The year is 1968. The summer of love. In America the Vietnam War is at a point of crisis. Drafts are being dodged. Call up papers burnt. And as a culmination to the many anti-war demonstrations happening all around the world thousands of students and young people gather at the Pentagon to demand an end to the hostilities. Their plan was, to say the least, original. Aided by all sorts of illegal substances that should not be mentioned here, they hoped that if enough people had enough lovely thoughts then they might levitate the Pentagon to some higher stratosphere and thus bring the war to an end.
Needless to say this didn’t work. But it was a huge and impressive show of peaceful resistance. But the numbers were so great that the authorities got increasingly twitchy. Although peaceful, they feared at any moment violence may break out, and as the afternoon wore on determined to disperse the crowd. And what I’m now about to describe to you is one of the most famous pieces of newsreel footage from those days: a great line of soldiers, their rifles held at the ready, snake out from within the Pentagon, pushing back the thousands of young people protesting on the grass. The soldiers themselves are no older than the protesters. The crowds are pushed back.
Then one young man steps from crowd. He is carrying a flower. He approaches the line of soldiers. Very carefully, deliberately, he places the flower in the barrel of a gun. It is an astonishingly beautiful moment. Like that Chinese student who danced in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square. The tables are turned. Normal services upended. The situation transformed. Because the man with the gun is utterly helpless against the man with the flower. And the gun: the symbol of power and authority is subverted. It becomes a vase. So also the tank, a dancing partner. Everything is changed.
On Palm Sunday we blessed and unveiled a new Icon of the Crucifixion. It hangs in the North Transept underneath the great painting of the Tree of Life. And in the ancient tradition of so many icons and paintings of Christ’s passion, the cold, hard wood of the cross is beginning to spout and blossom. In our icon of the cross there are green shoots springing up and down the shaft of the cross. In other depictions it is from the very places where Christ is wounded, his hands and feet nailed, his heart pierced, his head crowned with thorn. Do you see, this is the Easter proclamation, the greatest turning around of all: as the ancient hymn puts it: the wood of the cross has become for us the tree of life. Where life was lost, there life has been restored. By his wounds we have been healed. It is precisely from those places where Christ is most beaten, most injured, most hurt that the flowers and fruits of the resurrection begin to grow. We look at this Icon and we see both the cross – God’s sharing in the sufferings of the worlds and God’s redemptive work in Christ – and also the resurrection; flowing from the heart of Christ: the fruits of victory and the promise of glory.
And then we look up, to the tree of life itself, and to that promise which is ours; that we can receive and enjoy the fruits of this victory. For he is risen from the dead. He still bears the scars of his suffering – and he will bear them for eternity – but they also carry the promise that our flesh, our humanity is taken into this glory.
And then we look around, to the horrors and sufferings of our world today: the conflicts in Libya and Afghanistan and so many other places; the confusions and compromises within our hearts; the injustices we live with daily, the cheeks we fail to turn, the other sides we travel by. Can these become the place of resurrection? Will we invite Jesus to turn us around and through us the injustices of the world? Will the flowers of his peace and of his coming bloom in our world today?
Here is the real challenge. Like Mary Magdalene standing in that first Easter garden, and like everyone who has followed Jesus since, we need to become the bearers of his message, the witnesses to his peace. We need to take the flowers of his gospel and plant them in the soil of the world, especially in those places where life is darkest and most disturbed, where what is, seems furthest from what should be.
Why do we find this so hard? Is it just a lack of courage, or is it, that like Mary at first, we just don’t recognise the Risen Christ? We stop at the cross. We see there God’s love and compassion, but we don’t see his triumph?
Perhaps Mary was able to stand and wait at the tomb, because she had also stood and waited at the cross. When the others had gone, she remained.
Can we do the same? Can we look long at the cross of Christ; can we linger at the tomb. For if we do, beauty, truth, hope is ours; even this: a share in the resurrection of Christ.
So look again. Do you see? Blood and water flow from Christ’s wounded heart? And from the scars of his passion flowers grow, the green shoots of something new.
It happened in a garden. It happened in spring, when flowers are blooming. Mary Magdalene stood in the garden on the dawning of the first Easter day and she beheld the Risen Christ. It can be so for us today, this Easter. No, Mary didn’t recognise him at first. But when he spoke her name she knew him.
Do you believe that Christ calls your name today? That he loves you? That he is looking for you? That he has a purpose for your life?
Mary thought he was the gardener. As it turned out she was right: he is the Gardener; the new Adam, tending a new creation. And he invites us to be a part of it. He calls our name today. The wonders of the gospel are passed to us, the chance for life to be changed, for the world to be transformed. We are called to be his witnesses, the people with the flowers. For nothing can withstand the power of such love.
+Stephen