Monday 9 April 2007

Rowan Williams' Easter sermon

In this year’s Easter Day Sermon, Rowan Williams spoke of the revelation of sin and grace in the death of Jesus: God brings us healing, and so reveals our deep need for healing. Here’s an excerpt:

“If the purpose of Jesus dying was that all might be made whole, the implication is that all have been sick. So that Good Friday tells all of us, those who think they’re good and those who know they’re bad, all alike, to look inside and ask what part we would have played in the drama of the Lord’s death.… In some way, however small, we have already contributed to the death of Jesus. He is there on the cross because we are the way we are.

“But on Easter Day, this bleak recognition is turned on its head. We were all involved; yet the combined weight of every human failure and wrongness, however small or great, all of that could not extinguish the creative love of God. We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional love in a human life of flesh and blood…. The vortex of error and failure that affects everybody in the world draws Jesus into its darkness and seems to destroy him body and soul. That, says Good Friday, is the kind of world this is, and we are all part of it.

“Yet there is more than the world to think about. If that love is really what it claims to be, eternal and unconditional, it will not be destroyed. What’s more, the human embodiment of that love, the flesh and blood of Jesus, cannot be destroyed…. So: if we can accept the unwelcome picture of us and our world that Good Friday offers, we are, in the strangest way, set free to hear what Easter says.”

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Did I ask to be born?

Anonymous said...

Great homily by Williams. Points out how God wastes nothing, but uses our sins as an opportunity for us to see his compassion. He soaks our sin in his relentless love, and they become the windows where we look and see the face of Christ.

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