“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.
Why is there anything at all? The only answer that is remotely satisfactory, as I see it, is God. The Resurrection, I like to think, celebrates the mystery of creatio ex nihilo in its most radical and deepest meaning. God creates out of nothing. He is no thing. He creates out of love, out of nothing less and nothing more than the necessity of himself as love. Not out of some pre-existing matter in its randomness for nothing is but is of God.
The Resurrection is the further expression of that divine act: the making new out of the essential nothingness of sin and evil. Such is the Patristic insight into the Resurrection of Christ as depicted in the Passion of Christ in the form of Christus Rex – Christ crucified is depicted as King and Priest reigning from the tree of the Cross. Venantius Fortunatus’s 6th century Passiontide hymns signal that to us quite wonderfully: “He reigns and triumphs from the Tree,” and again, “Faithful Cross, thou sign of triumph.” The insight here is about the radical nature of God as essential life revealed in its antithesis. “Love’s crowning power … O Tree of grace, the conquering sign.”
Easter without Good Friday is meaningless nonsense, the sheer vanity of human presumption and arrogance, an empty celebration of ourselves. None of the classical and traditional Easter hymns ignore the Cross and Passion, sin and death, evil and wickedness. The sorrows of the Passion belong to the deeper joys of the Resurrection. Neither the Cross nor the wounds of the Crucified are hidden from view in the Resurrection. Quite the opposite, they bear witness to the transforming and renewing power of divine love. The wounds of Christ are the marks of redeeming love. The past is not eclipsed by some imaginary human vision of the future.
Alister McGrath has remarked on the extraordinary influence of the Star Trek series, noting that, for decades, under the direction of its originator, Gene Roddenberry, it reflected a kind of humanist rationalism confident in the progress of science as technology and altogether dismissive of religion. “The Enterprise was thus the flagship of scientific rationalism, adrift in a mad universe whose inhabitants persisted in believing the strangest things,” as McGrath puts it. It is a shallow North American version of one aspect of the Enlightenment, not altogether unlike the thinking of the so-called New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins. Despite the rediscovery of religion or ‘spirituality’ in the 70s and 80s, often in New Age forms, the series persisted in its techno-exuberance, the legacy of which dies hard. But after Roddenberry’s death, the series moved out of “the time-warp of the 1960s” (as McGrath rather nicely puts it) and embraced the vague ‘spiritualities’ of the 1990s in America. This suggests the reactionary nature of the New Atheists and how such views remain trapped in a self-defeating conflict narrative which assumes what it seeks to destroy. All fine if you are a Klingon, I suppose.
The radical message of Easter is altogether of a different order and one which confronts the confusions of our age and, indeed, every age by engaging our confusions and uncertainties and countering our certainties. This, too, belongs to a truer account of modern science and culture. We can no longer be, as T.S. Eliot says, “assured of certain certainties … impatient to assume the world” (Preludes IV). What Einstein said about mathematics extends to the wider culture: “Insofar as the statements of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.” We can no longer assume unquestionably and uncritically our domination of nature. We can no longer ignore the destruction and death of nature and ourselves that we have caused.
The great good news of the Passion and the Resurrection, because they have to be thought together, is that God and creation are greater than human folly and presumption. God’s life is essential life. That is the proclamation of the Resurrection.
It challenges our shallow thinking. Some may presume that matter is all there is – a dogmatic view – and that somehow matter produces mind; that our minds in thinking are nothing more than neuro-pathological processes. Mind as brain, as it were. The accounts of the Resurrection suggest otherwise. They offer, like all good philosophy, a critique of human reason. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb expecting a body only to find it empty. Is this the absence of evidence out of which we fabricate and invent a story? But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The point of the Resurrection is the presence of God as life which is greater than death, as love which is greater than fear. In other words, the Easter Gospels show us the confusions and the uncertainties of human experience in its encounter with the great something more of divine life. They show us the process of minds coming to understanding. How? Through our encounter with God in Christ. The accounts of the Resurrection are about nothing less than the birth of new life in us, the coming to life in us of the deeper meaning of God as life and love. “Something understood,” as Herbert concludes (Prayer (1)).
That is our celebration both in the Passion and in the Resurrection; then, in the tones of sorrow, now in the notes of rejoicing. This is our joy even in our sorrows for this is our life with God, in God, and towards God. Such is Resurrection. We learn through the brokenness of our hearts, the broken and contrite hearts that God does not despise, but renews. So be it in us even as we are given to proclaim. “Rise heart, Thy Lord is Risen.”
Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2021