Tag Archives: Easter

Never the same again?

19 Sunday Apr 2020

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talking to miryim

Last Sunday we were treated to messages from Christian leaders. Their message amounted to stating that things would “never be the same” after this pandemic. The one thing upon which one can rely is that time changes things; things are “never the same,” anyway. What is lacking in them is a sense of agency; what part are Christians to play in this change that “must” come? When the Archbishop of Canterbury writes:

“After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS, so much effort, once this epidemic is conquered here and round the world, we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all is normal.

“There needs to be a resurrection of our common life, something that links to the old, but is different and more beautiful.”

He speaks in hope, but in terms of that “something” that will link to the old, he is coy. By far the most useful commentary I read came from the Bishop of London, Rt Revd Sarah Mullally who wrote on her blog:

 Easter reminds us that God has touched the world in Jesus Christ.

Touch is central to Jesus relationships.  Filled with compassion Jesus reached out his hand and touched the leper, a women who has suffered a great deal with a bleeding disorder, came up behind Jesus and touched his cloak, Jesus took Jiraus’ daughter by the hand and said to their little girl get up, he took the man who could not speak or talk and put his figures into his mouth, he took the blind man by the hand and put his hands on him,  people brought little children to him for him to touch, the betrayer kissed him, and there on the road to Emmaus in the breaking of bread the touch of the presence of Jesus made their hearts burn.

Touch brings reconciliation, reconciliation to a community and to God, it brings restoration of relationships and healing.

At a time when we are “social distancing” it is good to be reminded of this. The “something” in the Archbishop’s statement becomes the “someone” in the Bishop’s commentary. It is the Risen Christ who touches us. In Eliot’s words:

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year.Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. 

As the Bishop put it:

In a sense we have no more or less than Mary for we like her have glimpsed the hopes of Easter – death does not have the last word. The promise of a new creation without pain and suffering.

Now hope is not blind optimism.  It is with hope that we can with eyes open to see the suffering and yet believe in the future.

How to convey the message that that “hope” lies in Jesus is the question?

Perhaps the answer lies in the gaps? For the better part of half a century, mankind in the West has pursued pleasure and consumption as its goals, convinced that “happiness” lay down those routes. It has not proven to be the case. Happiness is always just over the next hill, and the grass is always greener on the side we have not yet trodden.

The promises set out by politicians have always been recognised as illusory by those of a conservative disposition; but even those on the left who have been looking for the next utopian visionary, seem to despair. Many young people, convinced that societies based on mass consumption are destroying the natural environment, protest on their hand-held devices and travel to demonstrate on the means of transport which exist to expedite mass consumption.

Down all these roads lies disillusion. Hope lies only in Christ. In the words of the Anglican General Confession:

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

It begins with penitence, it begins with the realisation that He loved us first. What follows will follow. Only then will we never be the same again. And until we are changed, things will stay the same.

He is Risen Indeed!

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Easter, Faith

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The Exsultet, with which we begin the Easter Vigil, ends with the words:

May this flame be found still burning
by the Morning Star:
the one Morning Star who never sets,
Christ your Son,
who, coming back from death’s domain,
has shed his peaceful light on humanity,
and lives and reigns for ever and ever.

R. Amen.

The Latin reads:

Flammas eius lúcifer matutínus invéniat:
ille, inquam, lúcifer, qui nescit occásum.
Christus Fílius tuus,
qui, regréssus ab ínferis, humáno géneri serénus illúxit,
et tecum vivit et regnat in sæcula sæculórum.

Unbelievably, there are sad sacks such as Bosco here, who, being monoglot and poorly-educated, see the word ‘lucifer’ and imagine that here we are worshipping Lucifer – and if you find that as impossible to believe as I did, here’s a link.

The reference is, of course, to 2 Peter 1:19. The day has dawned, the Morning Star has risen in our hearts, because the Light which ligtheth the world has banished death, and our hearts rejoice, being freed from the burden of sin. Like St Peter and the Holy Women, we could not have discovered the joy of the Resurrection had we stayed imprisoned in our fears and selfishness. On this first Easter night, the angels moved the stone away, and so, too, does Christ move away the stone which imprisons us in the tomb of our sense of sin. We are not without hope. We who were lost are found, we who we hopeless are redeemed, not by anything we deserve, but by His love, freely offered for us on the Cross at Calvary. Hope is the gift of Christ to us.

On that first Maundy Thursday two of the Apostles betrayed the Lord. Judas was the one who brought the troops to arrest Jesus, but Peter, who had promised to support Him no matter what, betrayed him thrice before the cock crew. Those who mock and say how can such a man be the foundation of the Church of Jesus need more of a sense of self; when they look within do they see a sinless being? The Gospel story is all the more convincing for this detail. Who, making up a narrative, would include such a detail about the leader of the Apostles? But where Judas, in in his pride, despaired of forgiveness and hanged himself, Peter lived his shame and was forgiven and redeemed; in that, Peter is the model for us all.

Jesus knew that Peter would fail; he told him as much. But that did not mean that Jesus reproached Peter; he knew that Peter’s conscience would do that work for him. Peter spoke with confidence, a confidence which reminds us of what St Paul told the Corinthians: ‘Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.’ Peter did not watch; he fell. We, often, do not watch, and we fall. If we have been told that we ‘are saved’, then when we fall, we either despair, like Judas, or, in this modern world, think it a sign that such assurance was wrong; either way we turn from the Lord. But if we read the story of Peter aright, we know that Jesus does not turn from us. He did not suffer on the Cross, He did not break the bonds of death in order that we should be lost. Unlike Satan, who comes to kill and destroy, and whose strongest weapon is our despair and pride, Jesus came that we should have life, and have it abundantly. The hope and the joy of the Resurrection are His strongest weapons, for they are the product of His love.

St Thomas needed to put his finger in the holes made by the nails before he believed, but as Jesus has told us, it is even more blessed to believe without seeing. So, my dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, may the joy of the Resurrection be with us all, ever more.

Christ is risen from the dead,
by death trampling down upon death,
and to those in the tombs He has granted life.

Holy Saturday

15 Saturday Apr 2017

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“On Holy Saturday, the Church waits at the Lord’s tomb in prayer and fasting, meditating on his Passion and Death and on his Descent into Hell, and awaiting his Resurrection.”

Today’s theme is silence. Broken, battered and bloodied, the body had been taken down from the cross and had been placed in the tomb; it was over. All the great hopes, all the expectations; these had dwindled to a handful of frightened men and women holed up in Jerusalem, hoping that the authorities would be satisfied with the death of Jesus. The Romans had mounted a guard on the tomb. God had not come to the aid of Jesus. Those who had always been a bit sceptical seemed to have been right. Peter, who had spoken so bravely, had, when the time came for action, denied Jesus thrice before the cock crew. Yes, it was over. Time to get back to life as usual; it had been but a dream.

The parallel with our secular world is all too plain. God? We note only His absence; He is dead – we killed Him. Does that ‘us’ include those who confess His name? To what extent have we conspired in killing Him? Imprisoned in antiquated modes of thinking; confined to a particular form of worship; contained within approved modes of piety; unwitnessed to in the lives we say we devote to Him; the disregard of the love He preached in our hatred for each other, and our dismissive attitude, even to our co-religionists, let alone to those who worship Him in ways we do not. The flatness, the uncertainty, the want of faith shown in that first Holy Saturday, all that reflects our own world.

The Creed tells us that He ‘descended into Hell’. Sheol, as the Jews called it, or Hades in the Greek of the New Testament, should not be confused with what the Church means by ‘hell’. It was the land of the dead, the Hades we see in Luke 19, the place where all the dead, good and bad, rested, awaiting the opening of the Gates of Heaven. The parallel with this world is striking. But on that first Holy Saturday, unseen by the world, the miracle happened. The Gate that had been closed was opened.

That is the message to us all, now, Christian and non-Christian alike. The icy emptiness of the tomb  which can grip us, and which can force us into an attitude of defensiveness, melts during that miracle. God is not absent. We have been absent. On that terrible Saturday evening the disciples cowered behind barred doors, living in fear of being identified as followers of Jesus. Only the love of the Holy Women took them out, before dawn, on that Sunday morning. We cannot know what fear gripped them as they set off, only that love triumphed over it. What they would encounter as the result of that love would change their lives and the lives of those fearful men back in Jerusalem, and then, through them, the world would be changed. What reward will our love bring us?

The disciples had never quite understood Jesus, and that led them to hide away upon His death, although He had told them He would rise again. Through the darkness and through the silence, the Light that lighteth the World, came to dispel the terrors of the night and to offer hope to all. As we watch and wait, let us remember that the darkest night ends, and that, the darkest of all nights, ended with the lightest of all mornings. As we journey, it is to Emmaus, and He is with us, even to the end of all things.

 

The Testimony of a Woman

06 Monday Apr 2015

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The angel and the women at the empty tomb. Benedictional of St Æthelwold, BL Add. 49598 f.51v

The angel and the women at the empty tomb.
Benedictional of St Æthelwold,
BL Add. 49598 f.51v

I bring you greetings from Jessica, who tells me that she misses us and prays for us as we do her. She is also pleased that you read and enjoyed her posts that we brought over from NEO, and it gave me great pleasure to do so, as well.

I know that you wonder, as do I, whether she will return to us, and not least to the blogs. I don’t know; she doesn’t know. She says there is much she misses about them, the give and take, the camaraderie, the learning and the teaching. But she also says she grew weary of personal attacks, and was increasingly hurt by them. And so, only God knows, and he hasn’t told anyone yet.

Personally, I pray, and suspect many of you do as well, for her return. But while I have told her what I think, as I usual, I will not presume to urge her to do so. That is for her to decide, with God’s help. Nor would I presume to attempt to substitute my judgement for hers. I have far too much respect for her to do such a thing.

And so, as Jessica said yesterday, “Under Jewish Law the testimony of a woman was no testimony at all.” And yet the very fact that you are reading this here is because of the testimony of a woman. How unlikely is this group? How likely for Chalcedon and I to meet? He is a distinguished and senior professor at a great British University, I am an electrician in Nebraska, yet we did. And we have become close friends due to the testimony of a woman. In fact, she foresaw it long before we did, I think. Not long after we became friends she commented that she thought we were the same man, because we always have the same reaction. She’s not far wrong, the major difference between us is which bank of the Tiber we stand on. 🙂

And so, our newer readers have had an opportunity to read Jess’ work over a few days, and to see why we have all come to love her so, and why we link so often to her posts. The Testimony of a Woman, is a powerful thing, indeed.

Probably the things that unites all the contributors here are first, our love of our Crucified and Risen Lord, but also, I think we all love teaching. Chalcedon, and Jessica are trained teachers and yet as I told Jessica once, one of the main things I miss about not being in the field anymore is the sheer joy of teaching someone to be better than I ever was.

The importance of women is something that goes to the very beginning of Christianity. I have said before that if you would understand the role of women in Jesus’ time, you have only to look at fundamentalist Islam, it is simply a milder form of what was. And yet in the Annunciation, we see the Angel sent to tell Mary that she would bear Jesus, reassuring her until she assents saying, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word,” That is not submission, that is informed consent, to something that she knew could, at best, make her a pariah, and at worst cost her her life. And so she pondered, and carried out the mission.

And again at the end of His earthly mission, Christ again chose a woman to carry the news, Mary Magdalen this time, when He chose to reveal Himself first to her. Jess said yesterday:

She looked into the tomb again, only to be met by the most amazing sight – two angels asking her why she wept. The answer she gave echoes down the ages:  “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” As she turned away she saw a stranger, whom she took to be the gardener and asked where Jesus was. Then the man spoke – just one word, one word which shattered the world as she had known it and which echoes down the ages, even to the end of all things. ‘Mary’ was that word, the first from the lips of the Resurrected Lord. However much her tears had blinded her, that voice was clearly unmistakable: “Rabboni!” She said. Teacher, teacher, that was what she called Him. She went to cling to Him and He said: ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’  He bade her to go and tell the others what she had seen.

And so she did, and so does Jessica, and so should we.

The Testimony of a Woman, God’s chosen method of communication with us, the most powerful sound in the world.

Good Friday meditation

03 Friday Apr 2015

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cropped-mary-at-the-foot-of-the-cross.jpgWe call it ‘Good Friday’. The altar in my church is stripped bare, and the crucifix is covered, and we leave with the smoke from the extinguished candles filling the gloom of an English spring afternoon. With temperatures stuck next to freezing, the shivers could have a number of causes; but meditating on the Passion of Our Lord is enough. The sense of sorrow is an echo of that first Friday at Calvary, and it is hard to know, at that moment what is ‘good’ about it.

But when we stop in prayer and think, we can see precisely what is good.  It is the day on which all our sins are loaded on the Lamb of God, when He takes upon His shoulders your sins and mine. What wonder is this? What have we done to be so rewarded? How can this be? What wondrous love is this? Good? Yes, the best news mankind ever had or ever will have. Whatever confessional allegiances divide us, I like to feel on this day of all days, the Cross of Christ unites us.

I leave it to all the clever men to explain what in my heart I know is simple. Christ loves me. He loves us all. He did what He did, He suffered what He suffered willingly. He knew if would be terrible, and He would have preferred it if it had been otherwise; but that makes it all the more precious.

The American expression ‘when the rubber hits the road’ comes to mind. This is where our salvation was earned, and not by us. With every nail that was hammered in, as with every stripe He bore for us, we are being saved. If we find those sufferings horrible, we should know that is how God finds our sins; God did something about it – what are we doing?

It was through the breaking of that body on the Cross, and the spilling of that blood that we see what He meant on the evening of the Last Supper. His Body was broken for us; His blood spilled for us. Some of us believe that at the Eucharist we receive His Body and Blood as He said; others that it is in memory of Him. Well, Good Friday is no time to rehearse what divides us – yet more stripes we apply to His back. It is a time for prayer and contemplation.

Mine is that for all of us, the Spirit of Christ may be with us this Easter, and that we may know Him as Lord, and worship Him and be thankful for what He has done for us. What did we do to earn it? Nothing. What can we do to be worthy of it? Just heed His call to repent and follow Him in belief that He is the Christ.

In the shadow of the Cross we kneel and pray and give thanks – we are redeemed through His suffering. As the ancient hymn has it, let all mortal flesh keep silent. He has saved us. It is Good Friday – be sad and yet rejoice.

[First published on nebraskaenergyobserver on 29 March 2013]

Something is Cooking for Us All

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

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20121115-180317.jpgWell, I was thinking about what I would write for Easter this year, and I came to the conclusion that I had little new to say. It’s the most important series of events in Christianity but, still, we’ve been writing and talking about it for around two thousand  years. We’ve explored it pretty thoroughly.

But as I was looking around in the archives here, and especially at Nebraska Energy Observer, I realized something. Two years ago, both blogs were immensely productive, mostly because of Jessica herself. From Thursday right on to Sunday, she published at least one post on each blog every day.

If you don’t know, this blog and Nebraska Energy Observer (or our blog) as Jess began calling it, shortly after she became my Editor, and I finally after a chuckle, gave in and call it that now (although it has always reminded me of the old joke about married couples, “There’s her money,and there’s our money, that he earns and if he’s lucky he gets an allowance.”) have often worked together with articles and occasionally whole series that jumped back and forth between the two blogs. I think it was good for both, and I miss it.

If any of you haven’t visited, my blog, NEO, is a history, current events, politics blog built on a foundation of Christianity, and I found Jessica’s insights on those topics as keen as they are on Christianity here, and her voice on America to be very valuable as well.

So after speaking with Chalcedon, and asking Jess if it was OK, I have decided to share with you, here, four of Jessica’s posts from our blog. A few of you may remember them but, to most they will be new. They are specific to the day, and they showcase her voice exceptionally well. I think they also showcase her distinct viewpoint which often (for me, anyway) yields a different lesson than what others have written. they will be exactly as she wrote them, with merely a note that they were first published on NEO.

I’ll also note that on NEO, I am running my companion articles from that week. I think it remarkable that we were both writing an article for NEO, and Jess was writing one for AATW as well, and often more than one.

This was one of the high points for our blogs, before in Chesterton’s words:

“And this is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire
`No more of comfort shall ye get,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.’ 

And those skies grew dark indeed, as the seas rose, and in time we came so very close to losing the Chatelaine for ever and despair was very close for all of us. But in the end, God’s grace sustained us and God restored her to life and perhaps some wondrous day she will return to us. As GKC said:

The King looked up, and what he saw
Was a great light like death,
For Our Lady stood on the standards rent,
As lonely and as innocent
As when between white walls she went
And the lilies of Nazareth.

And so, starting tomorrow, All Along the Watchtower, will again feature posts by its Foundress, and our Chatelaine, and my dearest friend, Jessica.

Enjoy!

Just a note on practicalities, comments will be, as always, open. But do be aware since these articles are being published over Jessica’s name, and she is not online, response may be slow. Chalcedon and I will try to keep an eye on it, but…