Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy for me to be with you here in Saint Mary’s, the
Mother Church of Greenock and all Lower Clydeside, this Easter Sunday. Your parish can trace its Christian roots close to Gospel times themselves and certainly from the sixth century mission chapel founded here by Saint Blane of Bute. Re-established in post-Reformation times as the Greenock Mission, the first priests of Saint Mary’s preached the Gospel across the river into Dumbarton and down through Ayrshire, founding many parishes that thrive still today, far and wide.
They went out like Saint Peter, whom we find today’s Scriptures bringing the Good News of the Resurrection not to an individual but to a family, in the household of Cornelius. Just as Jesus first came to know Peter within his family life, with the curing of his mother-in- law, perhaps Peter knew better than most how Jesus’ Gospel was destined for the redemption and salvation of families as households who need His Presence close by in their daily lives.
Cornelius and his family already knew about Jesus and His work. Peter is aware that they had heard all about the ‘recent happenings’ and that they were quite familiar with the Way of Jesus from Nazareth, through Galilee, into the countryside of Judea and, finally, in Jerusalem itself. But Peter sees that they know of it only as hearsay, on the testimony of others, and from the perspective of the recent history of someone who, although He went about doing good, had come to a sad end in a big city quite remote from their ordinary lives.
Peter’s testimony presents that same story that Cornelius and his household already know fairly well but now in an entirely new light. He points out to them how the Gospel is incomplete, and even incomprehensible, as long as it remains only the story of some good man named Jesus who went around curing the sick and freeing those who had fallen into the power of the Devil. Peter knows that if they are going to understand the Gospel in its fullness they will have to believe his testimony about to the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and how He has won the right to judge with mercy and forgiveness all those households who learn how to trust in His power to save.
Perhaps Cornelius and his family had, till then, lived with their sights set on the good things of the earth, or in hope of a Messiah who could offer perfect solutions to their troubles in this world. But, as Saint Paul will later insist to the Colossians, the essence of the Easter proclamation is for Christians to look above and to the things that are in Heaven, where Christ is sitting at God’s right hand. In the Easter Message of both Peter and Paul there runs the same golden thread: the Death of the Messiah has changed everything, and from now on His true disciples no longer set their hopes on seeing worked in their day the kind of miracles performed by Jesus in Galilee and Judea. Instead, after His Passion, Death and Resurrection, they will pin all their hopes on the new life He offers above in His hidden life in God.
This true life with Christ above, that God our Father offers, is not easy for us to understand in one go and Christians can live a whole life of faith here below without really grasping this essential point. Even the apostles Peter and John, who followed Jesus intimately over a number of years, failed to understand this full teaching of the Scripture about Him. In truth it was only the terrible experience of His death, and now the very Empty Tomb, that caused them to realise how faith had to be fixed on His Resurrection and new life, where they too might one day hope to follow and so be revealed in all their glory with Him.
For Mary Magdalen, who loved Jesus with incomprehensible devotion however, this truth was not enough on its own to satisfy her sorrow at all that had taken place and all that she had lost. As the apostles departed with the spring of the Gospel in their step, she nonetheless remained. It was one thing for them to believe before the emptiness of the Tomb, but that did not change the fact that the One she loved has been taken away and she did not know where they had put Him. In the end it will be in her, Mary, that the full power of the Resurrection will manifest itself if Jesus really is the Saviour He promised He would be. And so it turns out. The truest power of the Resurrection is that, especially amid the most terrible sorrow of those who loved deepest and best and who lost, the Risen Lord can suddenly appeal as a surprising Personal Presence, addressing them even by name.
It is through the witness of these, whose mourning He turns to peace, and whose sorrow He can turn to joy, that the Risen Lord evangelises His Church with the assurance that there is a greater glory still to come in is ascending to His Father and God, now our Father and God too.
We turn at the last to Mary, Our Mother:- She Who witnessed the scenes of Calvary at first hand but not the events of the Resurrection and Who yet is blessed for believing the full teaching of the Scriptures; that She pray Her Risen Son and Lord to be our Life, our Hope and our Peace.