“Enlighten by a word,
a sign, a token gentleness,
this state of numb confusion, relentless
disparagement, and point the way
to beginning over again
the slow ascent to light, the gradations
of blue that come at the break of day.”
(Jeremy Reed “Prayer” in the collection “Nineties” (Jonathan Cape 1990, p.147-8)
I wanted to write something about Easter. Having written previously about Good Friday and Holy Saturday, I felt something ought to be said about Easter. Struggling to write this on Holy Saturday, my mind went back in time to Mansfield College, Oxford (1994) and the last college based sermon class where I was the one being scrutinized. For the reading unfamiliar with this kind event, it is (or more likely, was) an important part of ordination training when an ordinand would lead an act of worship and preach a sermon before her/his peers and tutors, to be scrutinized in a session that followed. Sometimes these were brutal occasions, other times encouraging and affirming. On this occasion, in my final year of training before I was unleashed on the congregations at Holloway and Harecourt, Islington, I chose the readings for Low Sunday and in particular when Thomas is shown the marks of the nails and the wound in Jesus’ side. The sermon proved controversial for some of my peers because it was not an explosive proclamation of Easter joy! Unfortunately I no longer have the text of what I preached, but I do remember more or less what I said, and the overall message is one I still wish to affirm. So this is an attempt to say it all over again with extra thoughts that come with the passage of time.
I begin with the betrayal and abandonment of Good Friday and the stone-like stillness of Holy Saturday. How can one find a way to peer inside the empty tomb when betrayal and abandonment cannot be merely preached away into the dim distance?
We can learn much from the theologians who tried to make sense of faith in the aftermath of the Holocaust for whom mass slaughter cannot easily be theologized away, or of the experience of the survivors of childhood abuse for whom memory and survival go hand in hand. As a survivor myself I know too well of the primal wound that never quite heals.
For all the bombast of the church’s Easter acclamation, the Gospels are surprisingly low key and gentle in the way they proclaim the resurrection: a figure in the garden who is mistaken for the gardener, a woman weeping by the tomb, a private encounter on a routine journey, a meal by the shore and an invitation to touch the marks of the nails and to remember. It was not sufficient for Thomas to merely see the risen Christ, he needed not only to see the marks of the nails but to touch, feel the sheer horrific nature of what Christ had endured. Only then is he able to acclaim “my Lord and my God”.
Many are content to acknowledge and celebrate the risen Christ without any sense of recall of suffering. For the church, Easter is a season in C major, with no discordant notes. But where is the church for those whose lives are still in D minor on Easter day? For all of us who are survivors, who have endured betrayal and abandonment, we continue to bear the wounds that never completely go away. Yet the proclamation of the resurrection lies in the whisper of a gentle Easter that we are still here, still living, and still have the will to live and to love, to go on in hope and yes, joy!
Now that I have made the deliberate choice to no longer preach in churches, I need not worry that a sermon might be badly received or might offend evangelical or catholic sensibilities, for I can write freely even if no-one is interested in what I write – that alone is liberating! I had thought that in these past few months, faith had gone for good, yet the God beyond our knowing has the quiet persistence of creeping in through the drafty cracks in the doubt that was thought to be solid and well sealed. Easter whispers through the cracks, offering a gentle and intimate promise of hope that all can be well.