Easter Day, Hong Kong Island, St. John’s Cathedral, 2025

Happy Easter to you all. Christ is Risen, Hallelujah! On Maundy Thursday we gathered at the altar, stripped it bare, and remembered that “on the night before he died, he had supper with his friends”.  At the Eucharist, we are asked to repeat it. “Do this in remembrance of me” is what Jesus asks. Remember.

But our memory is not like a video that we can rewind, so it looks the same every time. It is more like an old oil painting. It can be stared at again and again and seems the same. But it can also be touched up, painted over, repaired and added to. Furthermore, the only memory we have is the most recent one we can see. So, when Jesus says, “we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen,” we are being reminded that can only speak with integrity of what we know and have seen, which is to say, of our experience.  

Easter only makes sense if you understand the desolation and loss of Good Friday. Jesus, teacher, healer, leader…is dead. Stone cold dead.  He is laid in a tomb.  And his followers and family do what normal people do: they grieve. Deeply.  So no-one expects to see anything strange.  Mary does not see Jesus at the tomb – she sees a man, ‘supposing him to be the gardener’.  In the same way, the disciples on the road to Emmaus do not ‘see’ Jesus until the breaking of the bread.  The gospels, then, are all saying the same thing in the resurrection stories.  All look; but not all see.

The resurrection breaks all frames of reference, bursting our perceptual boundaries, leaving the gospel writers with the huge task of trying to piece together shards of information that exceed any sense reality.  An appearance here, a disappearance there; a sighting then, but a vanishing now; one minute you can touch Jesus; the next, he’s like an apparition. 

At Easter, the church does what it has done every year since AD33 . It faces death. It is no use clinging to the past however.  Because the Easter message is that whilst we must continue to live alongside the suffering of the world, we are meant to understand and live by the revolutionary freedom of the resurrection.

To be sure, our job is pain: living alongside it, sitting in the dark with people, offering hope just by being there and listening.  If these same sufferers are alive on the cross, we are to be at the foot.  The Church is called to be a field hospital where, sometimes, the vocation dies but – as in a garden – rises to something new. We are witnesses to tell our brothers and sisters what we have seen.

But this is costly.  Earlier in Lent, I listened on BBC Radio 4 to a Lenten reflection by the Anglican Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani (tipped to be one of the candidates for the next Archbishop of Canterbury). The talk focused on her brother Bahram’s martyrdom in Iran, which occurred shortly after the Iranian Revolution. Bahram returned to Iran after taking his degree, and despite the increasing levels of persecution and death threats against his family, he refused to leave. He was shot and killed on his way home from work by Muslim radicals. 

His father, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop of Iran, upon learning of his son Bahram’s martyrdom in 1980, wrote from exile in Cyprus to his English wife who was still in Iran at the time:

I feel bewildered but very calm. May God forgive those who have murdered our son.  For, plainly, ‘they knew not what they did’.  What had Bahram ever done to them? May God use the death of our dear son to free people from hatred and enmity in our country, in whatever way He knows. What an educated and cultured man our country has lost. The seed of this sacrifice somehow, sometime, somewhere in the whole plan of God for his world, will blossom and bear fruit.

How and when and where we cannot know but we believe that the sacrifice will not be wasted. We must not have hatred in our hearts –only sorrow, pity, mercy and compassion, for those callous murderers. May God awaken their souls so that they realize the depth of their prejudice and hatred and so be saved from their sin.

And on the day of the funeral, because he could not personally attend, Bishop Dehqani-Tafti broadcast this prayer into the service:

O God, we remember not only Bahram but his murderers, not because they killed him in the prime of his youth and made our hearts bleed and our tears flow, not because with this savage act they have brought further disgrace on the name of our country among the civilized nations of the world: but because through their crime we now follow more closely thy footsteps in the way of sacrifice. The terrible fire of this calamity burns up all selfishness and possessiveness in us: its flame reveals the depth of depravity, meanness and suspicion, the dimension of hatred and the measure of sinfulness in human nature.

It makes plain to us as never before our need to trust in thy love as shown in the Cross of Jesus and his Resurrection, love that makes us free from all hatred towards our persecutors: love which brings patience, forbearance, courage, loyalty, humility, generosity and greatness of heart, love which more than ever deepens our trust in God’s final victory and thy eternal designs for the Church and for the world: love which teaches us how to prepare ourselves to face our own day of death.

O God, Bahram’s blood multiplies the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls: so when his murderers stand before thee on the Day of Judgment remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives, and forgive.

We should see Easter not as the Feast that not only puts the broken back together, as the Feast of Total Transformation.  It offers us a sense of re-creation. 

And the Easter stories are a narrative of light.  Not just because the darkness of Good Friday is dispersed and destroyed by the shattering light of the resurrection. But also because Jesus, now he has been raised, is recognised as the new light. A light so dazzling indeed, that it cannot be comprehended. As the poet Emily Dickinson has it:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

Success in circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind. [Emily Dickinson, Tell All The Truth]

So this light returns us to the first light of creation.  This is a new dawn.  God’s light now shines – a sign of the realm of heaven, where there is neither day nor night, but one light of equal brightness. This is a light beyond the sun, moon and stars. The light of the resurrection is the light of a whole new creation; a revelation of radiance that can barely be worded.

How shall we live in this light? One way of understanding our new place in the world is the grasp that the scriptures are bookended by and pivot in gardens.  The Christian scriptures begin with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  The centre takes us to a Garden of Gethsemane (abandonment and betrayal) and the Easter Garden of resurrection.  The Christian scriptures end with flowing rivers in Revelation, and leaves on trees to heal nations.  One eternal light, and no more darkness or tears. None.

Easter is the festival of fire and light – a new age dawns the moment the stone is rolled away, and the Son of God bursts forth in a radiant splendour that is blinding, yet totally illuminating.  In this light, we are all now transformed – in our awe, wonder and worship.

Happy Easter to you all. Christ is Risen, Hallelujah. He is Risen Indeed, Hallelujah!