No Sunday puts pressure on a preacher more than Easter Sunday. The sheer enormity of the task dries the mouth, and flop sweat seeps through the robe.Quite possibly, someone who worships maybe, at Easter and Christmas, will complain that we read the same things over and over.The words of the prayers and music and hymns are so fulsome and properly so. In a time of diminished expectations, it is quite a stretch to even approach such a huge day.
All of the pastels of spring fit its message of fresh new life emerging. No pretty Easter basket can come within hailing distance of Easter.In a recent clergy discussion on Easter, I was struck at how the gorup shied away from Easter’s grand point. Instead, out of a fear of pie in the sky for the afterworld, they insisted on turning Easter inward as an antidote to fear and as a energizing source of social action.I agree with the interpretive move, but Easter, in the end, deals with the fundamental fact of mortal life:death itself.
Part of my disquiet comes from the brave words,especially phrases such as Death has been destroyed, that mark Easter as prolegomenon and as final goal do not yet match the reality 2000 years after the first Easter. Paul knew it well Death is the last enemy. After 200 years, Death stalks us still. After 2000 years, flowers are placed in funeral homes and laid on graves as blankets. Every year, I try to re-read parts of an elegant meditation on the season Alan Lewis’s Between Cross and Resurrection. He sees the Holy Week as a triptych with Holy Saturday, the day when the Incarnate was was interred, between Good Friday and Easter. Only by moving though Death itself can we even approach the power of Easter proclamation.
Scripture itself is quite reticent about Easter morning description. We get no cinematic description of the event itself. No, we get a report of a stone rolled away, an empty tomb, and the wondering, fearful awe it evokes.
To find a hymn that works the deep symbolic structure of the day, we go back 1300 years to the hymn, The Day of Resurrection. Attributed to John of Damascus,the hymn captures the deeper and more expansive view of Easter. While we note the Passover setting for Maundy Thursday, it is extended here to Easter. Passover saved the Israelites from the angel of death, but Jesus passed through the angel of death itself into a resurrected state-”Tis the spring of souls today;/Christ hath burst his prison, /and from three days' sleep in death /as a sun hath risen; /all the winter of our sins, /long and dark, is flying/from his light, to whom we give /laud and praise undying.” It is a good spiritual exercise to reflect on hymns as religious poetry. Please consider doing so for the two Easter hymns that have been with us through the centuries by John of Damascus.
Easter alters, no undercuts, the basic symbolic structure we use to face the large events of life. The dead and buried Jesus enters into the very bastion of Death itself and emerges as , as Risen. In the notion of the descent into Death’s prison abode, artists pictured Jesus leading a procession out of the abode of the dead toward a beckoning heaven.In the pre-dawn darkness, the dawn of a new light emerged.In the final analysis,the Creator God is the God of life. God takes the conclusion of life itself and turns it into an open door to new life.
1 comment:
Where I now live, I hear a lot of what I've come to call "ticket to heaven" theology. When someone dies, the event sounds like a cheer instead of accepting the hole torn from the survivor's life which still needs the work of grieving the loss. I believe there is still a "not yet" dimension of present reality that needs to be admitted and addressed, but a more profoundly theological perspective than social action or the old social gospel liberalism of the early 20th century.
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