Easter Meditation

[Geoffrey Colmer]

One of the things that I struggled with as a minister of a local church, was keeping the distinctiveness of the different seasons of the church year. It felt that although we called it ‘Advent’, often it was simply Christmas come early. And the same was true of Holy Week. It was hard to resist the pull of proclaiming Christ crucified and risen from the outset of the week. However, I persevered, and while, at the Good Friday Walk of Witness, I could understand the need to express something of Easter Sunday, I managed to stay with the story at its own pace.

A book I’ve found particularly insightful is Jeremy Begbie’s, ‘Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music’. He says about the Easter story that it ‘needs to be told and heard, believed and interpreted, two different ways at once – as a story whose ending is known and as one whose ending is discovered only as it happens.’ When you allow one to drown out the other, then the truth becomes victim. Whereas, when you allow each of them to sound, you get what is a ‘stereophonic unity’.

And this is what the NT narratives offer. On one hand we’re invited to gaze upon the cross in the light of the daybreak of Easter – Sunday morning vindicates the Jesus who was crucified, it announces that he was God’s Messiah and that the world’s sin has been defeated. This is to view the cross from the outside.

Yet along with this we’re also invited to read the story from the inside, from the perspective of those who lived through the long and catastrophic Good Friday, and the longer desolation of Holy Saturday, without knowing the ending.

On Tuesday I went to see ‘Easter Icons’ at Bunyan BC, Stevenage, put on by Andy Goodliff. This is an embodiment of reading the story form the inside. It’s an interactive, multi-sensory installation which takes you through fourteen stations of the cross, and it’s been done very imaginatively. Various aspects struck me, but at the final station, ‘Jesus is laid in the tomb’, the words that accompany it include, ‘All hope is lost. Jesus dies. Jesus is not the Messiah.’ And this is how it was experienced.

Why are we given the inside story? To impress on us that the healing of the world is achieved in this way and no other. The resurrection doesn’t delete the memory of Friday, it confirms the cross as the specific place where the weight of the world’s evil is borne, and borne away. This is how God disarms the principalities and powers and triumphs over them. This is how ‘It is finished’.

In his book, Jeremie Begbie quotes W.B.Yeats, ‘Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.’ And he goes on to say, ‘If we bound over this place to Sunday too quickly we risk losing the very core of the good news that God’s love reaches its ultimate intensity at this place of excrement, that his decisive victory over sin and evil is won this way.’

This comes in a section in which he explains how music cannot be rushed through. If you rush through music it soon becomes unintelligible. But also music cannot be rushed over. It depends on sequences of tension and resolution. And the resolution has no power other than that which it possesses as the resolution of tension.

He makes a particular connection with Holy Week, urging us to play the events at God’s speed, not ours, living in and through the events day by day. By refusing to rush over these days, we allow ourselves to be drawn far more profoundly into the story’s sense and power.

I find this a challenge in terms of preaching at this time of the year, and I guess you may do. But I encourage you to delay gratification, not to cut to the chase, to resist telling it from the outside – we do that throughout the year. Rather, tell it from the inside, stay with the tension, the pain, the desolation, the hopelessness, and then allow Easter Sunday to do its work in its own time.

I’ve been using this prayer which is taken from the Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland, p. 437:

Lord Jesus Christ,
in this sacred and solemn week
when we see again the depth and mystery
of your redeeming love,
help us to follow where you go,
to stop where you stumble,
to listen when you cry,
to hurt as you suffer,
to bow our heads in sorrow when you die,
so that when you are raised to life again
we may share your endless joy. Amen.

[David Gregory]

I enjoyed the stimulation of these blogs and while waiting in the moment between a 6am open air communion by a lake here in MK (yes, it was cold and only snowing a bit) and our main Easter Suday services I have a bit of down time to add a few thoughts. Despite the weather there was a wonderful moment as we sang "Up from the grave he arose, with a might triumph o'er his foes" when a flock of starlings took to the sky, swirling around over our heads - a sign of life and also pointing to the great commission in Mark's gospel - "go into all the world and preach to all creation".

I recognise the tension of the inside/outisde story in celebrating Easter and have felt it myself this year again. Here we have specific services marking the inside story - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, whihc encourage folk to take the inside story. Yet, yesterday at an Easter Family Day we told the outside story from beginning to end - needed as many people who came know little of the Easter story, coming to more formal moments of worship either at Easter or at other times of the year. Still, the outside story at this point in the weekend could be seen as provisional - lie on a hike when you look back on the route taken and check on the map where you are going.

Even in the setting of a Good Friday witness, I wonder how much completeness is needed. I agree with Geoff, that even on Easter Sunday many lives will still be in a Good Friday moment, in the midst of difficult and painful circumstances. Rushing to end the story with a focus upon victory and resurrection may leave such people feeling dislocated from the story. I have been struck this year by Jesus cry on the cross recorded by John - "It is finished". There is a sense of completeness here even though the resurrection is not in view - that God is revealed as one who bears our suffering and pain, working to bring resurrection which may in practical reality be far off, and in somecases beyond the hope of this life.

Just a final unfinished thought. Could we view the Easter story as having a similar structure as a Psalm of lament - which contain both a cry of pain to God over the circumstances of the writer (or community) but also in the midst of despair, words of hope in God. This seems to bring together the inside story of the writer/community with the outside story of salvation into one moment - comfort for the pain of the inside story of life found in the outside story of God's acts.

[Andy Goodliff]

If anyone has a spare few hours tomorrow afternoon (which I'm sure many won't), Easter Icons is open to the public to make a visit between 12-6pm. http://www.bunyan.org.uk/

[Geoffrey Colmer]

Hi Phil! What a stimulating response! What I'm saying works at different levels. Of course there will be people on Easter Sunday who in their own lives remain in Good Friday and will do so for the foreseeable future, and we walk with them. It works the other way as well. And there are plenty of times within the church year, in fact most of it, when we will have the view from the outside, and tell the story as it's known in all its fullness.

In the context of the market place on Good Friday, where people are not sharing the journey with us, it would be irresponsible not to give at least some sense of the ending and what this means. It raises the question, is Good Friday the best day for a Walk of Witness? What about Easter Sunday instead?

But ... I still think that we lose something if we don't use the opportunity to travel at the story's pace from the inside.

Your musical example exercises me! I think that while you're playing the slow movement, or listening to it, your focus is wholly on that moment. And there are slow movements which express deep anguish with no let-up, which move into an atmosphere of lightness or even an explosing of joy. The overall architecture is known but while you are in the movement you are in the movement and nowhere else. This is the best I can do!

I'm very grateful for some challenging response - keep it coming! And a Happy Easter, when we get there!!

[Phil Campion]

A very challenging piece Geoff, thank you. My problem with it is that different people are at different points in their own story at any given time of the year. As I read the rest of the NT there is little if no expression of this journey of season, rather an awarenes that at each part of it, the Lord is with us. So when for example we share the Good Friday story in the market place, as we hope to do tomorrow, the listeners will not be back on Easter Sunday to hear part 2.....and they need to know today that this Jesus, who is God with us, is with them in their pain and yet is also with them as one who has overcome. The pace of life 's journey is of course a key issue, and we must not rush ourselves or others through the dark valleys, but we can also be there as those who are confident of the end of the jounrey. Even the musicians playing the slow movement, have in the minds the progression to the finale already on the score, and already rehearsed!