Day: April 4, 2021

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

This text has carried us throughout the pageant of the Passion. Yet it belongs equally to our celebration of the Resurrection. To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is “to reckon ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin and thus alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion anymore than the Passion eclipses the Resurrection.

Sorrow and joy, not either sorrow or joy but both / and. Both sorrow and joy belong to the deep truth of our humanity in union with God. The joy of the Resurrection intensifies to the greatest extent imaginable what we have, in our poor fashion, endeavoured to go through in the sorrows of the Passion during Holy Week. The sorrows of the Passion intensify the joys of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy mark the deeper meaning of the Resurrection.

The simple truth is that the accounts of the Passion are and could only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. It is not a fairy tale, and certainly not the Disney version of any of the classic fairy tales. It is not a feel-good, happy-clappy ending to an otherwise grim and gruesome spectacle. In other words, Easter is not some desperate attempt to gloss over the realities of human sin and the sufferings of the world. It is not some astral flight of gnostic fantasy. It is not an older, benighted and unenlightened, and, ultimately, superstitious form of positive thinking and of the desperate attempts to be ‘kind to yourself’ which unfortunately appears to be where the cultural mantra of ‘be kind, be calm’ has taken us in the current pandemic. The deep truth of the Passion and the Resurrection is the same. We only live when we live unto God. Be kind to others and be kind to yourself is too small a vision especially when so easily it turns into a focus on ourselves, a distortion of the nature of sacrificial love which both Passion and Resurrection teach us.

The whole point of Easter is not the contrast with the Passion but the illustration and demonstration of its essential logic. It is altogether about the radical nature of God and the fullness and the mystery of divine life. It is all God and all God in us just as it is all us and all us in God. The new life, the new birth is the renewing of the life of God in us without whom there is no life. Prayer, as Herbert puts it, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth”(Prayer (1)). Such is the Resurrection in us, the renewing and returning of our souls to God. The Paschal feast recalls Paradise but only to deepen our understanding of the purpose and truth of Creation. It does not take us back to some imaginary Garden of Eden which so easily turns into some utopian fantasy on our part from which there are any number to choose, especially in the techno-fantasies of contemporary culture.

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