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This is a text-only version of an article first published on Sunday, 31 March 2013. Information shown on this page may no longer be current.
THE RESURRECTION - GOD'S UNDERSTATEMENTWell, the Queen has come and gone.
On Thursday we had a glorious service in which she distributed the Maundy money to 87 men and 87 women who have given themselves to Church and community, and who were old enough for a bus pass - and a bit. The preparation was truly epic.
It went on for months, accelerating in the last few weeks to a breathless rush for the line, with emails and letters flying in all directions, running orders, timing sheets and protocols streaming out of overheated photocopiers; my secretaries offering pastoral advice to anxious phone callers about whether coats could be kept on in church and whether medical facilities would be available (I'm trying to be delicate). The day before the service we had a rehearsal with about 100 people present, including the Yeomen of the Guard, the Keeper of the Closet, and the Lord High Executioner (sorry, Lord High Almoner).
We were all drilled to the last twitch.
And so, of course, it was wonderful, but it's been an education in royal protocol and preparation. But it was as nothing compared to the time Michelle Obama came by a couple of years back.
That's when we start remembering snipers on the roof and helicopters circling overhead.
What a palaver it all is when royalty, English or American, comes to town. When Jesus rose from the dead it was a rather quieter affair.
Indeed you might say the resurrection was God's understatement.
First, there were no witnesses at all; no-one was there when Jesus rose again.
It even happened in the dark, before dawn. Then, second, the first people at the scene were women.
Well, that was a mistake; you can't trust the women.
The testimony of women was, I'm afraid, pretty well down the pecking order in terms of credibility.
Third, the women went and got Peter and John out of bed, but having raced to the garden and seen the empty tomb, the gospel says they went home for breakfast. Which just left one woman, Mary Magdalene, crying at the tomb.
Another mistake.
She's got what you might call a colourful past and has a clear dependency on Jesus, so she's not exactly a winner as a witness.
And in any case, the risen Jesus is so unremarkable Mary thinks he's the gardener.
God still isn't going for maximum exposure in this resurrection event. But maybe we'll still get the big climax; Mary lunges forward to hold on to her risen Lord.
It's a great finale.
Jesus the conquering hero, triumphant over death, holding his most devoted follower, sharing the final credits.
But no, they've flunked it again.
Jesus tells Mary to keep her distance; he isn't available to her in the old way of friendship.
'Don't hold on to me.
Sorry. 'God's understatement; you see what I mean? And it went on like that.
The risen Jesus came and went; sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn't.
In John's gospel, after the story we've heard, Jesus appeared in the upper room that evening but then didn't appear again for a week, when Thomas was back.
If we'd been planning this reappearance of the risen Son of God, I guess we might have arranged a bit more of a media strategy and a series of personal appearances, interviews and parchment signings. And yet, and yet.
How wrong we'd have been; how out of step with the way God wooed his people through the life of his Son.
It's all of a piece.
The anonymity of his birth, in the poorest of surroundings, and again in the night.
The first thirty years of his life; totally off piste, invisible to all but his family and a few hundred inhabitants of Nazareth.
His commissioning - submitting to a sinner's baptism in a muddy river.
His early ministry - no motorcade here, just shanks' pony as he wanders the hill country of Galilee. What about a bit of royal authority? No, the greatest among you must become like the least; you're here to serve.
It's relentless; he enters Jerusalem on a donkey for heaven's sake (actually it is for heaven's sake); in Gethsemane he begs for another way but there's no release; on the cross he still won't give in to the cheap shot of calling on twelve legions of angels.
God's understatement all through. But that's the way you win a world.
Not by overcoming but by underplaying, not by overruling but by underruling - ruling from within the human heart, not trying to control it by force.
Ask yourself; when Jesus faced Pilate, who had the power and who had the authority? Pilate obviously had the power, he could do what he liked; but Jesus had the authority, look at the creed for further details.
In our day apartheid had the power but Nelson Mandela had the authority.
In Tiananmen Square the Chinese regime had the power, but the student in front of the tank had the authority.
The Burmese generals had the power but Aung San Suu Kyi had the authority.
And so on. But having identified the understated method, let us be in no doubt about the explosive force of the resurrection.
The resurrection ricochets around the world 2000 years after Peter and John went home for breakfast.
It heals and liberates and restores hope; it encourages and transforms; it makes all things new. And maybe its greatest gift is that it enables people to survive.
Martin Niemoller was a German theologian who was imprisoned by the Nazis, throughout the second world war, for opposing Hitler.
He and others were regularly taken out for interrogation and beatings.
One Good Friday, as he was being dragged out for yet another beating, he passed some cages in which prisoners were kept in solitary confinement.
As he went past one cage he saw scratched in the dust the single word 'vivat', meaning 'he lives'.
Niemoller said afterwards that this word of hope enabled him to survive the beatings and the terror as he remembered the invincibility of his risen Saviour. I'm constantly inspired by the lives of people facing life or death situations with grace, dignity and extraordinary faith.
They know that their Redeemer lives and won't ever let go of them.
They know they're not safe but they're secure, 100% secure. The paradox of the resurrection is that it threw the engine of creation into reverse; it was the greatest, most mysterious and perplexing event since the Big Bang, but it draws its power not from its glory and scale but from its understatement and hiddenness.
Gerald Manley Hopkins uses the lovely verb of 'eastering. ' 'Let him easter in us' he cries, and as he easters in us so we find the fears and rigidities melting away, not by divine fiat but by divine love.
For if Jesus rose from the dead it was not because of some blind, irresistible force, but because love demanded it and love enabled it. The resurrection is God's supreme act of love.
And love, as we know, is patient and kind and doesn't insist on its own way, and believes all things and hopes all things and endures all things.
And it raises all things too.
The theologian Lesslie Newbigin was once asked if he was an optimist of a pessimist.
He answered: 'I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. ' That's bedrock; it's Christian realism. But at the end of the day, even Easter day, no-one can prove the resurrection is true, that it took place in history in the way the gospels say it did.
In that sense the resurrection is a choice.
God won't force it on us any more than he forced it on a fearful group of dishevelled disciples in an Upper Room in Jerusalem years ago.
It's up to us whether we want to inhabit the resurrection and let it inhabit us, whether we want Christ to easter in us. In Yann Martel's book and now film Life of Pi , the ship in which young Pi and his family are sailing sinks in a storm and the young hero has an incredible voyage in the company of a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.
He barely survives, but in his hospital bed he has to give an account of what has happened to two insurance agents.
He tells the story of his remarkable relationship with the tiger and finds his listeners totally disbelieving, so he tells them a much more conventional story of what happened, full of human cruelty.
At the end of the two accounts the young man poses the vital question to his listeners: 'Which story do you prefer?'That's the question for us too.
Which story do we prefer? Is it resurrection or no resurrection? Which story makes most sense to us emotionally, intellectually and spiritually? Which story has the scent of the divine? Which story gives the world hope? Which story might enchant the jaded palate of a weary society?I think it's the understated story of an empty tomb, a worried woman, two bewildered disciples and a gardener. The rest is history.
Rt Revd John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford Easter Day 2013