Bishop Paul’s Easter Sermon in Southwell Minster
Easter Sunday 2025, Southwell Minster, 10am
My text for this Easter morning is John 20 verse 18:
“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’”
This discovery eclipses all other discoveries ever made. It changes everything about our world view, and on a deeply personal level requires a response. What happened that first Easter morning, what Mary herself and the other disciples encountered, is the reason we are here in this place today.
It is the reason this Minster was built with such devotion and skill. It’s the reason that Sunday is the day that Christians gather every week to worship: putting God at the centre of our lives and praying for the needs of the world.
It’s the reason for many other things we take for granted in our culture: things that remain embedded in the fabric of Western society, however threadbare it may sometimes seem. But there have been recent reports – including in some of this weekend’s newspapers – reports of a change in the spiritual temperature with a growing interest in Christianity, particularly among younger generations. Some social commentators are pondering if this may be a consequence of two centuries of dedication to relentless progress which over the past decade has proved to be unreliable and spiritually unsatisfying.
Whatever we make of it, I’m simply thankful we have 26 young people giving a year as interns serving in churches across the diocese. And this morning there are baptisms of new adult believers in churches in Nottingham, Mansfield and Retford, and elsewhere. People committing their lives to following Jesus, believing he is who he said he was, the Son of God, and that he suffered on the cross for us and rose from the dead. What Mary saw really matters.
If what we celebrate today actually happened, then no wonder the bells rang out from here and in towers across the country, as they do on historic occasions. Because this isn’t just good news for those of us in church. It is public truth and so should be announced for the benefit of everyone whether or not they’ve ever been to church: this is for them too.
I will come back to the significance of Jesus’ resurrection in a moment, but contrast that with a discovery announced earlier this week:
On Monday a Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b announced they had detected signs of molecules which could indicate an ocean world capable of hosting microbial life. While they emphasised caution as further studies are undertaken, the lead researcher, Professor Madhususdhan said the implications could be huge. Commenting on what they’d seen, he said: “This is a very important moment in science, but also very important to us as a species. This is the strongest evidence yet there is possible life out there.”
By contrast, Raymond Pierrehumbert, who is planetary physics professor at Oxford (there’s bit of competitive here) said no one should get too exited about the existence of terrestrial life. He pointed out that K2-18b is not only 124 light years away (that’s 750 trillion miles from earth), he said it’s also ‘hellishly hot’ with temperatures up to 392 degrees Fahrenheit, making it completely uninhabitable. He added, ‘oceans of lava are more plausible’.
But Mahususdhan was not despondent, saying: “This could still be the tipping point when suddenly the fundamental question of whether we’re alone in the universe is one we’re capable of answering.”
I find this exploration of our universe exciting and mind-blowing. But it cannot begin to compare with the monumental discovery that we celebrate happened on that first Easter morning.
Mary has a face to face encounter with Jesus three days after she and the others had watched him suffer such a horrendous death, then saw his tortured and lifeless body laid in a tomb. Now, on the third day, the tomb has been found empty and the large stone rolled away. And the risen Jesus appears not only to Mary but by the end of that day he appears to the rest of disciples in an upper room.
All the gospel writers make it clear this was no apparition, like a presence they somehow sensed. Jesus appears in bodily form: they touch him and eat with him, and are not only astonished but filled with joy and new confidence because of their encounters with the risen Jesus over a period of 40 days.
By the time he ascends to the Father in heaven, they have such certainty that Jesus is risen from the dead that they will, in the days and years to come, stake their very lives on it. That’s what Peter told the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household about in our first reading from Acts.
The resurrection of Jesus is not merely a symbol of new life. It is a fact that causes hope to cascade into the world. The biblical word alpida, translated as the weaker English word hope, means profound certainty. From the first-century onwards, Christian hope centres on one explosive event – the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is what Christianity offers to a world searching for meaning and seeking hope. Arthur C Clarke once said, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
If Jesus is risen from the dead, and now reigning as King over all things, then whatever our lives may hold, and whatever this vast universe may hold, we will never be alone, even in death itself.
What is the real significance of Jesus resurrection?
First, death has been defeated – all that separates us from knowing God has been dealt with once and for all on the cross. Death entered into the world through sin but now through the cross and resurrection of Jesus, death has lost its power. Jesus opens a new and living way into the presence of God, though the extraordinary gift of forgiveness and eternal life. Peter explained it to Cornelius like this:
“We are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree: but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead….and everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” This is the victory Jesus won out of love for the world.
Secondly, the resurrection declares Jesus is Lord.
That’s why Peter makes it very plain to Cornelius that Jesus, he said, “commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.”
Mary and Peter and the other disciples were compelled to pass on the good news that Jesus is risen, not simply because you wouldn’t believe this, but to explain therefore that Jesus is Lord, the Son of God and Saviour of the World. As Paul would later say to the Colossians about Jesus: “He is before all things and in him all things hold together.” (Col 1:17)
That leads on to a third aspect of the significance of all this, which is that the resurrection of Jesus requires a personal response. The offer of receiving God’s forgiveness for sin and a sure and certain hope is something truly personal. As personal as it was for Mary, as Jesus spoke her name and broke through her sorrow and her despair, so she threw her arms around him. I always find the most moving words spoken in a confirmation service – words taken from the Gospels – is when I say to each candidate, ‘God has called you by name and made you his own.’
And so as the celebration of Easter continues, we can rejoice that death is defeated, that Jesus is Lord and holds all things together, including this vast universe and our broken world and broken hearts too.
And since he has made a way for us to know God personally and be known by him, my Easter prayer for you is this: that the eyes of your hearts may be opened in a fresh way to the full wonder of his love for you. Then by his grace and power, as Paul puts it, we may “shine like stars in the sky as we hold firmly to God’s word of life” (Philippians 2:15). Which is why this Easter faith inspires us to serve with courage the good purposes of Christ in our world with all its need. And to God be the glory. Amen.