CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL: ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S EASTER SERMON

The Most Revd Rowan Williams

Canterbury Cathedral

Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004

A good many years ago, I heard a distinguished American scholar of ancient history comment on how the proclamation of the resurrection would have sounded in the classical world. “If an educated Greek or Roman had been told that someone had been raised from the dead,” he said, “his first question would have been: ‘How do you get him back into his grave again?’”

For the ancients, resurrection was not joyful hope—but a grotesque or even terrifying disruption. The dead belonged to Hades, a shadowy half-life of yearning. To return was unnatural: boundaries between worlds existed to be preserved.

Even the ancient Hebrews, who first envisioned resurrection as a future hope—reward for the righteous, punishment for the wicked—would have found the claim of present resurrection deeply unsettling. St. Matthew’s account of holy ones rising from their tombs in Jerusalem after Christ’s death is not a scene of reunion, but an earthquake in the cosmic order.

So why was resurrection so alarming?

Because, in the ancient world, the dead—especially victims of imperial violence—were meant to disappear. Empires thrived by treating human lives as expendable. What if they did not vanish? What if the firstborn from the dead was not a hero—but a crucified criminal, executed by Rome?

The Gospel announces: this man is now the messenger of God’s peace to his killers. And he is only the first. His resurrection guarantees that no life will be forgotten—no victim erased.

Christianity introduced an irreversible shift: every life has inalienable dignity. Not because of utility, status, or virtue—but because God remembers. And if God can raise one subjected to Rome’s dehumanizing machinery of death, then imperial power has reason to tremble.

We do not live under that empire—thank God. Yet the 20th century witnessed regimes that assumed, as blandly as Rome, that the dead could be buried and forgotten: Auschwitz, the Gulag, the Killing Fields, Rwanda.

And today? While we did not wield the machetes in Rwanda ten years ago, the world stood by. In Northern Uganda, children are still abducted to serve as soldiers—and their suffering barely registers in Western headlines.

Nearer home, who remembers the aged dying alone? The homeless addict? The mentally ill, isolated from human contact?

Easter tells us: God does. Not as an excuse for our indifference—but as a call to service. His justice rebukes our forgetfulness.

In Argentina and El Salvador, Christians developed a powerful liturgical response to state terror: as names of the “disappeared” were read, the congregation cried out, ¡Presente! — “Here!”

When we pray “with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven,” we echo that cry. With the thief crucified beside Jesus—and the thousands of nameless thieves Rome crucified. With the Rwandan mother, the Ugandan child, the widower with Alzheimer’s, the young woman lost to overdose.

With Christ our Lord—the firstborn from the dead—who leaves no soul in anonymity, but gives each a name, a place, a presence.

He is risen:

¡Presente!

END