Easter
The Rev. Canon William H. Barnwell
“He is Risen!”
Mark 16: 1–8
He is risen. He is risen. Let the whole wide earth rejoice. Death is conquered we are free. Christ has won the victory.
Easter is the story of The Resurrection. Death cannot hold the crucified and entombed Jesus; death cannot hold us. Jesus invites us to cross over to the other side with him
But Easter also helps us appreciate resurrections in this life, those times when Life triumphs over death-like experiences. Here is a story of one of those times.
One of our Cathedral members has been a volunteer in the Kairos Prison ministry in a nearby maximum security prison. He has been working with an inmate, who was on Death Row for twenty years. This man came within a few moments of being executed. Needles were inserted in his arm. The lethal chemicals were about to flow into his body. The man stopped praying for a last minute reprieve and surrendered his life to God. At the very last moment, the prison phone rang. The governor commuted his sentence to life in prison.
But the story does not end here. The inmate then got up the courage to write the widow of the victim he had murdered so long ago to beg her forgiveness. She wrote back, but he was so afraid to open the letter, fearing that she would reject him completely. He brought the letter to the next Kairos meeting so he could open it among his new Christian friends.
One of them read the letter aloud. The woman wrote: “I forgave you 20 years ago and I have been praying for you every day ever since.
The inmate and all of his friend, inmates and free alike, wept as they felt God’s love sweeping through the prison walls.
He is risen. He is risen. Death is conquered. We are free. Christ has won his victory.
About ten years ago I started a healing service at my church in Boston. It was well attended every Tuesday evening. Many of the participants would tell their stories of how God’s love had triumphed over their losses, their despair, their grief, their suffering; of how God would give life in the midst of death-dealing situations. Sometimes illnesses would be cured; more often God would give us strength to endure, to find redemptive meaning in our suffering. I used to say, “There may not be a cure, but there can always be healing.”
In early 1999, our lovely twenty-nine year old daughter, Abigail, became ill and then died. These same people, who had been coming to the healing service for some time, surrounded us with love, both before and after her death. They knew just when to give us active support and when to let us be in our silence.
The words I had spoken for many months took on new meaning. There may not be a cure, but there can always be healing. And there was for me and my family. We will never “get over” Abby’s death. How can you get over someone you love? But her death was not the end. All that love we had for her and all the love she had for us, this love now seeks new vessels to fill. Easter helps us know that death is not the end but just the beginning. He is risen indeed!