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Easter Day
31/3/2024

Genesis 1:1-5
John 20:1-18

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With the resurrection of Jesus, God disturbs the peace which is our uneasy compromise with death.

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Early, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.

Early. It’s quiet, the early morning darkness, a quiet for quiet tasks: for thinking, for planning, for remembering, for tending to the dead. No matter how heart-rending it might be, death brings its own quiet and forces us to be still. Requiem in pace, we say to those who’ve died, Rest in peace, and quietness falls also on us who remain.

It had been a chaotic week for Mary and the other disciples, on top of all the movement, surprise, conflict, tension and misunderstanding of their tumultuous time with Jesus before that. The chaos now past, Mary’s quiet morning reflects the clarity and closure of death’s dismal order. Early in the morning, the fever of life is hushed.

But Mary approaches the tomb only to have her sad solitude shattered: “They have taken away my Lord…”. Three times she declares, I don’t know where he is. The tragic but reliable peace of death has been disturbed, and so also Mary’s reconciliation with death. “They have taken him away…”. Tell me where he is, and I’ll gather him back and hold him, and at least I’ll have again death’s calm.

When Jesus died, the dream of a life of peace died with him, but there remained the reliability of the dead.

At least I know where he is.

At least I can remember him in the quiet of the morning.

No one can take that from me.

But he is not there.

Tell me where he is, and I will go and get him so that he can be properly dead again, so that he and I can have at least death’s peace.

Sometimes, our compromise with death is pushed upon us – as for Mary, as for our own bereavements. Sometimes the compromise is the convenience of a death we choose to effect. If Mary had the calm after Jesus’ death forced upon her, death’s peace-by-crucifixion was chosen by Caiaphas and Pilate and the exclusive heavens they envisioned (see the Good Friday sermon!). This is death we seek as the means to some end, to some peace which requires that someone die. The peace we seek with distance and death is the quiet which comes when some onerous or terrible or dangerous thing is now past or put away. It is the dark peace which comes when the divorce papers are signed, when the life support is turned off, when the last of the evening’s lingering guests leaves, when I’ve put my enemy in her grave, when I’ve done what I swore I would never do, or just when I turn off the news bulletins because it seems everything is going insane.

None of this is really peace, of course; it is chaos subdued, suppressed, but still chaotic. This peace is not the reconciliation of enemies but a cutting away of the other, more or less violently.

Into this suppressed chaos, Jesus appears alongside Mary. Her first instinct is to do what any of us would likely do: she reaches for him (“Teacher”, “Lord”, “Love”) to grasp, to hold, never to let him go again: I know again where you are, who you are, what you are.

But his reappearance is no mere return of the one Mary thinks she lost, though she doesn’t understand this yet. The resurrection is going to be the possibility of Mary herself being renewed, but it’s not this yet. At this point, it is only Jesus who is risen; Mary is a mere observer of his dying and rising, and his appearance is outside of her, does not yet envelop her. All she knows is that her dreams were dashed in the death of Jesus, and now they seem to be restored, and she grasps to hold tight the Jesus she thinks she knew.

But Jesus insists, Don’t hold on to me. Let me go. This is not what you think. It is not only that I am returned to you; it is also that you will be returned to God. But for this to happen, you must see me as I am; you must see God as God is. Let me ascend to God so that you can see my cross in God’s own heart. It is not merely death which is overcome. It is your resignation to death which is comprehended, your reconciliation to it, your use of death for your own ends, Mary, Peter, Caiaphas, Pilate. All of this is overcome.

The resurrection shatters death as peace, death as resolution, death as flight or abandonment, death as a means to some end.

This resurrection – the resurrection of the Crucified – is a challenge to our memory, a question to our account of what we did or felt or wanted.

This resurrection is the visitation of the present by the past – the haunting of the present by the past.

This resurrection tells a fuller story, not allowing certain things to be forgotten or hidden away, but bringing them uncomfortably into the light. For there are not a few histories we want to forget, or which have been forgotten for us, or which we would suppress if they again came to light.

This resurrection is revelation not of only God’s power but of the full extent of our need, of our incapacity to speak the truth, to bear it, to know what to do with it.

This resurrection is the dead refusing to take death “lying down” but rather disturbing death’s grim peace with a word of truth: you have come to terms with the empty and void ways of the world, and with the terrible depth of the darkness, and there is no life in this.

But in this resurrection, our victim returns to us, yet not with accusing finger. He speaks our name and brings the urgent, hopeful question: Mary! Peter! Caiaphas! Pilate! Do you see now? Do you see that God has overcome even all this? Do not grasp tightly what you thought you had to be; let yourself rather be grasped by my Father and my God, your Father and your God. Reach for that resurrection into a life which has put death’s power behind it.

God meets us early, in the morning quiet, after our dealings with death, to disturb the uneasy peace death brings.

But God comes not only early, not only in the dark stillness. God comes on the first day of the week.

And God finds the world – finds Mary and each one of us – as if we were dead, entombed in that early, mortal stillness – formless and void, buried deep, deep, deep in darkness.

And God says, let there be light.

Alleluia.

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Good Friday
29/3/2024

Philippians 2:1-11
Luke 9:44-48, 51-56

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If we do not keep hold of the crucifixion, Easter Day becomes mere kitsch which has nothing to say to this broken world.

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It is forty years since the appearance of Milan Kundera’s novel, The unbearable lightness of being. The book is the account of four lives set against the background of the 1968 Soviet suppression of the Czech Spring, although Kundera is less interested in this historical context than in the fact that his protagonists must live somewhere. How can we live in our particular Where? Should we fight for life or do we flee from it?

Kundera begins by asking about the “weight” our actions have, and whether it is better that they be heavy or light. Two possibilities present themselves. First, our actions gain substance by means of eternal return (after Nietzsche): weight and meaning arise from repetition in recurrence or constancy; this is the struggle for life, and holding it tight. The second possibility is that our actions can only be “light”, fleeting, once-and-never-again events which are then lost with the oblivion tomorrow ultimately brings. Kundera proposes that the lightness of our being is that it will soon be as if we and all we love never existed; the unbearability of this is that we must still exist in relation to each other, nonetheless.

The idea of an unbearable lightness has increasingly coloured my reflections on Easter and the thinking any Christian must do around the confession of Jesus’ resurrection. Is there not, for the sceptical but also for believers who are paying attention, an “unbearable lightness” about how Easter is often celebrated and proclaimed? This is not quite Kundera’s unbearable lightness but relates more closely to another concept in his book: “kitsch”. Kitsch is representation which hollows out the substance of the thing represented. Easter is susceptible to kitschification, to the extent that promises of resurrection locate our most authentic existence in a future world beyond this one. Kitschy Easter proclamation leaves this world behind. Whatever such a future might be, it tells us little about how to be in our fractured present.

Against this too familiar reading of Easter, the resurrection might better be taken to point backwards rather than forwards. That is, the true miracle of Easter is Jesus’ life up to and including the crucifixion. The path to the cross is the true miracle because the real shock in the Easter story is not that the dead might one day live again. It is rather that there are worse things than being crucified.

This is perhaps a little surprising, given the horror of death by crucifixion. Yet the lightness of the crucifixion here is not What it entailed but That it happened, despite the What. Contrary to atonement theories which require Jesus to be spent as some kind of salvific coin, dying as he did was not necessary but was the indirect consequence of a decision to live in radical openness to human (and divine) truth, undeterred by the potential lethal cost of such a life in a truth-denying world. Jesus came to live, not to die. On this reading, “worse than being crucified” seems to be, for Jesus, a life without openness God’s truth and its claim on our relationships with each other. When, then, as in our Gospel text this morning, Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”, it is with an openness to this living future in this world, and not with a commitment to escaping the world through the cross into an easier eternity.

This resonates on one level with Kundera’s interest in lightness of being. Not motivated by the desire to establish weighty institutional legacies or even simply to survive as long as he can, Jesus enacts an openness to truth and a fearlessness in the face of the horrific death which looms because of that freedom. Life is more than surviving. But for Kundera’s protagonist Sabina, who seems to represent what he himself holds to be true, the fleeting nature of our existence translates to life as flight; lightness is finally freedom from the entanglements of relational commitment and responsibility. Sabina’s truth is finally detachment – from others and so from meaning. Such a life has its own harsh authenticity, but it is finally as lonely as the sheer eternity of Easter kitsch is empty.

In contrast, while Jesus lived with a Sabrina-like lightness of being which did not fight for grandeur or survival, neither was his life flight from others into lonely solipsism or by escape to heaven. Precisely the opposite: as Paul described in our reading from Philippians this morning, Jesus takes the form not of a fleeing survivor but of a servant. This is a radical being for others which neither betrays nor abandons them. If it is such a one who is resurrected, so also is resurrected the possibility of a life that neither fights nor flees but proclaims and lives into an uncomfortable one-and-all social and political tension which could lead to a cross. An Easter resurrection which recalls the cross does not promise time with God someplace else; it promises the presence of God here and now in any life lived in openness to bearing the “unbearable” other.

The cross arises from a social and political ethic which does not destroy and does not abandon, and it is just this ethic which is raised on Easter Day, and not merely the individual Jesus, understood to have died a few days earlier. The heaven of Easter day is the heaven which led to Jesus being crucified.

This matters today because – contrary to the gospel of the risen crucified one – the struggles which wrack this world are precisely struggles for some heaven or another, each conceived as an eternity without the requirement that we bear this or that particular human other. Someone is always missing from our preferred heavens. And so those various eternities become visions for which we can justifiably crush and kill or abandon the other who won’t be in our heaven anyway: we want a heaven with no Israel to live with, or no Palestine; a heaven with no gays, or no fascists; with no difficult bodies but only easy souls; with no tangled histories but only tidy logic; a heaven with no appalling chauvinists or uppity feminists; no traffic, no stop lights, no waiting; we want a heaven with no differences to overcome and so, what all this could only finally mean: a heaven with no one else there. The heaven proposed by crossless Easter kitsch – and by every fight or flee social or political program – is finally an unbearably lonely eternity.

We need a better heaven than this. That better heaven will have something to do with a resurrected cross. An Easter which does not forget the cross speaks of the miracle we need: the revelation that our life with each other is bearable, and is not merely bearable but is the possibility of a joy worth dying for, though not killing for.

In our Lenten Studies text this year, Sam Wells writes that the kind of reconciliation we see in Jesus – and so salvation he brings – is one which “[holds] together profound but incompatible loyalties, [straddles] deep but rival relationships, [is] the battleground for terrible and uncontrollable enmities”. The proclamation of Easter cannot exceed this, for this is the nature of the one who is said to be risen, and this is what that risen one continues to do. The risen crucified one spans our incompatibility with each other, our rivalries, our enmities.

To return then to the question of Kundera’s book, “How should we live in our particular Where?” What has the Easter of the Crucified to say to this? Our life is to reflect not other-worldly Easter kitsch. It is to reflect God’s being with us in the midst of our fractured here and now.

We are to live with the understanding that this is the only place given to us to live, with these people and no others.

We are to recognise that life’s promise will only be realised in the form the other human being.

And we are to learn to bear the cross-shaped burden we can each sometimes be to each other, for their sake and so for our own.

This is the reconciliation, salvation and call of the Easter of the crucified Jesus.

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Lent 5
17/3/2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

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In our Lenten study book this year, author Sam Wells, remarks that we tend to invoke euphemisms when we find suddenly ourselves out of our depth – not “died” but “passed away”, not “going to the toilet” but “going to the bathroom”, not “a little bit stupid” but “not the full quid”. The euphemism refers to the presence of something that seems both necessary but also inappropriate to acknowledge – it doesn’t seem “proper” to bring that up here.

In our Gospel reading today Jesus speaks once more (cf. last week) of his approaching crucifixion as a “lifting up”: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (v.32; cf. also John 3.14f; 8.28). We know, of course, what he refers to – his impending crucifixion. And we know something of the horror a crucifixion was. So, is Jesus being euphemistic here, softening the blow for those he addressed, throwing a fig leaf over the embarrassing nakedness of God in the crucifixion? In churches which have crucifixes – representations of the figure of Jesus on the cross – there are not many without loincloths.

In fact, the “lifting up” is no euphemism. The evangelist John loves double meanings and the ironies which come with them. The Greek word here can certainly apply to being lifted up on a cross. But, at the same time, it can just as naturally be used for that kind of elevation which is an enthronement. A king’s coronation could be said to be his “lifting up”. The cross, then, becomes a throne, the crown of thorns truly a crown.

Yet the point is not now that Israel unknowingly crucified its king. The ambiguity of “lifted up” allows John to present to us Jesus as being both outcast and enthroned, being both crucified and made king, in the single “lifting up”. Not simply the king mistakenly or unknowingly crucified, Jesus becomes king in his very being crucified.

And so Jesus can also say in our text this morning, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (v.23), and to mean by this that the cross itself is the glorification (cf. also John 12.16; 13.31f; 17.7). The lifting up, the crucifixion, is the glory of Christ. (We might add here that the glory is not the resurrection. In the crucifixion we see something about the nature of God which the resurrection by itself cannot show). John presents a vision of God in which God’s glory – and so God’s very being – is tied up with his relationship to a people which falls short of his covenant call, to the extent that they (we) even crucify the Lord of glory.

When John says, then, that God so loved the world that he sent the Son, he is not speaking about the “size” of God’s love, as if God might have loved less or even more. Rather, the cross is the love: this is God’s presence to and for the world. How God loves is itself God. God is the glorification on the cross, God comes into view here.

This is not an easy thought to think, but it is crucial in a world which thinks God irrelevant because we imagine that God to be “out there” beyond us, or deep, deep within us. In either case, we don’t imagine that God is in the messy time and space in which we live, not in the times and spaces between us.

But against the God who is nowhere useful is the impossible proclamation that the greater the distance we place between ourselves and God – the more strained our relationship with God is – the more God is set free to be God. That is, God’s love for us is shown to be all the more remarkable when he exercises that freedom to overcome the distance, in order to be life and love for us. When St Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounded even more, he says the same as John’s double reading of the cross: God makes shame into glory. This is not, of course, to justify or even promote sin(!); it is only to declare that God’s grace always outreaches human brokenness. (Children’s talk: God is very stretchy).

The God who is the cross, then, is no “idea” of God which we fill with other ideas like love or judgement, according to our need. God is no euphemism we are forced to invoke to refer to an embarrassing truth we wish we didn’t have to acknowledge or negotiate around. Rather, the God who is the cross is the very revelation of our condition. For, whatever else we might be, such a God as this reveals us to be those who would crucify God. Ours is the crucified God because this is the only God who has come close enough to us to be precisely our God, the God of those who are capable of crucifying each other, even of crucifying God.

The gospel, then, presents us with two possibilities.

The first possibility is the pessimistic conclusion that the cross is only the work of human hands. The story – the story of Jesus and of each of us – ends with the violent rejection of one who deserved better, and that story is simply tragic. The awful truth here is that it doesn’t get any better than this, but it might perhaps get worse. We need a mouth full of euphemisms to speak the truth here because it is more than we can bear.

The second possibility is that the cross is indeed the work of human hands, but that it is also the glory of God, in the terms we’ve described. This is to say that the cross is not tragic, is not the end of the story, but is the sign of how far God is able to reach – how “stretchy” God is – to embrace again those who have rejected God so profoundly. This would also be an aw‑ful – awesome – truth, but now one which must be said as clearly and directly as possible, so that we all might understand.

Faith – or unfaith – is a decision about these two possibilities. Can God reach us or not, regardless of how far away we run? Can God reach us, regardless of how far away we push the possibly that God might be reaching for us, whether in Jesus on the dusty roads of Palestine 2000 years ago, or on those same dusty today in cries of God’s children for justice and mercy, or in the quiet fears and loathings of our hearts?

Can God turn our tragic existence into God’s own glory, and so into our healing? Can our deathly ways with ourselves and each other become the glory of God?

The awful-awesome God of the cross calls for an awe-filled faith:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

God can do this.

And it is by this expectation that we will live.