I wonder what kind of week you have had. I wonder how quickly the songs of Easter joy died away in your household. I wonder if Easter itself has felt like no more than a brief interlude in the present difficulty. Easter is a season and yet we often treat it as if it was only a day. The shops start selling off their Easter Eggs and we go back to whatever is normal and carry on as if nothing remarkable happened. Except this year of course for lots of us we don't. In the Easter narrative there are 50 days during which the risen Jesus appears to his followers. And 50 days are only the beginning for these disciples working out how the world has changed and their lives have changed. But we can tick it off in a day.
In the church the Sunday after Easter is traditionally called Low Sunday. The exact reason for this is unclear but it seems in part to be a recognition that the highs of Easter celebration couldn't last. It probably fits very well with where we are at the moment. We are still in Easter, we are still a people who believe that Christ is risen, but after all the drama that began with Palm Sunday and ended with Easter Sunday, this Sunday we are struggling to keep it all going. Every year I find myself asking what difference does Easter make, even more so this year. What does it mean to proclaim the Easter news that Jesus lives?
At no point in the resurrection narratives is anyone looking for the risen Jesus. They expect him to be dead. Mary and the women going to find the body. The rest of the disciples are in a locked room. Cleopas and friend is skipping town for Emmaus. Later Peter and friends are off fishing on the Sea of Galilee. There is never a point where anyone says, ‘ah, I’ve been expecting you Jesus.’ When Jesus dies everyone thinks, ‘that’s it.’ And so when Jesus turns up there is shock, fear, disbelief, and joy.
I read something this week that said the resurrection of Jesus is like a wound,[i] a wound than never quite heals, its something we live with, and we might say also we live from. It’s like Jacob got his limp after wrestling with the angel of God. If wounds can be ever considered good, this is a wound of the best kind, but it is a wound. We live with this reality that Jesus is risen; it accompanies us, comforts us, challenges us, astonishes us. One poet speaks of seeing Jesus’ body as the ‘wound of knowledge.’[ii] Easter is a reminded that Jesus is both the crucified and the risen one, we know Christ in both the cross and the empty tomb: a wound of knowledge. We know and we don’t know, we understand and we don’t understand. The resurrection of Jesus stands as the marker in which all hope and joy is found, but we never grasp the fullness of its implications, we never embrace the totality of its newness, we never comprehend wholly what it is say ‘I have seen the Lord.’ Easter is a wound that marks our lives, the world is not the same, we are not the same, but we live in what feels too often like an untransformed world; we might say we are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.
We receive this wondrous wound that Christ is risen amidst the wounds of our current time, which we are living with and we want to be over. These wounds which are a continuing source of pain and anxiety. Life is always carrying its wounds, its pain and suffering, but where we can perhaps overlook them, they are more visible this year jarring with the Easter alleluias that we are meant to be singing and feeling. As I said this is Low Sunday.
‘You, Lord, keep my lamp burning, my God turns my darkness into light.’ (Ps 18.28) That perhaps is a verse for now. The God of Easter, the Risen Jesus, keeps our lamps burning, keeps our hoping living, keeps our faith breathing, keeps our alleluias ringing. The shadows are near, but they do not totally envelop, because God shines his light, the light of Christ. ‘Easter is the promise that the absence of God has been penetrated with light, and the silence of the early morning is no longer hollow, but hopeful.’[iii] As we wrestle with the glorious wound of Easter and the wounds of our current lives we hold on to the Light, the light that filled the tomb, the light that filled the world, the light that God has shone on us: the light we name Jesus; Jesus wounded, crucified and risen One. The light shone in the darkness and the darkness could not put it out.
The good news about the risen Jesus, is he can come to us. Today light a candle, say a prayer, share bread, give thanks, read the gospel, make a phone call, be patient, take courageand trust in God, and then repeat it again tomorrow. Let this be your Easter routine.
[i] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (T & T Clark, 2012).
[ii] R. L. Thomas. It was the title of Rowan Williams first book (1979).
[iii] Maggi Dawn, Giving it Up (BRF, 2009), 211.
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