Day 75 - Pass it on!

1 Corinthians 15:3-11

Easter’s not just for a weekend! Easter’s not just for the seven weeks between Easter and Pentecost either! Sunday’s our day for worship because Sunday is the day of resurrection. Every Sunday’s an Easter Sunday!

There’s a wonderful sense of continuity when we celebrate Easter. By the time she died a couple of months ago, Myf Blakeman had celebrated 103 Easters and many, many more Resurrection Days. The first eleven years of her life she joined her family in Marton Congregational Church, Shropshire, and for the remaining ninety-two years she worshipped at Minsterley Congregational Church.

Myf could well have echoed the words of Paul and said, when talking about Easter and her faith, ‘I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve’.

Myf had received the wonderful good news of resurrection from those who had gone before her in the faith; in turn, she passed that wonderful good news on to all of us who have known her. It is a remarkable thought to think that as few as twenty centenarians link us with those who first witnessed the resurrection of Jesus! Each one ‘handed on’ what they ‘in turn had received’.

Paul recalls resurrection appearances of Jesus that haven’t made it into the Gospels. ‘Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.’ Though not there at the first Easter, Paul goes on to recall his own experience of the risen Christ: ‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you believed.’

Behind each of us is a long chain of people who received the good news and in turn handed it on. And each one of us is the last in that chain. Those last words of Paul are words each one of us can paraphrase: ‘last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. I feel as if I am the least in that remarkable chain of people who have borne witness to the resurrection. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. Whatever work I have done, it was not I but the grace of God that is with me.’ May we also pass the resurrection message on and come to the point at which we too can say, ‘Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you believed.’

Richard Cleaves