’s great, the food is out of this world, the mansion has everything and more we’d ever dreamed of, the golf course is the best we’ve ever seen, there’s no fees, no taxes, our health is fantastic, why aren’t you happy? What’s wrong with you?”

The husband replied, “you we hadn’t made me eat that miserable oat bran, we could have been here ten years ago.”

What a sad view of one’s experience of heaven! The husband is so bound up with what he’s previously missed out on that he has lost all sense of celebration and thanksgiving for all the joys in his new existence.

The Christian Church too so often loses sight of the resurrection and the life and joy that it brings. We keep the 40 days of Lent, but it seems that once Easter Day itself is over, the 40 days of Easter pass us by. People go back to work after a long weekend off, the Easter eggs eaten, and life returns to normal.

Life never returned to normal for those first disciples who rushed to the tomb that first Easter Day. Mary Magdalene, according to John, was the first to arrive, early in the morning. She is panicked by the fact that the stone has been removed. We’re not told that she gets as far as looking inside, but she’s obviously made the assumption that the body is not longer there.

So, not sure what to do, she rushes off to find Peter and the other disciple. They dash to the tomb to see what has been going on. The other disciples, who is never named, peers into the tomb, notes that the linen shroud is still there, but then hangs back from going inside.

Peter, though, is never one to hang back. He goes straight inside the tomb, and spots not only the linen wrappings but also the cloth that had been around Jesus’s head. Then the other disciple follows Peter in and believes.

We’re not told exactly what it is that he believes. John wrote his Gospel in order that people might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing they may have life in his name. And that, for John, is what faith is about.

But what the disciple believes in this story is made somewhat ambiguous by the sentence that follows about them not understanding the scrupture that Jesus must rise from the dead. The two disciples go back home, believing that the body has gone, but as far as we know, not that Jesus is alive again.

But Mary is too upset to go anywhere. She stays where she is weeping. And now she too looks inside - something she hadn’t done earlier. She sees two angels there. They ask her why she is crying. She explains that Jesus has been taken away and she doesn’t know where he is.

And then she turns round and finds a man standing there, who also asks why she is crying. Her mind can only cope with rationality - her conclusion that this is a gardener makes absolute sense in some ways - who else would be in a garden?

And if anyone was going to have moved a body, then the most likely person would have been the gardener.

It takes only one word to transform her perspective from the normal sphere of human thinking to the joyful recognition of the resurrection. “Mary.” There must have been something in the way that he said it. I imagine it was a bit like the way in which a mother, in spite of a clamour of noise from other children, will always know the cry of her own child.

Mary, in spite of the clamour of voices going on in her head, knows immeditely who this gardener is once he has spoken her name.

And now he has returned she tries to cling on to him. She doesn’t want to experience the pain of separation from him again so tries to hold fast to him in the hope that he won’t disappear.

But he won’t let her, and gives her a message to take to the disciples and bids them hurry to pass it on. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

The resurrection is important, it is a sign of God’s decisive action in our world, it makes a difference. However, we are not to spend ages staring at the marvel of the empty tomb, but to carry the message of the resurrection to others.

Mary does as she is asked, although the initial message she gives to the disciples is somewhat different from the one Jesus asked her to convey - I have seen the Lord, she tells them - though she then goes on to tell them what Jesus has said.

We come to this scripture so many years after the events it describes. But it has not lost any of its power. It has transformed lives, brought hope, joy and salvation to millions of people down through the ages from the time of those first disciples.

Our reading from Acts is a speech given by Peter in Cornelius’s house. We become aware of how he has been transformed by the power of the resurrection. Just a few days ago, we heard how he denied Jesus three times in the courts of the High Priest. All through the Gospels he has seemed an unlikely figure for Jesus to have chosen as the foundation stone for his church.

He’s the one who so often get sit wrong, or speaks out before he has really though about what he is saying.

Peter should give all of us hope, since God takes who he is and uses that - he doesn’t ask Peter to become something or someone else before he uses him to deliver the message of the resurrection. He uses Peter as he is. And God wants to use us as we are.

Of course, once God starts using us, transformation follows. After the resurrection Peter is radically transformed: he preaches Christ crucified and raised from the dead, so that those who hear him believe and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. He is no longer the simple fisherman with a gift for saying the wrong thing, he has insight and wisdom and he teaches with courage and conviction. But, at the same time, he is still Peter.

The message of Easter is in part about God’s mighty power: God’s power to raise Jesus from the dead, God’s power to save us from our sins and to bring us to eternal life. But it’s not just that.

It is also a message about a message: a story about the importance of passing on the story, of not delaying, of sharing the good news.

Jesus is risen, we do not need to be afraid. Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. So we are freed from our fears and our sins, freed to carry the message of the resurrection through our words, free to carry God’s love to others through our actions. God has shown that His truth and love are more powerful than sin and death, so we can have new confidence to live our lives so that they bear witness to that truth and they show that love in action.

On his return from 16 years spent in Africa, David Livingstone told the students of Glasgow University “What sustained me amidst the toil and hardship, and loneliness of my exiled life? It was the promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end.’”

That is the message that we too have to share with the world. Because of the resurrection, Christ is no longer confined to one place or a particular moment in time. Mary could not cling on to him and make him stay where she was, for he could not be confined. He is with us, right now, to the end.

He is with us in times of sorrow and in times of joy. He is with us when life is painful and when we are celebrating. If we believe in the power of the resurrection, our lives can never just go back to being normal, for once we have met the risen Christ, we too are transformed. It will affect everything we do - the way we live our lives, the way we react to other people, the way we conduct ourselves.

Christ’s life is our life. Christ’s life is blossoming all around us - we just have to look up and see it.

Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, says this: “Where God’s people celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection, they discover new possibilities opening up in front of them.”

May we, like Mary, open our eyes to new possibilities opening up in front of us, as we celebrate the resurrection.

Christ is risen, alleluia!