Author: CCW

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

The mystery of motherhood belongs, paradoxically, it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. It belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We are brought to birth in this new life out of the tombs of our sorrows, out of the prisons of our souls, out of the graves of our wills still wrapped in “a cloak of maliciousness,” the spirit of ill-will that is so deadly to our souls and our communities.

The idea of new birth and new life is a mothering image, an image about giving birth. Sorrow and pain give place to joy. We have only to live that joy which is not about our arbitrary moods and feelings but a joy which is beyond the fluctuations and changes of this world, a “joy [that] no man taketh from you”. Why? Because it has to do with our being opened out to the divine life of God himself. This is the great meaning of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ is in our midst in the power of his Spirit. He lives in us and we in him. Such is the burden of our liturgical life which extends outwardly to give shape to our lives socially, politically, morally, and so on.

Jesus would teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which he has inaugurated and established through his Death and Resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given and established in us. What we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. The love of mothers falls short, after all, of the completeness of God’s love for us. Our loves find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

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“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

The dominant icon in the little Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The dominant icon at Christ Church is the image of Christ Crucified. Together they belong to the spiritual landscape that shapes our Anglican and Christian identity here in Windsor.

They go together. The further paradox is that they both belong to the teaching of the Resurrection. In other words we only think the Crucifixion through the doctrine of the Resurrection and the image of Christ the Good Shepherd, too, is a Resurrection image. It belongs to the radical meaning of the Resurrection, something which we know about primarily through the eyes of John.

John’s  Gospel shapes our thinking about the Resurrection throughout  the whole of the Easter Season and right through to Trinity Sunday. We learn to think the radical meaning of the Resurrection through the eyes of John.

“The good shepherd,” Jesus says, “giveth his life for the sheep.” It is impossible to think about the idea of the good shepherd apart from the reality of Christ’s sacrifice. That is critical to the idea of care which the image conveys but it is care in a far deeper and profounder sense than the forms of care in our contemporary therapeutic culture. This care is about suffering and death which have to be gone through and not simply bandaging and medicating with drugs. Christ dies and rises. Death and Resurrection underlie the more radical care of Christ for us.

The teaching of the Resurrection is largely conveyed to us through the eyes of John. He shows us the dialectic of sorrow and joy and the transition from disappointment to wonder. We may cling to our pains and sorrows, our bitterness and our resentments. We are rather good at doing that and in a way we live in a culture which encourages our complaints rather than the idea of passing through them. We refuse the radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd. That more radical care has to with how the Resurrection opens us out to the love of God.

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