Sermon for Easter Day

Sunday 11th April 2004

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt


I promise not to mention this again after today (in an official way) but it has been nearly four weeks since I saw Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’. It’s simply known sometimes now as just “The Film”. I know some of you may have seen it by now. What I wanted to do this morning is to give to you my lasting impression of that film, because it’s relevant to this morning…perhaps you don’t really want to know what my lasting impression is…but for what it’s worth, here goes!

I wouldn’t call myself a film-buff, but I enjoy films and cinema and all that jazz. Even given all that, when I truly try to comprehend and take on board the passion and death and resurrection of Christ after seeing this film, I find myself thinking how very ‘superficial’ everything else is by comparison. Everything else seems to pale into insignificance compared with the death and passion and resurrection of this Jesus of Nazareth, none other than the Son of God. How we seem to be just always dealing with the surface things of life, without ever really experiencing the depth below.

St. Paul has an even stronger word than ‘superficial’. Do you remember when you were a kid, you looked up all the bad words in the dictionary – do you remember that? Maybe you were all so good and holy, you didn’t do things like that! Well, if you want to look up a bad word in the New Testament, you don’t have to look any further than St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, Chapter 3, verse 8…it’s on page 1180!! The New International Version politely translates the word as ‘rubbish’. Some other versions more correctly translate it as ‘dung’. There is an even more accurate translation, which I can’t even repeat in Church, but you may get the picture by now. And Paul says that compared to knowing Christ Jesus my Lord I consider, everything I have ever known, everything else as total “rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.”


You may remember the extraordinary and true story that Iain Barclay tells. Two American ex-GIs were leaving Victoria Station in London on a train. Not 20 minutes into the journey, one of them suffered an epileptic seizure. Immediately his companion knew exactly what to do. He stretched out his companion, made sure he didn’t swallow his tongue, mopped his brow and after some moments his companion appeared calm again. Their fellow traveller on the other side of the compartment leant over and said to him: “That was an amazing thing you have just done.” And the American said, “No, it was nothing. You see, we were in Vietnam together, fighting side by side and when we received orders to move forward, I was shot in the legs. My friend came back for me and he pulled me to safety and yet he had been wounded himself. My legs were in bits and I couldn’t walk. The helicopter didn’t come and so he carried me through the Vietnam jungle for nearly four whole days, until we got to a field hospital. Eventually they were able to fix me up and fly me home. After the war I looked up my friend and I heard that he had this condition. Since he had no one to look after him, I sold my house and I moved over to look after him. You see, mister, after what he did for me, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him.

A famous missionary called C T Studd (what a name to have all your life) was once an even more famous English cricketer, and he said something similar about this of Jesus of Nazareth: “If Christ be God, and he died for me, then there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him.”

We don’t often quote from Lamentations, but what about this: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me?”

Most of the ‘stuff’ that we deal with day and daily doesn’t really matter, does it? We worry and complain and moan about things, which, at the end of the day, are really quite superficial. Easter puts things in perspective. Before we try to take on the challenges of life and all that it has to throw at us, we have to try firstly to take on board, the passion, and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everything else pales into insignificance compared to it. That perspective raises very serious questions about how we conduct ourselves every day, how we think about our lot in life, every day. What really matters to you? What’s really important to you

Is it really nothing to you, all you who pass by?

You cannot face Holy Week and Easter ‘head on’ and not be changed by it. It has to affect us; it has to put things in perspective. It’s love so amazing so divine it demands my soul, my life, my all.