Easter: Proof of the Resurrection

Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18

The question of the historical truth of the resurrection has in the last few years loamed high. With the rational skepticism of our present age, we may think this a new phenomenon; but this “debate”, or better termed, concern, can be traced much further back. In fact, St Paul is addressing this issue in his letters years before the Gospels themselves were written. In the letter to the Corinthians it is clear that even among Christians the question existed as to the truth of Christ’s resurrection – and by extension their own. Paul writes to them: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:13-14, 18) He places the resurrection faith at the heart of Christian truth and Christian hope. However, Christians from the beginning have had to make to the world an accounting for this truth and hope that is in us (cf. 1 Peter 3:15), that is, the truth and hope of resurrection.

Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, for Christians the question as to the truth of the resurrection has become particularly focused, particularly acute. In his poem for Easter Day from The Christian Year, the poet John Keble poetically poses for his readers the questions which the rational and scientific world ask of Christianity: “The World thinks [not] on thee, thou blessed day: Or, if she think, it is in scorn: the vernal light of Easter morn
to her dark gaze no brighter seems
than Reason’s or the Law’s pale beams. “Where is your Lord?” she scornful asks:
“Where is His hire? we know his tasks;
 sons of a King ye boast to be:
let us your crowns and treasures see.” If in our proclamation of the resurrection, we Christians are to speak with authority, or even any relevance, we must make some sort of credible response to the world. More specifically, as Episcopalians – as Anglicans – we must make that response in clear faithfulness to tradition, scripture and reason. At the same time, we must do so without any simplistic or facile commitment to “facts” or proofs. Belief in Christ’s resurrection is above all, a statement of faith; and the truth of a faith statement is not proved in an appeal to science or history – to empirical evidence – but, rather, in the fruits it produces in the lives of those who believe. The resurrection is true, not so much because we can point to its happening on such-and-such a date, in such-and-such a place, or in such-and-such a way, but because we witness its reality manifested in transformed lives. Its truth does not lie in a historical fact subject to proof or dis-proof, but in a lived experience of freedom and new life, in a lived experience that divisions between people are broken down, and that new possibilities are arising. The truth of the resurrection cannot be grasped by those who look on and examine it with scientific objectivity, but instead by those who are enter into and live its reality, by those who allow their lives to be transformed by the indwelling of the Risen Christ in them.

Many know John Newton as the writer of the hymn, Amazing Grace. Fewer know that he was originally involved in the 18th century slave trade, and it was only when he had an encounter with the Risen Christ that his life was transformed. This encounter with the liberating truth of the resurrection not only led him to be ordained a priest in the Church of England, but more importantly to work tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. Even in his day, proof for the resurrection was a common issue, and in one of his sermons he preached: “…the proof the resurrection of Christ, which is the most important and satisfactory of any, does not depend upon arguments and historical evidence….Those who have found the gospel to be the power of God to the salvation of their souls…know that the Lord is risen indeed, because they have been made partakers of the of the power of his resurrection, and have experienced a change in themselves, which could only be wrought by the Holy Spirit which Jesus is exalted to bestow.” He eloquently presents what the Church has always believed, that the truth of the resurrection makes itself known in changed lives.

More than mere historical fact, the resurrection is mystery; and mystery is a way of engaging with truth, deepest truth, truth too deep for words; truth so deep it can only be experienced. It is only manifested in the day to day living. It is manifested when we commit acts of courage in the face of frightening circumstances. It is manifested when we dare to love even as the world says our loving is useless or inappropriate. It is manifested when we continue to trust life and speak up for freedom, although it may be easier or safer to settle for a quiet existence. Ultimately, it is manifested when we embrace life – all life – without having to be afraid or cautious, without having to hold back. We know that when we encounter people who live their lives in such a way we are instinctively attracted to them; we know, whether we can immediately vocalise it or not, that we have encountered something of the holy, something of the whole, something of the resurrection.

The world will continue to ask for proof of the resurrection, and the only response we can make is the one the Church has always made – the living of transformed lives. It is the only proof we can offer. More than that, it is the only proof we would want to offer, because even if the resurrection of Christ could be proved as historical fact beyond dispute, it would be meaningless if its reality were not manifested somehow in real lives and real people, right here, right now. A Jesus resurrected in time 2000 years ago is in some sense rather meaningless, at best a fact of history. Real resurrection is Christ resurrected in you and me, and in everyone who has given his or life over to the Christ mystery, in everyone who has entered with him into the deep baptismal waters of death, and now shares his risen life. You and I, and how we live our lives, we are the real and only proof that Christ is alive and abroad in the world. That is what is means to be the Body of Christ. Only by God’s power being manifested in us can the truth of the resurrection be ever fully revealed; only through us – through all of us – can, as the prayetr book says, “the whole world 
see and know that things which were being cast down are being 
raised up, and things which had grown old are being made 
new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection.” Isn’t this, after all the true meaning of resurrection? Amen.

Maundy Thursday: Remember

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Tonight is a night of love: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”(John 13:34-35) It is also a night when the Church – albeit in somber tones – celebrates the institution of the sacrament by which she partakes of the Body and Blood of her Lord, the sacrament by which St Paul tells the Corinthians that “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”(1 Corinthians 11:26) However, what many people remember about tonight’s liturgy is its end: the stripping of the altar, the stripping of the church. What many people take with them is a sense of traumatic desolation as the lights are extinguished, the familiar elements of the church building removed. It is a visceral sense of loss, a visceral sense of abandonment, even betrayal: “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become….She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies.” (Lamentations 1:1, 2)

This week as we have walked liturgically through the days leading to Jesus’ passion and death, we have been doing so with the poetry of John Keble’s The Christian Year. John Keble who lived between the years 1792 and 1866 is best known as the one who by his Assize Sermon sparked the Oxford movement. Lesser known is the fact that he was for some ten years Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. It was in 1827 that he published The Christian Year, in in it he provides a focus on the Sundays and Holy Days for which there is a proper in the English Book of Common Prayer. With each he hopes to bring into sharper focus the meaning of the day in relation to the Church’s year, but perhaps more especially in relation to the reader’s own journey with God. In a sermon on the theme of “Christ’s Own Preparation for His Passion”, Keble asks: “For what is the purpose of the Holy Church Universal in appointing this particular time of the year, in which for so many days we are to follow step by step, through all the stages of his bitter passion first, and then of his triumphant victory over death?” He answers his own question, when he says that “what is meant is, that we, by the help of God’s Holy Spirit, should make what happened to him as present to us, and as near to us, as ever we can; that we should…‘have the mind of Christ’ ”. He hopes that by making those events present to ourselves and us present to them, they will not “fail to come home to us”. Holy Week is not about apprehending the passion and death of our Lord in any intellectual or even liturgically detached sense, but in a lived and experienced sense.

It is not surprising that tonight’s service should evoke for us that feeling of desolation, that feeling of loss, the sense of darkness closing in on us – that is what it is supposed to do. Through the ages, it has been the Church’s meaning to make the events of these days not just present to us, but to make us present to them; and ultimately that cannot be done by thinking ourselves into them, but by feeling ourselves in them. Tonight, through the action and language of symbol, those parts of ourselves which feel or have felt lost, those parts of ourselves which have known desolation are tapped into and they serve as the entry into an immediate experience of these days. But also through action and language, for those parts of ourselves which may feel unclean or unworthy to be washed by Christ; for those parts of ourselves that feel hungry or thirsty to be fed and tended to by Christ. We sometimes talk about the observance of Holy Week, but notice how detached that language is: observance, observe, watching. It is still in the realm of the “not there”, the realm of the separate. The Church in her liturgy provides for an emotional immediacy, provides for us to experience Holy Week, provides for a space in which the saving events of this week and their power are made a present reality. It is the difference between nostalgia and remembering. “Nostalgia” is placing ourselves into a past event, it has a sense of the sentimental and un-costly. “Remembering”, in the sense that the Church understands it, is about making past events present right here and now; but even more than that, about making the transforming power of the event a present reality also.

So tonight Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and commands his followers: “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another’s feet. For I set you and example, that you also should do as I have done to you….I give you a new commandment that you love one another.” (John 13: 13-15, 34) Tonight we enter into that reality, physically – water touching skin, flesh touching fleshing. Tonight Jesus broke bread and poured out wine, commanding his followers to do this in remembrance of him. And so we do – and so has the Church down since her beginning, Sunday by Sunday, day by day – breaking bread, pouring wine – thus making that sacrifice of Our Lord a present reality, its power a present strength. As we remember – make present past reality – Christ’s words in all cases are directed to us, and the effects of his actions are accessible to us in so far as we can enter into the process of remembering.

Yes, tonight Christ gives himself for us in service as feet are washed; yes, tonight Christ gives himself for us as nourishment as we take into our selves his Body and Blood. Tonight, we will go with him to Gethsemane as we walk to the chapel; tonight, we make his desolation real for us as the altars are stripped, the church made naked of its usual beauty. Tomorrow we will stand at the foot of his cross, as we make our veneration, and we will go with him into the darkness of the grave as we commemorate his burial. Saturday night we will wait with him in that darkness, wait with the whole Church – past, present and future – for the revelation of God’s purposes, for the revelation of God’s life among us. Ah, then Easter, what Keble calls “Oh! day of days” – as we make that proclamation of resurrection, flood with the light the whole Church, in action and in word, we burst forth with Christ from the tomb, we share in his resurrection; the reality of Christ’s new life made symbolically and presently available.

In his second letter to Timothy, St Paul writes: “The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him; 
if we endure, we will also reign with him.” (2 Timothy 2:11-12) Symbolically – and believe me, this side of God, symbols are the only way to experience ultimate reality – symbolically, in these days we are doing exactly what Paul is talking about: entering into the reality of Christ’s death by remembering, making the reality a present reality. Do you feel desolation, loss as the altars are stripped? You are remembering, entering into that reality in the present moment. Do you feel Christ present with you as you receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion? You are remembering, entering into that reality in the present moment. Do you feel loved tenderly by Christ as you watch or have your feet washed. You are remembering, entering into that reality in the present moment. Remember. Pray with Christ in Gethsemane, walk with Christ along the torturous road to Golgotha, kneel as his cross, watch him die. Remember. Proclaim and share in his resurrection. In order that what “happened to him [may be] as present [to you, ] to us, and as near, as ever [it] can be”, and that in end the we may live and reign with him, both now and ever.

Wednesday in Holy Week: Resignation and Rest

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32

The Gospel tonight opens with the words “Jesus was troubled in spirit”. Not surprising. After three years of teaching and healing, he still finds himself an outsider, and not just an outsider but one whom the authorities are actively planning to bring down. After three years of fellowship and companionship, his closest followers still do not understand what he is about, they fail to grasp what it means to live a kingdom life. And, after three years of friendship, one of his friends prepares to betray him to those whose will it is to destroy him. Little wonder he finds himself “troubled in spirit”. However, he himself never forgets his identity; never forgets who and whose he is (as the expression goes). He clings to his relationship to the Father and trusts wholeheartedly that “if God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.” (John 13:32) In perfect union with the Father he does not shrink from the path his life will take by the week’s end; and indeed it is that perfect union that will keep him faithful and steadfast to the end. He resigns himself, not in any defeatist sense, but in trust.

As we continue journeying through Holy Week with the poetic works of John Keble, we come to his poem from The Christian Year for the Wednesday before Easter. And as we engage with them for their emotional impact, we find Jesus himself speaking as he prepares to begin his passion, as he awaits his arrest:

O Lord my God, do thou Thy holy will –
I will lie still –
I will not stir, lest I forsake Thine arm,

And break the charm

Which lulls me, clinging to my Father's breast,

In perfect rest.

Jesus submits to what is ahead of him, because it is the only way he knows by which to be faithful to the Father, and knows that in falling away from the Father’s will, he falls away from the Father’s care also – better the cross with God, than peace and praise without him:

Wild Fancy, peace! thou must not me beguile
With thy false smile:

I know thy flatteries and thy cheating ways;

Be silent, Praise,

Blind guide with siren voice, and blinding all
That hear thy call.

There is, it seems to me, a rest that does come with resignation; when we can accept the path our life has taken and – in broad strokes, at least – the direction to which it points. If we are to visit – as we have done through this week – the themes of Holy Week with more than an intellectual stance, we have to recognise that sometimes our purely intellectual assessment of a situation may let us down. A purely intellectual assessment would have moved Jesus to ratonalise why things did not need to be this way, or even how the saving power of God could be made known in less painful ways, or by slightly compromising the truth of his message. But he trusted his gut, as it were. His attachment to God and to the road that lay before him is not rational or intellectual, but an almost visceral reaction which finds its origin ultimately in love and in utter union with the Father. But also in union with humanity by sharing utterly in our condition, and at the same time giving us a pattern in our own difficulties:

To the still wrestlings of the lonely heart
He doth impart

The virtue of his midnight agony.

Sometimes we must cling to the certainty of what we feel or believe, rather that to possibilities which we can intellectualise or rationally construct. And sometimes by doing what seems logically foolish – resigning ourselves – we come into a place of salvation for ourselves and for others that we could never have thought out:

“O Father! not My will, but Thine be done” –
So spake the Son.

Be this our charm, mellowing Earth's ruder noise
Of griefs and joys:

That we may cling for ever to Thy breast

In perfect rest!

Tuesday in Holy Week: Love That Feels and Pities All

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 71:1-14
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
John 12:20-36

As I mentioned last night, during this week we are using the poetry of John Keble’s The Christian Year in order to engage emotionally and devotionally with the events of Holy Week, the events of our Lord’s passion and death. In a sermon on the theme of “Christ’s Own Preparation for His Passion”, Keble asks: “For what is the purpose of the Holy Church Universal in appointing this particular time of the year, in which for so many days we are to follow step by step, through all the stages of his bitter passion first, and then of his triumphant victory over death?” He answers his own question, when he says that “what is meant is, that we, by the help of God’s Holy Spirit, should make what happened to him as present to us, and as near to us, as ever we can; that we should…‘have the mind of Christ’ ”. He hopes that by making those events present to ourselves and us present to them, they will not “fail to come home to us”, they will not fail to touch us in ways more than just intellectual or theological, but emotional and experiential.

To that end in his poem for the Tuesday before Easter, Keble paints with words a touching image of the suffering Christ:

“The Cross is sharp, and He

“Is tenderer than a lamb.

“He wept by Lazarus' grave – how will He bear

“This bed of anguish? and His pale weak form

“Is worn with many a watch

“Of sorrow and unrest.

“His sweat last night was as great drops of blood,

“And the sad burthen pressed Him so to earth.”

Keble wants us to enter truly into the feelings of our Lord, into the agonies of his Passion, without allowing our intellectual knowledge of Christ’s divinity or of his eventual resurrection to dim the reality of the pain and suffering he endured. As I spoke last night about God’s love for us particularly, not just generally or theoretically; so tonight we are asked to contemplate truly the suffering of Christ, “the long hours of death as, one by one, the life-strings of that tender heart gave way.” We are called to enter into the heart of Christ as far as we are able to contemplate with our hearts how all this could have been possible. Keble draws us to almost ask of Christ himself: how could he deliver himself to be “now of mortal pangs, made heir, and emptied of [his] glory, awhile, with unaverted eye…[meet] all the storm?”

Keble does arrive at an answer, but it is the not the answer of theology, not an intelletualised response based on classical definition of the nature of Christ, neither a reasoned argument of sacrifice or salvation. Keble discerns an answer not in the mind of Christ, as such, but in the heart of Christ. Keble finds it in love which is willing to “feel all, that [it] may pity all”. Keble discerns it in Christ’s love:

As the deep calm that breathed, “Father, forgive,”

Or, “Be with Me in Paradise to-day?”

And, though the strife be sore,

Yet in His parting breath

Love masters Agony…

It is not Jesus knowing, but Jesus loving that which saves us; and we cannot apprehend that love’s depths, or breadth or height unless we are willing to set aside for awhile – and especially at this time – our intellectual pondering and listen closely to our heart, our emotions, our own ability to love and desire to be loved; in short, unless we do as Jesus himself did and enter fully into what it means to be human.

Monday in Holy Week: Love, Particular and Personal

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 36:5-11
Hebrews 9:11-15
John 12:1-11

Among other aspects of the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was the centrality of emotion. In one sense, the movement’s definition of humanity was as “feeling” beings”, more than “thinking beings. This view affected all aspects of society and thought, including theology, preaching and devotional writing. In these was demonstrated a renewed emphasis on the love of God, and on the humanity of Christ as expressed in his feelings and emotions. John Keble’s writings were no exception, and the poems of his work The Christian Year are infused with an appeal to our emotions, they tug at our hearts with the hope that we will be wakened into devotion and renewal. Each of the days for which there are propers in the English Book of Common Prayer, there is poem to bring into sharper focus the meaning of the day in relation to the Church’s year – certainly, but more especially in relation to the reader’s own journey with God. In each of the days of Holy Week he highlights some real emotion, whether of God the Father, or of Jesus himself, and challenges us to enter into those emotions for a renewed experience of God, but also for a more immediate experience of the Holy Week mysteries we are observing.

I would like to offer that in each of these three nights we examine the poems not as “rational” beings – although we can never really put aside our reason, but as emotional beings, allowing ourselves to be placed into various parts of the Holy Week story and thereby hopefully glimpse something of them in a new way, hear them in a new voice. Now, the lectionary of the English prayer book is different from ours, and so the readings on which Keble based his poetry are not the same. Nevertheless his poems for each the days of Holy Week still sit well with our present lectionary.

In the 14th century Julian of Norwich discerned the meaning of Christ’s suffering and death as love. Knowingly or not, Keble focuses on this love in his poem for the Monday before Easter:

Out of the bosom of His love He spares –
The Father spares the Son, for thee to die:

For thee He died – for thee He lives again:

O'er thee He watches in His boundless reign

Thou art as much His care, as if beside
Nor man nor angel lived in Heaven or earth:….

Thou art thy Saviour's darling – seek no more.

But the love of God about which he writes, is not essentially a generic, even universal love. It is a particular and personal love. It the sort of love that a parent may have for a child, or one friend for another. It is the kind of divine love expressed in the lesson from Isaiah, which while representing God, as “the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it” (Isaiah 42:5), also represents God as one who calls each of us “in righteousness”, who takes us by the hand and keeps us (cf. Isaiah 42:6) and who shares with each of us – personally – the divine glory. (cf. Isaiah 42:8).

If we were raised in the Christian faith, we heard from a young age that “God is love” with the injunction that we “love one another”. Yet, that love we hear about can sometimes feel generic or carry with it a cosmic sense, so that we never can apprehend it as directly focused on ourself. It rarely feels personal. Yet, when we examine the Scriptures more closely they reveal the particularity of God’s love and care. They so often reveal the divine love not in generic ways, but in personal and specific ways, in personal and specific relationships: he chooses Abram and Sarai to be parents of a great nation, he chooses Moses to lead that nation out of slavery, and eventually he chooses David to lead that nation into a great kingdom. We see it further revealed in the person of Jesus, who – but for some exceptional cases – always engages with people as individuals. His love and care are somehow localised. Even at his passion and crucifixion, his care and attention seems always personal – the women of Jerusalem, the thief on the cross, his mother Mary and disciple John. Keble extends this to suggest that in that final week before his crucifixion, Jesus thought of each person, each soul, particularly:

E'en in His hour of agony He thought,

When, ere the final pang His soul should rend,

The ransomed spirits one by one were brought

To His mind's eye…

As we walk with Jesus through Holy Week, engage with your emotions and see for a moment all that he does and has done for you; not in some theological or intellectual sense, but in the sense that touches us where we live, as it were. We can sometimes us the theological understanding of God’s love to avoid facing emotionally its meaning and implications. But God, loves you; not you in any generic sense, but you in a very personal sense. While God’s love indeed, “reaches to the heavens and [his] faithfulness to the clouds”, it reveals itself in the lives of particular people, in particular situations; it is the kind of love under which you can take refuge, and which comes into your own heart and home. Part of the observances of Holy Week is the Church’s way of trying to make palpable the love of God, make it a real and present reality. She helps us to recall that in all that happens, God’s meaning is love – real love for you and for me, for each and everyone of us, particularly.

Lent 5: Mortality and Immortality

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

It is a sobering thought to realise that as human beings we are defined by the stark fact that we are going to die. We are mortals, and that is what a mortal is, literally: a being who dies. The word finds its origin in the Latin mors, death, and as such we encounter it in terms like mortality and mortal wound. We are mortals and that means that we are going to die, like the palmist wrote: “As for mortals, their days are like the grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more”. (Psalms 103:15-16) At the same time, the book of the Wisdom of the Solomon reminds mortals that our “hope is full of immortality”. (Wisdom of Solomon 3:4b) As real as is our mortality and that of everyone we know or love, so is that hope of immortality held out to us; and yet ironically enough, we will never come to know the second, if we cannot fully accept, embrace, enter into the deepest depths of the first. And there is no short cut, no easy out. We cannot come into the fulness of that hope of immortality, simply by down-playing or ignoring our mortality. Mortality and immortality are both realities, and we live in that tension. Life and the hope of immortality are certainly real, but no less real than death, both its power and the grief and pain caused by it.

The first parish in which I served had five nursing homes within its boundaries, and English clergy have the responsibility and privilege of officiating at all funerals of those who die within the parish. Often my colleague and I would have two or three funerals a week between us. It was during that time when I first came in contact with a particular piece of sentimentalism, a poem entitled Death is Nothing at All: “Death is nothing at all,” it read, “I have only slipped away to the next room….Life is the same that it ever was.” Invariably, families would come to me wanting to use this poem at funerals. I'd never say no, but I would ask them if this is what they seriously meant, that “death is nothing at all”; and, if life really is “the same as it ever was” what were we doing? Why were they grieving? Why we were preparing for a funeral, to mark this “nothing” event? Death is ‘Something”. It is real, and simplistic ideas about the promise of immortality serve no one well. I am pleased to say I never had to hear that poem read at a funeral I officiated.

Death is real, and while that hope of immortality is real too it does not eclipse the pain, shock and sense of loss attendant on death. Last week the themes of light and dark pervaded the readings and the gospel, today it is the themes of death and life, and as they do so we have two pieces of poetry on which to focus; two poems written over 300 years apart and by two very different men. John Donne was born in 1572. Certainly in his early years he enjoyed the “good life” – wine, women, song and all that, and his literary production was composed primarily of satiric and erotic poems. At the same time, he worked as a lawyer and served as member of Parliament. However, in 1615 he was ordained priest at the insistence of King James. He was made Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and became renown as a preacher and spiritual writer. He is most commonly known for the phrase “for whom the bell tolls” derived from his published meditations. He died in 1631. W.H. Auden was born in 1907 in England, but emigrated to the United States in 1939 and because a U.S. citizen in 1946. He was poet, essayist and dramatist the central themes of whose work are “love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature”. Both were committed churchmen; both had conversion experiences as adults. Auden himself had abandoned the Anglicanism of his youth, but returned to it in 1940 when he became an Episcopalian. This morning, are brought together two of their works – Donne’s Holy Sonnet X and Auden’s Funeral Blues. Brought side by side and from across the centuries, and read in conjunction with each other, the two works demand we live in that uncomfortable place where both mortality and immortality are realities. They demand we sit with both the agonising loss which cries that “nothing now can come to any good”, and at the same time with the hope “that death shall be no more;…that Death, thou shalt die”; to sit with them, without minimising the real pain of the first and without despairing of the hope expressed in the second. As we enter completely into and stay with the two seemingly opposing realities the poems represent, we find ourselves standing with Jesus at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. We find ourselves with him as he knows the deep mystery of resurrection, and yet is still moved to tears at the death of his dear friend. For him both realities are real. The knowledge of resurrection does not erase the immediate pain of loss, or the suffering of those who pass through the gates of death and enter into its depths. Standing there among his grieving friends he grieves himself, while he holds out and gives a foretaste of the hope of immortality.

Sometimes people wonder at, and are even offended by, the fact that we Catholic Christians focus so much on Jesus’ suffering on the cross, particularly with images of the crucified Christ. “Christ is risen” they say; and of course we would agree, but it sometimes feels as if some people want to get to Easter without having to engage with the pain, anguish and desolation of real death on the cross. I was recently surprised to learn how many Christian communities here in Hanford will have no Good Friday service, no place to liturgically encounter the darkness when “the stars are not wanted”, the moon packed up, the sun dismantled. The thing is that if we allow ourselves to “skip” or ignore Good Friday – the cross and its attendant death – we also can “skip over” – never enter into the – deep pits of our own pain and loss, of our disappointments and frustrations, and embrace them both as real and as our own. “Christ is risen” does not erase the cross and its horror, neither does the “hope of immortality” erase the painful and grievous consequences of mortality. Rather, the “hope of immortality” is the promise that the pain and the reality of death, while most definitely part of the story, are not the whole story, and it holds out to us a vision of a reality when indeed “death shall be no more”. But we can only get there from here, and that means through the deep pits of death, pain, disappointment. It was so for Christ, why do we think it should be any different for us?

Death is real, very real. If you do not know that, speak to someone who has lost a child or a partner or friend. The hope of immortality is real too, however. Ask anyone who has found new life on the other side of loss and pain, who has experienced that loss and pain as glorified into a new vision and purpose. Like Jesus, we are called to hold those two realities together at the same time, living in creative tension between them. If we cannot we lose something: we focus on a life hereafter, while cutting off something of what it means to human; or we become morosely obsessed, while cutting ourselves off from a hope that is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading”. (1 Peter 1:4)

The painful consequences of our mortality make us cry with Auden “nothing now can come of any good”, while our “hope of immortality” can say Donne’s words with trust, “those whome thou think’st thou doth overthrow die not poor Death, nor canst thou kill me.” Both are real, both are true. Our work is to wait upon the Lord within the tension of both those realities; to wait like the psalmist says, “more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning”. (Psalm 130:5) It is to wait, while honouring both mortality and immortality as our human inheritance.