The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Seated (I hope) happily in the front row is Daniel John Robert whom we are to baptise today. He was born on February 5th, 2013, when it is likely that about 360, 000 other babies were born on the same day throughout the world. Daniel John Robert is  loved and admired by his whole family and no doubt all his needs are instantly attended to.
We would hope that every baby born will be loved and cared for by family and friends, though tragically we know that that is not the case. And yet all we can do is try to love the children and the grown ups who are given to us to love, but as we begin to think about the need of every person in the world to be loved something sets in which we might call imagination fatigue. Even though the media of newspapers and television enables us to know about the plight of people suffering around the world we know that our concerns are limited, we can only take on board so much; tragedies pass quickly out of the news because news has to be new and so, for example, Syrian refugees are not now news. Imagination fatigue inevitably limits our concerns, we cannot imagine everyone in the world as my neighbour so some people become more our neighbour than others.
In his Good Friday ‘Thought for the Day’, Cardinal Vincent Nicholls quoted Pope John Paul II, to the effect that Christ’s suffering on the cross represents the suffering of all human kind from Adam until today. And then the Cardinal said, ‘Contemplating the cross I open my heart to the suffering of all people.’ What he then went on to say was very moving, but I was still left wondering about that phrase ‘I open my heart to the suffering of all people.’ It is the sort of thing preachers are apt to say. They take their cue from the Bible of course where at this time of year we hear  phrases like, ‘As in Adam all died so in Christ shall all be made alive;’ or ‘We are convinced that one died for all;’ or ‘Christ is all and is in all.’ We say that we believe that God created all people, that God loves all whom he has created, even that God calls each and every one of us by name, as he calls Daniel John Robert this morning.
So we might conclude that the God who calls us individually is even so beyond our imagination; he does not suffer from imagination fatigue  – only in such an unimaginably loving God does this word ‘all’ make any sense; only through the eyes of such a God can we even begin to think about all people that on earth do dwell and have dwelt and will dwell. This is the God who, as Jesus says, does not forget even one sparrow though five of them are sold for twopence.
On the first Easter morning Mary Magdalen does not recognise the risen Christ until he speaks her name; ‘Mary’. And in hearing that name she realises that she is still present to Jesus, that death has not ended their relationship, that she will always be Mary to Jesus. Christ is risen but in herself she is also risen. His rising again has  somehow included her; and not only her. In this moment of personal encounter, this moment in which she feels more deeply and personally alive than ever before, now she must remember others; she must go to the disciples and tell them what has happened. She must subject what she feels to the possible disbelief and scorn of others.
So where are we? We began with the unimaginably all inclusive God and we have seen the way in which the risen Christ calls Mary by name and thus calls her into  new life. Baptising Daniel John Robert on Easter day points to the fact that we believe God calls us all by name; we believe that waiting for us all at different moments in our lives is something like that encounter between Jesus and Mary in which God gives us the sense of being deeply and personally and truly alive because he knows us by name. But secondly, God never calls us for ourselves alone. Christ died for all; and that means that whomever we meet God will be there before us. We may find it hard to open our hearts to all people; but it will make a difference to our encounters with all the people we do meet or see or hear about if we remember that God is calling them, willing the fullness of life in them.  If we remember this, if Daniel John Robert learns this, then, Alleluia, Christ is risen indeed.