Year: 2020

Jesus came and stood in the midst

It was, we are told, “the same day at evening,” meaning Easter. It is as if time stopped and yet even that doesn’t quite capture the wonder and the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection. It is more like being in the eternal now of God, in the moment which gives time its meaning and without which time and our lives have no meaning. That is the power of the readings for the Octave Day of Easter. They speak profoundly to our current crisis. The world, it seems, has stopped. There is not the same hustle and bustle of frantic and busy lives. Every day has a certain quiet but anxious sameness to it. And like the disciples in John’s Gospel we, too, are behind closed doors. Like the disciples, we, too, are perhaps in fear and worry about our suffering world and about ourselves.

Yet the Epistle reading from 1 John (5. 4-12) makes the extraordinary statement that “whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world.” What is born of God is faith, he says. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” As he explains, it has altogether to do with Christ’s sacrifice by which “God has given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.”

The Resurrection changes everything because it changes how we think and feel about ourselves and our world. When we are in fear and anger about the world and about being cut off and isolated from one another, then those things define us. We grant them a total power over us. That is to be defined by the world of suffering and death. What is our faith? It is simply that Christ is in the midst with us. “Jesus came and stood in the midst.” That changes everything, if we will let it. At least that is what the Gospel shows.

It is a powerful image that signals the radical truth and nature of God. God’s love is present in the midst of the sufferings of the world. That has been the stark meaning of the Passion of Christ that now carries over into the Resurrection. We have seen over and over again how Christ is in the midst of everything: in the midst of the crowd shouting “hosannas” in joy and then crying, “let him be crucified,” in hostility. Such are the contradictions of our hearts and our world. He is crucified between two thieves. Such are the cruelties and enmities in our hearts and our world. The whole of the Passion has been about his being in the midst of the chaos and confusion of our wounded and fallen world. He suffers for us and with us. Why? One word. Love. The one thing that doesn’t die. Love is forever. That is faith, a deep insight and trust in God as love. Such is the Resurrection, too.

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Jesus himself stood in the midst of his disciples

God, we have suggested, is in the midst of the sufferings of our world and day. Never more so, than in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ which shows us exactly that. What is of the greatest interest with respect to the essential Christian teaching of the Resurrection is that it is something which we learn from Christ. He comes into our midst. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That statement from 1 John 4.10 which we heard/ read in the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p.173) reverberates throughout Eastertide. Divine love conquers sin and evil. It is the life of the Resurrection in us but it has to be learned.

That is the point of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples. It is about opening their understanding to see the principle and truth of reality in their very midst. It is a demonstration of the ultimate ‘lordship’ of Christ and it bears witness to Christ as true God and true man. The Lucan Gospel for Easter Tuesday is poignant and touching,  even if touch is now persona non grata in our world.  Yet there are ways of being touched by words, a kind of transmutation of the sensible into the intelligible.

Christ comes into our midst but the initial reaction is one of terror and fright even after Jesus’ first word of peace. “Peace be unto you.” They thought they were seeing a ghost. One of the important teachings of the Resurrection is that it requires us to think about the body in a new way or, perhaps, we might say, just to think about the body. For as something thinkable then it is already more than though not less than physical and material. Thinking after all is a kind of act of de-sensing; it removes things  from simply the tangible. It is an act of abstraction, a necessary and critical feature of what it means to be human.

This is the power of Jesus’ response to their reaction. “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” Thoughts that are negative and sceptical. “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see;” Jesus says, “ for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” This is a strong testimony to the reality of the Resurrection. The humanity of Christ is not a chimera, a mere appearance. It is very real and yet its reality is more though not less than what we see and imagine. Why? Because of the way in which we are wedded to the world and to ourselves. We struggle to learn how to think about ourselves and our own bodies in their deeper truth as grounded in God’s will and purpose. We are more, not less than our bodies.

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“And they rose up … and returned to Jerusalem”

They were running away from Jerusalem in fear and perplexity about the events of the crucifixion, about everything, we might say “concerning Jesus of Nazareth”. The Resurrection changes everything. It literally turns us around. They rose up and returned to Jerusalem. How and why? Because Christ runs out after us.

The Passion of Christ is God’s suffering with us in our suffering world, God in the midst of our confusions, our sins, our fears, our tempers; in short, our evil and unloveliness. The whole of the Passion is about Christ in the midst. He is even crucified between two thieves. The Resurrection is the same. It is about Christ in the midst, making himself known in the radical truth of his being with the Father.

Easter Monday presents us with one of the classic stories of the Resurrection, the story of the Road to Emmaus. Two unnamed disciples are fleeing Jerusalem. Jesus runs out after them and “himself drew near, and went with them,” unrecognized by them. They were not, after all, expecting him. They were, after all, consumed and preoccupied in their confusions and uncertainties, not altogether unlike us in the face of Covid-19, clinging to our ‘technologies’, worshipping them in our idolatry even as they are at the heart of the problem of globalization, itself a technocratic artifice.

Jesus draws near and enters into their conversation. Why? To draw out of them precisely their confusion and perplexity. The two unnamed disciples give us a very complete account of the crucifixion, its immediate aftermath, their dashed hopes and expectations about Jesus, and their bewilderment about the empty tomb, about the testimony of angels, and even about the witness of the women! “We trusted,” they say, “that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” His crucifixion and death they were not expecting and cannot understand. The paradox is wonderful. It is precisely through his Passion and Death that Christ redeems Israel, the greater Israel, we may say, of our humanity, for such is the greater vocation and meaning of Israel.

“Foolish ones and slow of heart,” Jesus says to them and proceeds to unpack the radical meaning of his Passion and Death. He opens out to them  “in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” In a way, it is very much about how we read, how we think and understand God and his dealing with us. In a way, God has to break us in order to make us, to make us new. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” as the poet/ preacher John Donne says, evoking the extravagant language of violence and even rape. It is not enough, it seems, for God simply to “knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend,” the gentler forms of some of the more sentimental biblical images of God’s care. No. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” the poet demands of God. For only so might we be able to stand. And if that were not troubling enough, he cries out “imprison me, for I except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Extravagant language, indeed, and yet language that complements the wonder of the story of the Road to Emmaus. Why?

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“The night is come”

“The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium proclaims exultantly. This night marks the beginning of something new, a new creation, not through the destruction but by the renewing of creation. What is new is what the great Easter proclamation, known as the Paschal Preconium, signals. Resurrection. That is the new creation. That is God’s great work of making something out of nothing, indeed, out of the greater nothingness of human sin and evil.

How can there be a greater nothing? Only as a figure of speech, it might seem, and yet in another way, that is exactly the great joy of the Vigil and of Easter. We wait expectantly for God’s great second act; such is the Resurrection. Sin and evil seek to unmake the creation and even, folly of all follies, to unmask and dismiss God from every human horizon. Sin and evil try to make creation and God nothing. God takes human sin and evil, and out of its greater nothingness, out of its vanity and folly, makes a new creation. There is Resurrection not by a denial of the past of the Passion and Death of Christ but by its transformation. God makes something out of the suffering and death that we have caused. “The night is come.”

“The night is come” when we can shout with exceeding great joy that Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! What that means is signalled in the liturgy of the Vigil. It means that death has been completely changed, overcome; it has undergone a radical make-over. Death is no longer the terminus ad quem, the end of the road, the end to which all must succumb; death has been transformed into a transitus, a means to greater end. We pray that our “corrupt affections,” our sins being “buried with Christ,” “we may pass to our joyful resurrection”  “through the grave and gate of death.” The grave cannot hold him and God seeks something more for us. We only live when we live in him.

“The night is come” that out-nights all other nights including the love-duet between Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice, each seeking to gain an advantage over the other in references to the ancient stories of love and its powers. “The night is come,” the Paschal Praeconium says “wherein thou dividest the sea and madest the children of Israel to pass over as on dry land”,  the night, too, in which the people of Israel are led and guided by a pillar of light. The imagery recalls God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery in the Exodus. So this night builds upon that story and its importance for the understanding of Israel. Christ’s Resurrection is framed in terms of God’s deliverance of the ancient people of Israel from death and slavery and extends it to the whole of humanity.

“The night is come,” then, when “all that believe in Christ upon the face of the earth” are “delivered from the shadow of death” and “are renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection and its universal extent.

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