Alive

Dawn (author generated)

Perhaps the less said the better when it comes to Easter, as opposed to Christmas with all its its carolling and food preparation. There is a different kind of build-up to Christmas. Setting aside the present-buying hype with all its attendant pressures, Advent, if you take it seriously, is about light and darkness. The days shorten as, each Sunday, another candle is lit, insistent light piercing the growing darkness.

Easter has a very different prelude. There are the long weeks of Lent, coinciding with the lengthening days of early Spring as they lead us into Holy Week. Lent was originally intended as a time of preparation for baptism, culminating in the deep darkness of Holy Week.

Holy Week is an invitation to re-learn the art of remembering aright, remembering how things are, coming to terms with the reality which we can only bear in very small doses, given the weakness of human nature and our capacity for self delusion. The triumph of Palm Sunday leads almost immediately to the betrayal which follows the last supper, and the hours of agonised prayer in a garden near the city while others slept.

Our lives are summed up in these six pivotal days, as our mortality is defined by them. Many churches end their Maundy Thursday liturgy by a stripping of the altars, followed by the resounding closure of the church bible. The sound will echo around the darkened empty church, a reminder of the transience of worldly things, the fickleness of popularity and success, and the fear of oblivion with which we associate death itself. Good Friday follows, and then the long wait through Holy Saturday when tradition tells us that Christ descended into hell to rescue Adam and poor old Judas. The Church waits in silence for his return.

Then comes Easter, the most unexpected kind of return, redolent of the silence and subtlety of the beginning of all things. The reality of the Resurrection has a way of dawning on us quite gradually, as it must have done for those who first witnessed it. It happened, we presume, at first light, that moment when after a long night of sleepless watching, we realise that the night darkness is not darkness any more. There is a softness and a secrecy about this realised moment.

Belief in the Resurrection is about realisation. It is something understood at the deepest intuitive level of the human psyche, what we might call the ‘soul’. The triumph of the Resurrection is commensurate with the triumph of the Cross. It is about forgiveness. There is a deep and almost hidden joy about it, a joy which takes hold of us as if by stealth. This is what we experience as new life in a moment of real forgiveness.

The dawn moment, for those who take part in the great Easter Liturgy, is subtle. It is ‘silent as light’, to quote a certain well known hymn. It returns us to the silence of the beginning of all things, a beginning that simply was, rather than ‘existed’ in any kind of mathematically construed time framework. It also returns us to the defining ‘yes’ of a young girl’s acquiescence to God’s invitation to be at one with her and, because of her courageous obedience, with us.

So it is also about the relatedness which is intrinsic to God’s being. To talk of the ‘existence’ of God is to limit God’s being, to try to render it down to our level of understanding, to deny the mystery of what we call the Trinity and to deny his relatedness to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection was not a matter of reviving a corpse. It was, and is, about the risen and glorious body, something which we will ultimately share in, as we shall fully share in the relatedness of God’s own life.

The Resurrection is divine mystery. As Christ said to his friends shortly before his death, there is much more that we could know but, like his friends, we would not be able to bear such knowledge. From this it follows that the Resurrection is a mystery because we cannot fully understand its implications,  or perhaps we are not ready for them until we understand them in the moment of our dying. We are not yet able to fully embrace the mystery of the Resurrection because of our inability to live with the kind of joy which is unique to Easter, or, put differently, because of our unwillingness to live in the contemplation of God.