Easter Sunday - 8 April, 2007

Easter Sunday

Christ is Risen

He is risen indeed

Alleluia

Easter Images

As I listened to the readings of the Easter Vigil last night, once again the great images swept over me: The Genesis creation story with God the worker delighting in the goodness of his handiwork; the great escape from Egypt (how difficult it is to get the Cecil B. DeMille images out of one’s head – an act of religious discipline in itself.) with its story of liberation and destruction; Isaiah, Baruch and Ezekiel redolent with God’s yearning for Israel – calling them to repentance, chivvying them, chastising them, God repenting even for doing this liked a hurt spouse and like a hurt and wronged spouse still desperately in love, taking them back and lavishing Israel with such love and gifts – water, light, wisdom, life.

Of all the great images, the one on water stood out for me, perhaps because we are in severe drought and everything around us in brown and if not dead, languishing. Even the beautiful baptismal font, usually tinkling with running water, in the Cathedral was turned off and only still water in the font. However, what really was at the heart of my attention to water was my experience last week.

A Water Story

My street has been undergoing resurfacing. On the day of the repairs we had noise, dust, machinery creating a busy chaos in our very small street. I gave up trying to do any work so went into the garden to try to drought-proof some of my precious plants. As the day wore on the work continued – my work and their work which was all very dirty. I went to wash my hands but there was no water in the tap. Agghhhh. The heavy machinery had broken a water pipe that had survived unscathed since it was put down in 1928!

The broken pipe would not be repaired for at least six hours. I had a medical appointment at 4.00 p.m. I was covered in compost, mulch and sweat. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was filthy and smelly. I could not get out of my street to shower at a friend’s place. I frantically searched electric jugs, freezer for ice, anything that may have water reserved – I had not a drop of water in the house.

Now, if this had been a camping trip on which I knew I would have to ration water, it would have been all part of the adventure. But here I was, in the middle of the city with all the facilities provided, and to some extent gratefully taken for granted.

So there I was - grubby, smelly, in dire straits for a clean up so I could keep my appointment.

My brain wave came when I realised that if the pipe had broken, there would be water flowing from it. So down I went with two buckets to the workmen to see whether I could beg some water. They were a cheery lot, rather proud of the fact that when the pipe was ruptured, the water spouted as high as the telegraph poles. However, all that was there now was an ever increasing muddy pond.

I told them of my plight and that I had hoped to be able to get some water. One of them took my buckets, with a “Don’t worry, love, I’ll get some for ya.” Off he disappeared.

On his return with two buckets brimming with water,he carried the full buckets to my house and offered to go and buy drinking water for me.

So, grateful for the generosity of these workmen, I cleaned myself very well in half a bucket of water and with water to spare for later.

Living Water in a Dry Land and Life Abundantly

So, listening to the great Easter texts with their imagery that tries to give voice to the pursuing, abiding, delivering love God has for us and our world, my water experience came to mind.

Water is both a fact and a metaphor for life and life is not some abstract thing. It is the most concrete, fundamental and mysterious ‘thing’. When Jesus proclaimed that he has come that we may ‘have life and have it abundantly’, he was not talking abstractions or metaphor. This is why water is such a good image – we can’t do without it.

The courtesy and generosity of the workmen in not only giving me what I needed, but more than I asked; the water that was more than enough to clean me; the wonderful feeling of being clean after being so grubby and the feeling of relief that I could go on with my life because I was now clean, came together to give me an intimation of how utterly generous God is in giving us Living Water and why water is such an image for new life, conversion and flourishing.

Jesus, Living Water

The resurrection of Jesus has so many layers, but one has stood out for me this Easter. Jesus, who in his fidelity and ministry gave so much life to people through healing, prayer, teaching, hope, challenge, revealed in his living humanity the God of his ancestors who we celebrated in the Easter vigil. And this bond of faithful life and love between Jesus, his God and his people could not be broken in death. When evil tried to do its worst by destroying that abundant life, it could not. Life, like a living fountain welled up.

If Jesus, the embodied human being is risen to a totally unimaginably new state of life, we are risen too, as is all creation. The resurrection does not take Jesus out of the network of creation, rather it brings something new into God’s creation. A new and abundant life has entered into material creation. This is why it is impossible to separate the material from the spiritual.

If, in the light of world disasters that preoccupy us today, this sounds like some unrealistic, neurotic escapism, perhaps it is because we have come to take it all for granted, as I did the fact that I would always have water on tap. It is very fashionable to be cynical today. In fact, it is almost a sign of intelligence. In closing our eyes to the possibility of life and affirming even the smallest endeavours for goodness, we miss seeing the abundance of life that is happening around us and in a real sense, close off the power of that risen life to be manifest. Cynicism is paralysing, often arises from despair. Jesus, risen from the dead is hope, is life in abundance – so abundant that it has no end and will, if we as co-creators with God allow it, transform this creation from glory to unimaginable glory.

The Women

The women who waited in darkness on Holy Saturday came to the tomb to do the loving thing of anointing Jesus’ body. Their response to the presence of the angels was ‘Terrified, they lowered their eyes.’ This is the response of awe and wonder before something Godly. They were enjoined, ‘Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?’.

The apostles, clinging to their despair did not believe the women. It all seemed too far fetched. They took for granted that nothing extraordinary could happen and their despair had a degree of security and comfort. Peter had to go and see for himself.

So, as we contemplate Resurrection, let’s not take for granted that the despair and cynical gloom that has a foothold will prevail; that nothing will change. Let us open our eyes to the signs of the Resurrection that are all around us. In Jesus’ living-dying-rising, God has wedded Godself to us irrevocably, abundantly and like water in drought refreshes and gives life – surprisingly.

Like the women, may we find all our tombs empty.

Like the women, may we be filled with awe – and go and tell.

Holy Saturday 7 April, 2007

Holy Saturday

The cross stands empty

In a world grown silent….

These words from the Divine Office for today are so evocative.

Holy Saturday – we pause, we wait. The death has happened. He has gone from this world, from his disciples, his friends, his enemies. He is no more, just as all he stood for seems lost and dead.

So we pause, waiting in bewilderment for the loss and confusion to make some sense.

Today we sit with the disciples – uncertain, confused, bereft. It is easy for us because we know the outcome, the ‘happy ending’. The disciples had no real sense of the resurrection, just a vague promise in their tradition about the death of a just person having a deeper resonance.

From the adulation of Palm Sunday to the intimacy of the Last Supper, to the few, mainly women who remained at the place of execution, the core of those who trusted in Him dwindled down. In the darkness of their shattered hopes and love for their friend and rabbi, Jesus, they stayed in the darkness, confusion, grief and loss of this person who had given them hope, dignity and who embodies their God of Israel.

It is recorded in the Gospels that a few were able to do the loving things even in that darkness – Joseph of Arimathea gave him a tomb for decent burial, the women prepared to anoint his body in a ritual of love, respect and reverence.

Evil in the guise of political and religious expediency and status quo carried on as usual. For them, all was well now. They had achieved their end.

Holy Saturdays

We all face our own Holy Saturdays, when what has given us hope, delight, meaning, happiness disappears. Anything has the ability to evoke such a time – past trauma, illness, death, loss of a beloved or just that grey, misty, taste-less loss of meaning and drive that catapults us into this terrible darkness. What makes it even more bewildering and painful, is that the rest of the world, like Jesus’ opponents and the ephemeral crowds of Palm Sunday just go on about their business and ordinary life swirls around us.

How do we cope with our own Holy Saturdays? Will we, like Jesus’ opponents dismiss the darkness and carry on ‘business as usual’? Or perhaps like the adulating crowds and some of Jesus’ disciples, disappear in fear or hopelessness or disgust?

However, the alternative is like the women and faithful ones, wait, abide, do the loving things that are possible at that moment and tend the dead body of our hopes in respect for what is past, in the shear darkness of faith – faith in the unknown future that is hidden in God.

We will only experience the full power of Jesus’ resurrection, as the faithful women did, when we embrace the loss of what we have known in the Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays of our lives, when we too wait for the appropriate time for the power of the Resurrection to manifest. We do this by reverently laying to rest the body of our past hopes, loves and securities and wait in dark faith for what the future will be. This is both active and passive – we do what is possible at the appropriate time, like the women who could not anoint Jesus’ body on the Sabbath – they had to wait until the time was right; but we also wait with attentive, aware active-passivity without trying to ‘make things right’ or return to old certainties.

The women’s and other disciples’ encounter with the risen Jesus was so shocking, surprising and unexpected – even his appearance was changed – that all their prior expectations of how God would act were swept aside. They could not have imagined Easter Sunday on Holy Saturday.

So, in the Holy Saturdays of our lives let us wait with trusting, expectant faith for Jesus’ risen life to make sense of our darkness – not to pretend that it never happened, that our loss was not real, or indeed even a loss, but to allow the void to be surprisingly filled with life.

So, today in the silence and emptiness of Holy Saturday, let us wait at the tomb of Jesus and the tomb of our own losses, let us wait in reverence, gratitude and awe that we know how the Story ends. The trouble with knowing how the Story ends, is thinking we know how the Story ends, well let us pray to be surprised.