We are now in the season of Easter, a celebration of such importance in the Christian faith that it lasts for fifty days. That`s quite a party! This year Easter ends on May 30th which is the day of Pentecost. We are told time and again that Easter is the most important feast in the Christian calendar. We are told that Easter is the most important event in the life of Jesus Christ.

I was struck during our celebrations last weekend at how often Easter was mentioned as an event in which God "made all things new" (BAS Collect p. 335) and as a day on which "the Lord has acted" (Psalm 118:24). In a tired old world which has seen most everything, this is quite a claim.

What exactly happened?

According to the Bible the Resurrection happened, that`s what! It was a unique and unprecedented event in the history of creation which changed everything. That`s right an unprecedented event in history- an historical event. That is quite a claim. Can we believe it? What evidence would convince you?

Within hours of it happening, or allegedly happening, even those closest to Jesus were asking the same thing. Indeed, the struggle to understand the Resurrection is a struggle which takes place in the heart and soul of every serious spiritual seeker. That is, no doubt, the reason why today`s gospel story is placed as it is immediately on the heels of Easter Day. I am, of course referring to the story in today`s Gospel of John in which Thomas the Apostle, refuses to believe just on the testimony of others. Thomas insists on seeing the risen Jesus for himself.

The term "doubting Thomas" derives from this story and the term has entered our cultural heritage as a term of disparagement. A truly faithful believer would never be like Thomas. To this I say nonsense! Surely Thomas is the role model par excellence of the informed and articulate believer. He is not satisfied with a second-hand experience of God, he is not satisfied with someone else`s opinion about Jesus, he wants to anchor his life solidly in his own experience and convictions.

We ourselves know that our position is weak if we can only speak of someone in terms of what others have told us. Here-say is never as good as first-hand knowledge, is it?

What happened was the Resurrection. That is, Jesus died and rose from the dead. And because he did we can follow him from death to new life. What are we to make of this?

The Christian Church is built upon the resurrection of Christ. As St Paul says, "If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been vain" ( 1 Corinthians 15:12-14). Sounds like believing in the resurrection is pretty important. Without it, according to Paul, our faith is in vain.

This declaration echoes that of Thomas in today`s gospel when he finally confesses, " My Lord and My God" upon touching the wounds of Christ and realizing for himself that Christ is there before him, raised from the dead.

But what will forever remain an enigma is just how this can be. There are many theories about the Resurrection. Some believe the Resurrection to be historical fact- that would be the majority teaching among Christian Churches- but some think that the Resurrection of Jesus is a myth. Myth- not in the unhappy and inaccurate common understanding of this word as meaning "not true" but myth in the sense of something that is universally and symbolically true.

A Canadian Anglican priest and well-known journalist, Tom Harpur, has just written a book called The Pagan Christ, in which he defends the idea of the Resurrection as myth. This claim is by no means new but his arguments are compelling. Harpur, as a journalist, has the ability to popularize ideas that often never get beyond academia. His book is fascinating reading and, I suspect reading which may upset some of you. We have invited him to give a public lecture here at St John`s in October. Study groups will be organized before hand so we can all get our questions ready for him.

We have invited Harpur not because we endorse his controversial position but because we believe that St John`s is a Thomas the Apostle kind of faith community: willing to ask even the most disturbing questions in order to make us stronger.

I read on the internet the Easter sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury last Sunday. The Most Rev`s Rowan Williams preached in his See Cathedral of Canterbury. He began his sermon by pointing out just how this news of the raising of the dead would have been received by the Jewish and Gentile populations at the time of Jesus. A Greek or Roman would have found the idea grotesque because the dead were thought to live in s shadowy underworld condemned to a half life of yearning and sorrow. For Greeks and Romans it was important to keep high the barrier between this world and the next so as not to allow these creepy half alive beings to escape.

Even the ancient Hebrews, some of whom first made resurrection a positive idea, thought of the condition of the dead in a similar fashion. The righteous dead would be raised, some thought, but not at the moment of death but rather at the end of time. People today have been so shaped by the positive Christian understanding of Resurrection that it is difficult for us to understand the consternation and fear that such an event caused at the time of Jesus Christ. In today`s gospel the disciples are full of consternation and fear at the appearance of Jesus.

The Archbishop`s comments were not new to me. What did catch my attention is his observation that the one of the reasons why the return of the dead was such a frightening prospect to the ancients was because when the dead did appear in a vision or dream it was often to denounce their killers. Ancient empires, to a much greater extent that present day ones, specialized in mass murder. It was acceptable collateral damage, to use a present day term, to simply exterminate human beings by the thousands if they were inconvenient or in any way threatened the survival of the empire. We are not far from this kind of mindset ourselves. However, no one but the most perverse would ever consider this kind of state policy as anything but repugnant. Not so in the ancient world. Indeed, fathers had the right to kill their children, masters their slaves, the killing of criminals was popular entertainment in public arenas, and massacre was an accepted tool of war.

Williams points out that Christianity, for all its failures, brought into the world a revolutionary new vision of the worth of the human being. And that revolutionary new vision was based upon our understanding of Resurrection. Resurrection meant that "human value could not be extinguished by violence or death; no-one could be forgotten" (Anglican Communion News Service, 12/04/2004, Easter Sermon of the Archbishop of Canterbury).

Jesus was savagely murdered by just such a system of state-sanctioned violence. Jesus was one of the little ones, totally expendable. Jesus would die a violent and miserable death ,like millions before and after him. Or think of the people who die daily in ways that appear to be totally meaningless. Must we admit that all these lives are meaningless? Must we just shrug our shoulders and say, "It's the luck of the draw"?

Jesus would die meaninglessly. He died, like them, without justice, as if their lives mattered not a whit and weren`t worth counting. But the Resurrection of Jesus means that all have worth in the eyes of God

The Archbishop ended his sermon by recalling the death squads of Central and South America- and such death squads abound in countless countries to this day. He remembered how the Christians in those countries developed a dramatic way of celebrating their faith so that it was also a form of protest. At the Eucharist, someone would read out the names of those killed or "disappeared" and for each name someone would call out from the congregation presente- Here.

I know that each one of us could do the same at our Eucharist. We could do this every Sunday here at St John`s. In addition to praising God that we are surrounded by saints and martyrs, apostles and prophets, we are surrounded by the millions the world has judged valueless: the butchered people of Rwanda, and Uganda, and Nigeria, and the Sudan, by the victims of the Jewish Holocaust. We could read names and we could all shout "Presente".

Such a protest would be both political and religious. It would state in contemporary terms the power of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it reminds us that "there can be no genuine religious conversion without a change in social attitude." ( Willima Sloan Coffin, Credo, Westminster John Know Press, Louisville, 2004).