Easter Day, 8.00am & 12.30pm Holy Communion

‘Change the narrative’. It’s a phrase I’ve heard more and more in recent years, most recently from the lips of Boris Johnson on the just published report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: ‘what I want to do as prime minister is change the narrative…’. What he means is presumably along the same lines as the advice of psychologists and self book books: if the way you think about your life has got into a kind of negative, self-fulfilling spiral, then you need a shift into a more productive mindset. You need to ‘change the narrative’, change the story you are telling yourself about what always happens to you, and how bad everything is going to be. Embrace a more positive narrative, which will affect your whole life for the better.

There is a huge amount of psychological research to show that ‘changing the narrative’ really does work, but – and it’s a big but – only if the new narrative is actually true. When you’re really struggling, just saying ‘From tomorrow, everything is going to be brilliant’, is unlikely to help. Winston Churchill’s advice during the London Blitz is a classic example of ‘changing the narrative’ advice that actually worked: ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ Not that everything was fine, but that even in such fearful conditions it was possible to keep going; not to panic, but to get on with life as much as possible, and this time of destruction would pass.

Consider the three women in today’s Easter Gospel, the only three to remain faithful to Jesus after the desertion and betrayal of the disciples. Having rested on the sabbath, they arise early on the first day of a new week, and set out to anoint Jesus’s body. These women are keeping as calm as they can, and carrying on with faith and courage, but the story they are telling themselves is rooted in the old world, a world governed by the power of death. They are setting out, to put it bluntly, to anoint a corpse, a dead body, the body of one who has succumbed to the violence of others and whose life has ended. They wonder, as they go, who will roll away the stone from the tomb, for in the story they are telling themselves a stone placed over a tomb on Friday, will inevitably still be there on Sunday.

But now comes an astounding ‘change of narrative’ in which the old world is dismantled and a new world comes into view. The stone has been rolled away. And in the tomb there is no corpse, but rather a young man in a white robe: an angel, a messenger. In place of the expected dead body, the women receive an extraordinary message: Jesus, who was crucified, is not where they expected, because he is risen. Moreover, they must go and tell Peter and the other disciples, and all of them will see the risen Christ back in Galilee, where they first began to follow him.

I said the women were the only three to remain faithful to Jesus. And now even they fall into disobedience, saying nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The sudden shift of narrative is disorientating and disturbing, and it is on this note of fearfulness that, in the most ancient sources we have, Mark’s Gospel comes to an end.

But if the Gospel comes literally to a ‘dead end’ on this note of fear, then who is going to spread the news that ‘he is risen’ and that a new journey of faith and discipleship is now beginning, living according to a new narrative in which death and destruction no longer have the final word? Well, what about us, those who are the hearers and readers of the Gospel? Perhaps this is our Easter calling, that Mark sets before the whole church, to recognise and tell that ‘He is risen’ and we are called to encounter and follow him in our day to day lives.

‘Change your narrative’, Mark’s Gospel invites us, reorientate your life according this disturbing but extraordinary good news.

A week ago on Palm Sunday, our Holy Week preacher Stephen Hance quoted the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman: the resurrection Gospel is ‘an invitation and a summons to switch stories, and therefore to change lives.’ It is an invitation to a new and better way of living in the world. This is the best possible way to ‘change your narrative’, because it works, and it is true.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia