Communion in Country: an Aboriginal meditation on the paschal triduum

Introduction

Let me set the scene for what I want to say with a few historical remarks about the relationship between Christians and native peoples.

Historically, the settler colonial churches were the guardians of those of us who survived the frontier wars, especially in the east and south of the continent. With funding from the state, settler churches gathered us into missions and told us that our traditional way of life, our spirituality, was evil and that is needed to be replaced with their own, entirely white and British, way of life. In most places, not all, we were not presented with an option but only with an ultimatum. So, our experience of Christianity is largely that of whiteness, and a very violent form of whiteness at that. A whiteness that will happily destroy country, culture, family and a whole way of life for the sake of possessing the land and its wealth.  

The legacy of this missions-history is twofold. On the one hand, most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still tick a Christian box when we fill out the census documents. On the other hand, the vast majority of us—particularly in the east and south—are disinclined to ever step through a church door.  This is increasingly the case as our work on recovering culture, cosmology, and spirituality from the rubbish-bins of colonial history gathers pace.  This is increasingly the case as we recognise and name the continuing whiteness of ecclesial structures, leadership councils, and approaches to spiritual formation.

One of the many paradoxes in play here is that Aboriginal people generally have a lot of time for Jesus. As presented in the gospels, Jesus seems more invitational and genuinely helpful than your average Christian missionary. He seems willing to transgress the barriers of gender and race set by his society, treating women as worthy conversation-partners and even learning some theology from an indigenous woman. He also goes up against the religious and civic authorities where their policies are designed to hurt or marginalise the poorer and more vulnerable members of the community. He tells terrific stories about country in the parables and becomes country himself by dying and being reborn as the body of country and the spirit of loving community. Just as our ancestor-creators do.  So, we have time for Jesus, even as we abandon the settler churches in droves.

In what remains of our time, I’d like to share with you some of the ways in which I am seeking, ever so tentatively, to weave a new way of being Aboriginal and being Christian from this rubbish-heap of colonial experience. Amongst the discarded valuables are Aboriginal stories about the meaning of country and how to live and die in country with respect and a sense of kinship with all that is alive.  But there are also trinkets of discarded christology, traditions about Jesus that are often rehearsed in our churches, but rarely lived. To create a Christianity that our people can live with, a christianity that doesn’t require us to supress our cultural spirit and abuse our social bodies, I am seeking to work with both country and Christ to create a paschal Christology of country.  So come, walk with me through an Easter Triduum set in country.

Maundy Thursday

When it was evening, he came with the twelve. They took their places and were eating.

(Mark 14.17)

When Aboriginal people get together for a feed we share our joy and our sorrow. Joy can take many forms: funny and highly embellished stories about recent doings; fond stories of revered elders; still older stories about the ancestors who formed country and taught us how to live in it.  Sorrow is also present. The sorrow accompanying frequent illness, incarceration, and death, of family brokenness, betrayal and economic hardship. Stories of casual and not-so-casual racism at work or in public interactions.  There is also discussion of a problem-solving nature. What may the members of the community realistically hope for? How might whatever is hoped for be attained, how does one go about making it happen? The setting for the meal will be partly inside, and partly outside, depending on the weather. Some of the cooking will be done over a campfire, where everyone will eventually drift to continue the storytelling as the light fades.  The host of the meal will be a matriarch of the clan, or perhaps two or three of them. The men and younger woman will all have their roles to play, but it will be the matriarchs who manage the business and who are very much in charge.  You cross them at great peril!

Aboriginal meals are in many ways similar to the meal Jesus had with his disciples before he was arrested. It was, apparently, modelled on a Passover meal. The family of disciples gathered around and told stories. Old stories about the creation of the world, the sojourn of God’s people as slaves in Egypt and their escape under Miriam and Moses to a land of freedom. More recent stories, about the journey to Jerusalem from Galilee and all the happenings along the way. Fears were expressed about the future of their community in the face of political and religious opposition. And, even as a betrayer sneaks aways to do his dirty work, Jesus tells a new story about the way in which his own body will become like both the Passover bread and wine, which sustains the community on its journey to freedom, and the Passover lamb which is sacrificed to keep the homes of the faithful safe from the Angel of death. Jesus himself takes the role of both the manager of business and chief storyteller. In this, he is like our matriarchal women. But he also takes the role of the slave who washes his disciples’ feet and who, later in the evening, is quite literally taken by the temple authorities as a scapegoat for all their failings. The story therefore continues by torchlight, by fire, outside the house where the meal began.  And, later still, by fire outside the place where Jesus is being tortured.

How are we to weave an Aboriginal christology from these two meals, so different and yet so similar? Perhaps by drawing back a little to catch some of the bigger patterns and themes. First, that the exchange and consumption of food in meals performs both cosmic and community-forming functions. At the cosmic level, our need to eat is about the dependence all of us have on country, the biosphere, the environment in which we live. In Aboriginal cosmology, we literally eat our kin.  We take only what is needed from our environment, and we give thanks to the turtle, the bird, the kangaroo, the yam root or the fish who gives of its life that we might live. At the same time we promise that, when we die, our remains will also become the compost of life for whatever fruitful creature will spring from our bones. The eucharistic words of Jesus therefore make sense to us. He is making himself food for others. He is giving his life that so that what is dead may become both alive and fruitful.

The meal is also community forming. In Aboriginal culture, the exchange of food with one another also performs an exchange of joy and sorrow, of hope and the shattering of hope, of life and death and everything in between, with each other. The reciprocal exchange of these things in story-form binds us together in love and kinship. We literally imbibe each other—in body, mind and imagination—the more we gather to exchange the food we have taken from country. Shared meals are therefore country’s greatest tonic against the evils of neoliberal individualism and narcissism. We learn that we are part of each other’s dramas and stories, that we have parts to play—significant, important parts—in each other’s lives. We learn, also, that we are not alone, that we have kin. The food teaches us that we are kin with country. The people who share the food with us teach us that by imbibing country together we are made one body and mind and imagination in the service of country. For the dreaming stories of ancestor-creators that are told at meals teach us that country is bigger than any of us, that our purpose as kin is to live in and for country. For without her, for without her generous love, none of us would survive.  Christ at the last supper is like country for us. He is like an ancestor-creator who is an avatar or voice for country who passes down the sacred stories of old. He is bread and wine, who sustains us all and gathers us together to eat. He is the lamb who is sacrificed that we might live, and live in community. He is the servant who washes our feet to show us how to love one another. He is country. He tells us who he is, who we are, and what our responsibility towards one another looks like in practice.

That all of this takes place in close proximity to fire and to evening tells us that the exchange of lives through the meal is potentially transformative for everyone involved. For fire and evening have always borne witness to that liminal space between fixed abodes of being. Neither day nor night, twilight is a time between times when torches are lit and fires set. By that light we see, but not well, not well enough to be certain about what is changing. It is a time for stories of transformation, when people, landscapes and whole histories might change, become something other than what they are in full light of day.  In the gospel stories, the lighting of the torches signals the time when the disciples travel to Gethsemane where Jesus will become transformed from hero and teacher into scapegoat and martyr.  The fire outside the place where Jesus is tortured lights the scene where Peter, leader and arch-symbol of all the male followers, will be transformed from disciple and supporter into denier and betrayer.

Great and Holy Friday

‘. . . it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’

(Caiaphas in John 11.50)

In the ritual version of the Paschal triduum, it is the meal on Thursday evening and all that is said there by Jesus, that provides the interpretive key for what is to follow.  For, after the arrest, Jesus says very little. Apart from a few brief responses here and there, Jesus is mostly silent.  It is his actions, and those of the people around him, that speak most profoundly.  Here the meal from the night before starts to find its way into the social and economic world as well as the cosmos. I’ve spoken, already, about the centrality of death to eating. In this fundamentally anthropological and biological sense, meals are about things that are dead sustaining other things in life. Meals are about the way in which country dies in order that country may live. In Christian terms, Jesus of Nazareth dies in order that his dead body may give life to the new body of Christ which is community and cosmos. But now, in the events of Great and Holy Friday, we are invited to look at this death from another angle, to see it as the result of a great evil: the evil of empire.

Why did Jesus die? In social and political terms, the answer has to be ‘because he threatened the carefully balanced détente that existed between the temple aristocracy and the Roman invaders of Judea.’ The Romans had occupied both Galilee and Judea more than a century before. Imperial policy at the time of Jesus seemed to cultivate strong ties with chosen religious and civic elites, in this case, the aristocratic families connected with the temple priesthood and its bureaucracy.  These elites were cultivated as collaborators who could enforce the iron-fisted ‘peace of Rome’, but at one step removed. If they toed the line, keeping the more radical elements of the colonised population in check and the taxation system running smoothly, then they were rewarded with power and money. If not, as demonstrated in the uprising of 70 CE, then they and all they sought to govern could be crushed.

In the eyes of the ruling families, Jesus was seen as a potential unsettler of this delicate settlement. By his portrayal of God as lover and liberator of those populations which suffered most under the yolk of Rome (rather than as friend and legitimator of aristocratic policy) he attracted the attention of the Jerusalem bureaucracy. After a period of investigation which evidently involved interviewing both Jesus himself and many of his acquaintances, they decided he was a dangerous man who needed to die before he was able to stir the masses against the Roman ‘peace’.  So, they had him arrested at the festival, interrogated, tortured, and finally crucified with the permission of Pilate, the Roman procurator.

Now, what do Aboriginal people see when they look at the crucified Jesus? We see two things. First, we see a blackfella who attracted the attention of empire just by preaching a message about inclusive love. We see a teacher of Aboriginal lore who drew examples from country in the parables. We see a fella accused of heresy because his spiritual teachings very often critiqued those of the powerful elites. We see a fella who, by inspiring his impoverished countrypeople to endure and to look out for each other under the yolk of empire, became the scapegoat for that same Empire. The one on whom all its colonial sins were laid.

But we see something else as well. Because Jesus was hung from a tree and—in a sense became one with the that tree that had been cut down and fashioned into an instrument of torture—we also see country itself, cut down and crucified under the yoke of Empire. The meal had already suggested that Christ was country: co-extensive with the water, the bread, the wine and the meat that country provides from its own body. But now, as he is nailed to the tree, the analogy is extended to the way in which country itself has been crucified by colonial empires: raped, tortured and pillaged so that a few, a very few, can become unimaginably wealthy.  

Who can doubt that this is what has happened here, on Aboriginal land? Who can doubt that it is still happening? Who benefits from the destruction of our lands and waterways by mining companies, pastoral companies, forestry companies? It is not the land itself! Our rivers are dying. Our rainforests are drying out. Our ever-more compacted soil is turning to salt and to ash under the twin assaults of herd farming and wildfires. Our birds and animals become endangered or extinct at rates that outstrip any other place on earth. Colonisation, you see, is not only about genocide. It is also in the business of ecocide. Country is suffering, is being tortured, is being crucified on a scale that is no longer sustainable as part of the cycle of life. And as she dies, the community who depends on country for life and for sustenance, is scattered and loses its way.

Holy Saturday

On the sabbath day they rested, according to the commandment.

(Luke 23.56.b)

This is Luke’s summary of all that happened whilst Jesus rested in his tomb on the Jewish sabbath, what we now call ‘Holy Saturday’.  In some traditions, particularly those from the African north or orthodox east of the church, a whole theology has grown up around what it might mean both for Jesus to rest in the tomb and for the church to rest on Holy Saturday, beginning with the fact that the Greek hēsych-asan, here translated ‘rest’ (ἡσύχασαν), can also be translated ‘silence’ or ‘peace’.  

My own approach to the silence, or peace, or rest of Holy Saturday is informed by the concept of dadirri, as practiced and promulgated by N’ganji elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. For her, dadirri is a deep listening. Not, it should be said, to Scripture, or the church, or even to the voice of God as it is mediated in a human heart. No, dadirri is a listening for the voice of the divine in country. In country.

Here one might talk of a reorientation of human listening towards the gifts that are given us in the rest, the silence, or the peace of country. For country is at peace when it is allowed to be itself, unmolested by thoughtless interventions from the white possessive that is colonial society. Country is at peace when its ecosystems are allowed to dance and to circumambulate in symbiotic communion. When birds are allowed to forage and to sing and to dive from the skies as birds are meant to do. When trees are allowed to send their roots into the damp substructure of the soil and send their branches out into the air and into the sun. When wombats are allowed to scurry this way and that, cleaning up roots, grasses and tubers, and leaving behind deposits of nutrient-rich poo, as wombats are meant to do. When alpine moss is allowed to grow slowly, oh so slowly, over hundreds of years, absorbing and transforming all the particulate matter and carbon dioxides that pollute the atmosphere. When snakes slither from water-hole to crevasse to a spot of sunbaking on a rocky outcrop, when they shed their skin to become more fully themselves. When they show us the way in which country transforms itself through death to become life in all its excessive fulness, over and over and over again.

Here, through a decision to attend to country—not just for an hour, or a day, but repeatedly and consistently over a lifetime of prayer—human beings might notice that country is able to show us what is truly divine. And more, how it is that the divine is at work in the world and in the cosmos. We might notice, for example, that land cannot be forever productive and fruitful. That is needs to rest, to recover, to be at sabbath from the endless uses that human beings would put it to. We might notice, through this dadirri of sustained attentiveness, that fruit needs to fall to the ground and die, that it needs to be buried in the soil. That fruit needs to be transformed by microbes, microscopic organisms that inhabit good soil, in order to become the seed for new life and new fruitfulness. 

This is what Aboriginal eyes seek when we look at country. This is what Aboriginal ear hears in the silence which is holy Saturday. First, that the buried body of God’s child must be transformed by the microbial work of the Holy Spirit, if it is to be reborn as another body. And second, that the snake-like transformations of death into life happen according to their own time and their own schedule. They cannot be hurried. They cannot be pushed along or quashed and repackaged into notions such as ‘timeliness’ or ‘convenience’. The work of the divine is slow. And, if we are to become wise human beings, in any meaningful sense, we might perhaps become slow as well.

The feast of the resurrection

While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognising him . . . then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he vanished from their sight.

(Luke 24.15-16, 31)

Easter Sunday is rightly called the principal feast day of the Christian church. And, if the gospels are to be believed, it is a feast that begins in the middle of the night when it is dark. Not at dawn, nor at noonday. In the middle of the night. That is when Christ was raised. The darkness signifies, it seems to me, a certain opacity concerning what the resurrection is, and where it can be located in time and space. Do you know that word ‘opacity’? It means ‘without transparency or translucence’; it can also mean ‘obscure, resistant to understanding or meaning’. When it is dark, it is difficult to see. And it is difficult to ‘see’ the resurrection of Christ. 

Let me remind you of a few puzzling features of the resurrection narratives as we have them in the gospels. First, they do not agree with each other in terms of narrative details. Who discovered the empty tomb first? Was it the men (as in Paul) or the women (as in the gospels). Who were the first witnesses of the newly resurrected Christ? Mary Magdalene (as in John)? Peter (as in Paul), or no-one at all (as in Mark?)  Who met the first arrivals at the tomb? Was it a young man (as in Mark), an angel (as in Matthew) or two men in dazzling white (as in Luke)?  Also, what did the resurrected Christ look like? Like Jesus of Nazareth? If that were so, surely Mary would have recognised him (in John’s account), or the disciples on the road to Emmaus (in Luke). But they don’t. He is somehow unrecognizable. Furthermore, in Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance, he actually disappears from sight the moment he is recognised. Indeed, several accounts have Jesus walking through closed doors or suddenly dematerialising. Which makes one wonder what kind of body this resurrection body must be. Certainly not like one that works like yours or mine!  Indeed, Pauline tradition shifts much of the language of a resurrected body of Christ away from the notion of an historical person with a genuinely fleshy, but rather unusual, body and towards the language of a social or cosmic body in which the presence and activity of Christ may be discerned, but rarely in the sense of individual, personal, presentation. Here the resurrected body of Christ becomes word and ritual, bread, wine, community, even cosmic kinship.

A few years ago I tried to capture some of this theology in a rather bad poem:

Christ is risen.
For and with the little ones,
the forgotten and abused ones,
the poor and the broken ones.
Christ is risen into mob,
into church,
into loving kindness.
Christ is risen into word and ceremony,
into ritual water,
bread and wine.
Christ is risen into country and waterway,
into air, earth, fire and water.
Christ is risen into nova, supernova and stardust.
Praise him.

What do Aboriginal people ‘see’ when they look on this opaque and rather elusive body of the resurrected Christ? What we see is another presentation of our ancestor-creators, figures from our dreaming stories who are at once only too human in their capacity to reason and to communicate, and yet are able to shape-shift into various animal forms or features of the land and seascape. Some even become heavenly bodies, like stars. There is a sense in which each of these ancestral figures, from whom we as humans are also descended, are individual avatars or presentations of country. They are the voice or face of country, the way in which country communicates. Secondarily, of course, they appear in story and ceremony. Just as Jesus does, in the three classic sacraments of word, baptism and eucharist. For us, then, Jesus is country. And especially, in this resurrection mode, the capacity of country for make life out of death. To pass through death, to life. And to communicate and transport that capacity for life to any place, person or situation.

It is also worth reflecting on the reappearance of fire at our vigils of the resurrection. The ‘new fire’ which the church lights at Easter, in the middle of night and before the dawn has arrived, riffs off the story of Peter’s reintegration into the community of Jesus at a beach on the Sea of Galilee in the gospel of John. The disciples are fishing when the resurrected Christ suddenly appears assist them. Afterwards, as they are eating, Jesus asks Peter, in a classically tripartite manner, if he loves him. Peter replies that he does. Three times. And each time he is given a new job or vocational responsibility: ‘feed my lambs’, ‘tend my sheep’, ‘feed my sheep’. Through this ritual, Peter is again transformed. His status as a denier and betrayer of Jesus is put aside and remade so that he is able to take up the leadership of the church community. The charcoal fire by the beach, at dawn, again symbolises a place of change and transformation.

In Aboriginal cultures, as we have seen, meals and storytelling are very often accompanied by campfire. But campfire also accompanies many of our traditional rituals of initiation, when boys and girls are transformed from catechumens into fully responsible members of the community. Last year, in far north Queensland, an elder was telling us of a time when she witnessed the newly initiated boys returning from their time on country learning the ancestral stories of the tribe. A great fire was lit on the beach, at twilight, to welcome them home as transformed people. As they emerged from the tree-line, all painted up with ancestral stories, the fire rose from its place on the beach and surrounded the new initiates. It danced between them, avatar of an ancestral spirit, binding them to their purpose and confirming them in a new identity and vocation.

Conclusion

So, three days. A walk through country and through the events of the Easter Triduum. Three moments of encounter and transformation with country and with Christ. I would finally describe this walking as a walk of communion with Christ and with country, as my very favourite saying of Jesus intimates:

Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be also.

(John 12:24-26a)

Here Christ and country come together in intimate communion. They are not the same, but through the alchemy of poetry, they are shown to be related to each other in some deeply interfused way. Here Christ compares himself, and the way he will die, to the seed that falls into the ground and ceases to be. By that ceasing, by that death, it becomes fruitful. It becomes capable of living again, in a way that far exceeds its capability as a single seed. This is the lore of country, this is the Aboriginal way. Christ for us is therefore the voice of an ancestor-creator who teaches us the lore and invites us to participate in this living and dying and living again through an adherence to this lore. Following, in this sense, means mimesis: imitating. By imitating Christ we imitate country. By imitating country, we imitate Christ.

But what of that part which says we must not love our lives, we lose them; that we ought to hate our lives ‘in this world’ so that we can keep them for eternal life? This trawloolway man reads that as a warning against becoming culturally captive to the almighty ‘me’ that is part and parcel of the neoliberal culture, the social imaginary, of settler-colonial societies. ‘Me’ means that I am a single grain. ‘Me’ means that when I reach the end of my powers, I am very much alone and can go no further in what can be achieved or changed. ‘Me’ means that I can never be helped or share my rather grandiose sense of responsibility with anyone else. ‘We’, on the other hand, means seeing ourselves as a part of a larger kinship network that can be described as either the cosmic and social body or Christ or the matrix that is country. ‘We’ means that our single seeds are related to other seeds and what they are meant to do, so that if we act out of sense of communion with the whole, we can create a veritable forest, new lungs for country. ‘We’ means that when we die or reach the end of our powers, the power of the whole can take what we are and multiply our fruitfulness so that I become seed for more growth, compost for another harvest which, quite literally, feeds both community and planet. The narcissistic ‘I’ will kill us all. The cosmic and communal ‘We’ is better. ‘We’ can save and heal both our troubled communities and our suffering planet.

Garry Worete Deverell

This piece is based on talks given at conferences for the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (June 2023) and the Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction (July 2024), as well as a seminar delivered at St Francis' College in May 2024. 

On deferring Easter and diving more deeply into Lenten quarantine

As I write the COVID-19 virus is transmitting itself from person to person at an exponential rate. Much of the trasmission is happening 'under the radar' as people who do not know they have the virus pass it on to others. Governments are desperately seeking to contain the virus by enacting strict 'social distancing' rules and closing down venues where people might gather.  This means that many businesses are severely curtainling their activities and their workforces. Perhaps a million people have already lost their jobs, mostly those who were employed as casuals or 'gig' workers. The effects on the economy are already profound, with steep losses on stock markets not seen since the Great Depression. But the effect on social cohesion and mental health is likely to be even more profound. For we are social animals. Even those of us who are 'introverted' on personality scales will struggle to keep our 'positive' on as we are prevented from social intercourse except via video-streaming app or phone. (Many of the poor, of course, do not have even those means of communication). Every anthropologist will tell you that humans need more than digital reproductions of another's image or sound. We need physical contact - intimate touches, hugs, whispers, non-verbal cues, olfactory interactions - in order to feel that we are part of the tribe, that we belong, that we are safe, secure and loved. If the virus continues to divide us, the already-serious rates of mental illness in post-industrial societies like ours are likely to reach pandemic proportions outstripping the reach of the virus itself.

The church is not, of course, immune from any of this. Because of our foundational ethic to love one's neighbour as oneself we can see the sense in protecting the vulnerable through spacial distancing. We can see the sense in closing down public gatherings. We can see the sense in passing on public health messages about hygiene.  And, of course, we are seeking to mitigate the social-psychological affects of these lockdowns by connecting our people into pastoral care matrices and making resources available through various media to encourage prayer, worship and a continuing connection to the sacred story in which we find our communal sense of vocation.  None of this makes us immune, however, to feelings of bewildernment, hopelessness and even despair. Many in our communities will struggle terribly in the days to come.

Many of my collegues - both clergy and academic theologians - have been seeking to locate this current existential within the explanatory narratives of Christian faith, both biblical and liturgical. Some are saying that the lockdown of churches places us in something approximating the exile of Israel and Judah's aristocratic classes to Assyria and Babylon, respectively. We are at home, but we are not at home. Because we cannot meet and encourage each other, because many of the liturgical and missional imperatives we are accustomed to pursuing without inhibition have been forbidden, we find ourselves alientated from the symbolic sources of our communal identity and purpose. We are like the Jerusalemites who found themselves in a strange land where 'singing the Lord's song' seemed almost impossible (Psalm 137).  The irony here, of course, is that those who could not sing the Lord's song were actually singing the Lord's song. They were remembering their narrative genealogies and looking to them for guidance. As are our churches right now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

Before we travel too far down this rabbit-hole, it is important to note that the people of Israel and Judah were taken into exile very much against their collective will. A foreign power swept in from the north, a power with a superior army, and these small federations of God's people were simply overcome. That is not what is happening to our churches in the midst of this pandemic. For the most part, churches are cooperating with goverments because they want to, because their leaders are convinced that the public health measures represent the right - even the 'Christian' - thing to do. Are we, then, in a new form of 'exile'? In some ways, perhaps yes. In most ways, I suspect no.  In saying that, I fully confess that I am weary of the many other ways in which the churches invoke the exile whenever they are feeling 'got at' by their critics. I am rarely convinced by arguments that the church is being persecuted in the post-industrial West. We are being ignored and misunderstood. We are being dressed down for our many sins against the vulnerable, certainly, but that is far from the state-sactioned discrimination that Indigenous people, for example, continue to endure.

Others are turning to the liturgical narratives of Lent and Holy Week for a sense of location, and for good reason. I have heard colleagues speak about being in a 'long Lent' in which we shall not, perhaps, be existentially ready for a fulsome celebration of Easter until the statistical 'curve' on viral transmission has well-and-truly turned. I have spoken that way myself on social media and in local pastoral letters. It is instructive to note that there is a long-standing relationship between Lent and the notion of quarantine (Latin: forty days) as both a spiritual retreat in a place of wilderness and a paring-back of life in order that life might flourish again. Jim Crace's astonishing novel, Quarantine, is as fine a meditation upon this connection as I have read.

Others have located themselves and their communities more specifically still: at Good Friday or Holy Saturday, in the place of Jesus' torture and death, and/or his descent into hell. And there is no doubt that some people, especially those most vulnerable to the full devastation of the virus, might claim an experience that can genuinely sustain that comparison. For most of us, I feel, the analogy is a bit of a stretch. In any case, what people seem to be reaching for here is a sense that the ecclesial lock-down reminds us of the narratives of dislocation and disillusion that overcame both Jesus and the disciples in (some aspects of) the gospel narratives concerning the final week of Jesus' life.  And certainly, there are connections to be made, if you happen to possess what Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy called an 'analogical imagination'.

If we consider some of the key narratives presented us by the Revised Common Lectionary for Lent and Holy Week in Year A, we can note a number of analogies with our current existential. On Ash Wednesday we read of a terrible 'day of the Lord':

a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come (Joel 2.2).

The army Joel apparently speaks of is an overwhelming military force. But many in our community, from the Prime Minister down, have spoken about the COVID-19 virus as a 'hidden enemy' against which we must do battle lest we, too, are overwhelmed. The passage from Joel goes on to call for a 'return' to the Lord with with 'fasting, with weeping, and with mourning' (2.12) out of a recognition that the people of God have themselves contributed to what is about to happen to them. They have abandoned the covenantal relationship with God and the swarming armies from the north form part of the consequence for having done so.

Some have speculated that pandemics such as the one we are living through at present are in some way a consequence for our species' lack of attention to sound environmental management. John Vidal, in The Guardian, writes that 'a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19'. As human beings press further and further into rainforests and other places of extraordinary biodiversity, we are being exposed to zoonotic diseases carried by animals that human beings have had little contact with before. Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London, studies how changes in land use contribute to the risk. 'We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans,' she says. 'Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.' (The Guardian, March 18 2020). In addition, a large body of research has shown that pandemics often begin in places of poverty and hit those living with poverty hardest. Ben Oppenheim and Gavin Yamey of the Brookings Institute note that poverty is often the reason why people press into rainforests to harvest disease-carrying animals; that malnutrition and existing chronic conditions make people far more susceptible to catching new diseases; and that a lack of medical resources in poor-to-middle-income regions means that new diseases will transmit themselves more quickly and efficiently ('Pandemics and the Poor', brookings.edu). Scientists are confirming, it seems, that we are perhaps reaping what we have sown. Our lack of attention to the covenantal commands to steward the land and to care for the poor are making life difficult even for those of us who respresent the global rich. Perhaps a 'return' to these concerns, a return to the Lord with weeping and mourning and repentant hearts is precisely what is required.  Perhaps we should stop destroying the biosphere on which our lives depend. Perhaps we should start listening to Indigenous wisdom about managing our lands and waterways. Perhaps we should stop exploiting the global south's resources and impoverishing those who produce our consumer goods. Perhaps loving our neighbours as we love ourselves would actually make a huge difference. Who knew?

The lections that follow in the Lenten sequence might all be characterised as commentaries upon the difference between redeemed and unredeemed desire which, precisely because the COVID-19 has our communities questioning who they when they cannot do what they desire, have the potential to generate yet more analogical bridges into the viral existential. 

The Lent 1 lections critique various kinds of will-to-power, whether they be the yearning for God-like knowledge (Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7), a pretending towards self-righteousness (Psalm 32) or our complex fantasies about transcending creaturely finitude (Matthew 4.1-11). The COVID-19 virus, if nothing else, is surely teaching us about the very real limits of our human knowlege and power!  The Lent 2 lections propose a freedom that comes from faith in God's good election. Abraham trusts God's gracious promise, and this is credited to him as righteousness (Gen 12.1-4a; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17). Nicodemus is counselled by Jesus to be 'born from above', to be drowned in water and the Spirit and start life anew as if everything he has learned is wrong, except what the Spirit will then teach him (John 3.1-17).  When our 'normal' way of life is proving indequate even to human survival, let alone thriving, this story invites us to fall on our knees and look for the Spirit who alone has the power to re-boot the system in ways that will make for a more profound human flourishing. 

The Lent 3 lections discuss redeemed and unredeemed desire through the metaphor of water. The wandering Israelites thirst for water and grumble when it is not provided on demand (Exodus 17.1-7). The woman who comes to draw water at the well learns of a 'living water' that Jesus can provide, a water that is able to quench our many desires and wants in a way that ordinary (dead?) water never can. Switching to a food metahor, the narrative then describes precisely what this 'living' food (or water) might be: 'My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work'. (John 4.5-42). The Samaritan women, and all who hear the story through the evangelist, are invited to participate in Jesus obedience, to fix our hearts and minds only on what God asks us to do. For only if we empty ourselves of all pretence to self-knowledge, self-righteousness, self-generation are we empty enough to receive the gracious action of God in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is poured out for us (Romans 5.1-11). God is then able to do the good in and through our newly-formed desire.  Can this 'living water', this 'food' that Christ gives be read as a kind of anti-viral, or perhaps a new kind of virus which has the potential to shut down and remake our human systems from the ground up? Is it like the messianic 'one' in the Matrix movies who is able to re-set our contaminated human matrices so that they are more godly in their aspirations?  Read this way, the COVID-19 virus might be both an angel of death and an angel of light at the same time. Like the French word poison, which can mean both 'poison' and 'medicine', perhaps the virus is like a cleanser which exposes what is wrong in order to make room for what is right.

The Lent 4 lections play with images of perception, with light and dark. The dark is a state of blindness, a blindness which can be brought on, somewhat paradoxically, by the brightness and attractiveness of exernal apperances. Samuel is told by the Lord not to look at the beauty or stature of the men who might be king of Israel, but at the godliness of their hearts (1 Sam 16.1-13). Indeed, and to flip the metaphor over, one can have the brightness of God's company and comfort even when you are walking through a very dark valley (Psalm 23). The long excursis in John 9.1-41 explores these themes with a poetic density rarely matched since. A man born blind is healed by Jesus so that he can see. Paradoxically, however, he remains blind with regard to who Jesus is, and how Jesus saves the world, until the point when he hears Jesus name himself 'Son of Man' and responds by declaring 'I believe'. The Jewish interlocutors, though they can literally see, are declared 'blind' by Jesus because they refuse to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. The passage concludes with these words:

I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains.

Here again people of faith are asked to confess their blindness in order to really see, to renounce their faith in the commonplace and the obvious in order to make room for faith in God. Perhaps, in the midst of the COVID-19 crises, we are being called to account in exactly the same way Jesus' interlocutors in John's gospel are being called to account. Perhaps our faith in ourselves and our righteousness before God is being questioned. Perhaps our habitual complacency with regard to the covenantal responsibility to care for the earth and for the poor is being brought out of the dark and into the light? Perhaps our consumerist habits, and our scandalous comfort with capitalist notions of trickle-down wealth, are being exposed for the lies that they are? 

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light-for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them (Ephesians 5.8-11).

I consider it the height of irony that when the rich are finally exposed to something that might actually hurt them, their stable of politicians is suddenly willing to introduce all the socialist policies that councils of social services and welfare agencies have been calling for in earnest since the late 1980s. A universal living wage, even if you are jobless.  Programmes to guarantee that folk have a roof over their heads. Massive funding boosts for essential services. Profound levels of support for small business and a return to the local manufacturing of essential goods. Perhaps the threat of a virus that can kill us all is what it takes to teach the rich the lesson of human solidarity: that we thrive together or we die together.

Of the marvelous lections for Lent 5, which reflect more directly on matters of life and death, I will say very little except by way of a poem sent me by a friend, and written to interpret the existential in which we find ourselves explicitly within the frame of John's gospel, chapter 11:

now,
it is no longer
an exegetical puzzle
to be solved in our study;
it is no longer a pericope
with which to wrestle;
it is no longer a (really)
long reading to get through;
it is no longer a story
we blow the dust off every three years.
now,
it is our story;
now
it is about us;
now
it is us inside that
dank, dark tomb:
stinking of fear,
wrapped in the bands
of loneliness;
blinded by the handkerchief
of weary worry.
now,
we hope,
we pray,
we yearn,
we listen
for just a footstep,
just a tear dropping on the ground,
just a whisper of Jesus
pacing before the stone,
growling in his spirit
in anger and frustration,
before he cries out,
in hope and joy and life,
"come out!"
now,
we are not casual bystanders;
now
we are Lazarus
waiting . . .
                                                (c) 2020 Thom M. Shuman

'Can these bones live?' asks the Lord of Ezekiel the prophet. The bones of economic systems which leave the poor on a scrap heap; the bones of ecological practices which exploit our rivers, waterways, oceans and lands until they have no life left in them; the bones of our education systems, which strip away the capacity for wisdom and replace it with technocratic forms of knowledge which leave us dry and gasping and empty; the bones of a church which has lost its way by preying on the weak and the vulnerable, by losing its prophetic voice, and by its nostalgic yearings for a rapprochement with the State and with power?  Ultimately God would have us long not for a resucitation of these deadly ways of life, but for a nailing of such idols to the cross with Jesus so that there can be a new beginning, a 'new experience with experience' as Jungel would say. We do not need a tweaking of what we have already had, in the mode of Nietzsche's 'eternal return of the same'. What we need is resurrection. The arrival of the really and genuinely new: a flash that is able to clear our eyes and make us see what we have never seen before. Resurrection is not something we can make. It is only something that we can receive. By dying to all our self-sponsored performances of faith. By trusting in Christ. By falling to our knees with him and saying 'Not my will, but yours'.

The corona virus has forced us to consider the possibility of a longer, more profound Lenten quarantine. Many of our church leaders are rushing around more busily than ever, as if by their increased activity they might become the messianic answer we long for, as if they might thereby 'induce' the new birth of Easter through the deployment of condensed ceremonial into people's homes via streaming technologies.  While such deployments are clearly well-intentioned, they are really most unlikely to address the sheer depth of our now-more-exposed-than-ever spiritual poverty and loneliness.  Lent has always been a time for hearing and owning the truth, for the confession of sins and the exorcism of false spirit - first for catechumens who might embrace the faith at Easter baptisms, but then, also, for all Christians to walk that way again through the act of sponsorship and solidarity. The existential into which the virus has thrust us is therefore an opportunity for a more thorough-going Lent, a Lent in which our privations are more real than imagined and therefore more profoundly effective as a school of faith. If we embrace the possibility before us, we might learn again to live as creatures of God rather than of the market. We might learn to be still and listen for God's voice, the voice that can give life to the dead, rather than to rush around with strategies ingeniously designed to avoid that encounter. We might learn to be humble again, to renounce our schemes for propping up the crumbling edifice of church and society, and look anew for the God who can animate even the poorest of soil with spirit. We might learn, again, a poverty which is able to renounce all that we think we know, all that we think we must cling to, in order to learn again the way of the suffering Christ.

If we rush, too quickly, to Easter, we might miss these opportunities, these riches. And our celebrations of Easter would, perhaps, feel even more false than usual.  As a catholic Christian, who believes very much in the spiritual profundity of the church year, I would normally be on the side of those who argue against any departure from the usual flow of the seasons or of the lectionary. But we are now presented with a once-in-a-century crisis and opportunity. If there is ever to be a time when we might defer our celebrations of Easter, this is most likely it.

What I am suggesting, more concretely, is an extension of Lent through engaging, for example, a more thorough examination of the pre-exilic and exilic prophetic narratives, especially Jeremiah, First Isaiah, Lamentations, Joel, Amos, Micah and Zephaniah. Each of these reflect upon the ways in which national life in Israel and Judah had seriously departed from the covenantal settlements contained in the Torah. These reflections might be accompanied by gospel narratives taken from the lections for ordinary time, which explore the concrete demands of living a life of faith, and with a more thorough reading of the Pauline books of 1 and 2 Corinthians, which reflect at length of what can go wrong in the church's relationship with the dominant social and political culture.  The books of Daniel and Revelation, with their apocalyptic reflections on faithfulness in a time of Empire, might also be thrown into the mix.

The readings and reflections of Holy Week (along with whatever ceremonial is possible) might be reserved, therefore, for the week immediately prior to the Sunday when churches can safely gather again for the first time following the ban on public worship.  This Sunday, whenever it might come, might then be wholeheartedly celebrated as the arrival of Easter, and the full ceremonial of the entire Easter season might follow, right through to Pentecost.  Can you imagine what that would be like, after all the privation, after all the spacial distancing, after all that living of a more circumscribed life? It would be brimming over with joy, the joy that comes with the arrival of the dawn after a long, dark, night of the soul. Can you see the anticipation on the faces of those who gather to process the new fire into the darkened church? Can you see their smiles as the exultet is sung and the resurrection is proclaimed in a sudden blaze of light? Can you see their laughter at the startling preaching of Chrysostom's Easter sermon? Can you imagine that laughter erupting again, spontaneously, at the renewal of baptismal vows and the asperges with water? Can you hear the chatter and imagine the hugs and kisses of renunion at the greeting of peace? Can you imagine the smiles of satisfaction and gratefulness as the sacrament is placed in human hands for the first time in many, many months? And the champagne, and the cake, and the general merriment afterward?  It would be an Easter like none other in living memory. It would be the Easter you can have if you've rediscovered Lent. Really rediscovered it. Like finding a treasure so incomparable in a field that you are willing to sell everything you have to obtain it.

Now, there is nothing more certain than my losing this particular argument on the grounds of historical precedent in time of plague, or else the necessity and duty of conservatism when discussing liturgical change. Some might argue, pragmatically, that there is no prospect in contemporary times of our calling an ecumencial council with sufficient authority to change the rules. Still, there is occasionally some truth in small voices that speak to almost no-one out there on the edge of the wilderness . . .

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2020

Easter in Ordinary

Acts 2. 14, 36-41; Psalm 116.1-4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1.17-23; Luke 24.13-35

Well the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies.  And they remind us of the new life which came with Christ’s resurrection, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.  And we get up early on Easter morn and sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs and Easter bunnies.  And, well, the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen' with hearts full of joy, and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies and . . .  do you get the feeling that I’m going around in circles?  Do you get the feeling that the record is stuck, and you’ve heard it all before? 

Friends, what I have done just now is reflect back to you what I myself hear at Easter time just about every year.  I hear the resurrection of Christ being tied to the cycles of nature, to the return of fertility, to the flowering of flora and fauna in the European springtime.  For that is what the theology of the resurrection has become in our culture: an affirmation of the Eternal Return of that which we saw last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on.  Here the Christian meaning of the resurrection has been collapsed into that old pagan celebration of Oestre, the Anglo-Saxon god of fertility, whose advent is celebrated with the cyclic return of the sun to warm the world and awaken the life that lays dormant in the soil.   This Easter celebrates what Nietzsche called ‘the eternal return of the Same’, the irrepressible tendency of nature to repair and replace itself; but more seriously, of human beings to want what they have always wanted, to believe what they have always believed, and to know what they have always known.  It is an Easter in which the rhetoric of ‘new life’ is just a figure of speech, because nothing new is really possible.  The circle returns, endlessly, to where it began.  Which makes me think that perhaps the best symbol of this modern Easter is not even the fertile bunny or the egg of new life, but the Big Mac.  Because each time you have one, it tastes exactly the same as the one you had last time.

Of course, the Feast of the Resurrection has absolutely nothing, nothing I say, to do with the Eternal Return which is 'Easter'.  On the contrary, the resurrection of Jesus is about the in-breaking of something which is so new, so different, so unheard of, that, strictly speaking, we cannot even describe it.  It is, as Jürgen Moltmann says, an event entirely without comparison or analogy.  It is an event which shatters every established pattern, every expectation, every shred of comfort and certainty we may have had about the way things are.   It is like the T-Shirt which I bought at a U2 concert a few years back which said “Everything You Know is Wrong”.  It is the explosion within Sameness of a reality which is totally and radically other than anything that we could ever think or imagine:  it is the arrival of God.  And the purpose of this interruption?  To change things.  To change things so entirely that we will never again become captive to all that is predictable, or ‘necessary,’ or ‘fated’.  When Christ rises he does not rise, like Lazarus, to a life lived as it had been lived before.  When Christ rises, he rends not only our hearts, as Peter says in his Pentecostal sermon, but also the very fabric of the way things have always been, so that God’s creatures may never be slaves to the Same ever again.

Here we find ourselves inside Luke’s story of the Emmaus road.  Like us, the travelling companions live in that time after the resurrection.  The women had been to the tomb and witnessed its emptiness, but scarcely able to understand what had happened themselves, find that they cannot make themselves understood amongst their male companions, who remain trapped inside their cycle of despair.  And that is where we find the companions as they begin their journey.  Like many of us, they had lived though a cycling of highs and lows: their messianic hope had been shattered on a Roman cross.  Yet it is here, within the circle of despair, that the Christ chooses to meet them. 

Now, having joined them, Jesus, listens to their woes.  We would expect that of him, would we not?  But then he does something rather surprising.  He begins to preach to them from the Scriptures, but not in the mode of most of the sermon’s I’ve heard, which do little more than confirm and comfort me in circle of that which I already know.   No, this is a profoundly dis-confirming preaching, which first castigates them for their lack of faith in the prophets, and then proceeds to deconstruct their Scriptural knowledge so radically that the meaning of the same is utterly and irreversibly altered.  The results were, I imagine, terrifying.  Suddenly the disciples begin to see that everything they had ever known and believed was wrong.  Yet despite the upset, there is something in what Jesus says that compels them to hang onto him. 

So when they urge Jesus to join them for the evening meal, he consents to do so.  And there he does something which really dislodges their expectations.  In a careful repetition of what he had done at the last supper, Jesus takes bread, says a prayer of blessing, and breaks it so that all gathered may eat.  At that moment, we are told, the companion’s eyes are opened.  They recognise that the stranger is Jesus, their friend, the crucified one.  And yet he is not that one.  He is radically different.  He is risen.  If that isn’t weird enough, Luke then tells us that in that precise moment of recognition, at that very nano-second, Jesus then vanishes from their sight and is seen no more. 

Turning to each other in wonder and excitement, the disciples declare to each other the way in which their hearts were ‘burning’ within them when they heard the word preached.  Note the word: ‘burned,’ as in purged by a bushfire, not ‘warmed’, as by a cosy open fire on a winter’s night.  The disciples rise from where they are and return to the place of despair and forlorn logic from which they came.  They return to Jerusalem with a distinct and special mission:  to declare and confirm that Christ had indeed been raised, and that he had make himself known to them in the breaking of bread.  Which is to say, they returned to Jerusalem to dis-confirm the logic of the Same which held sway there, to interrupt and fragment its omnipotent power by the burning presence of all they had glimpsed in the risen Christ.

Now, this is a strange and wondrous story by any standard.  So strange and wonderful that I am certain that almost everything I intend in speaking about it tonight is not quite right.  But this is how it is with the resurrected Christ.  He comes to us as the word that is strange and in/credible, not conforming to the logic of what we know and experience to be real and trustworthy.  He comes to us not to confirm what we know or to reinforce our sense of what is good and noble and true.  He comes to change all that, to show us, in the blazing light of his risen glory, that the Eternal Return of the same is killing us.  Slowly killing us, but killing us all the same.  And who can doubt this word?  Hasn’t life become genuinely banal for us in this neo-pagan world of circles?  Hemmingway wrote famously that most people live lives of “quiet desperation”.  He was writing about himself, of course, a man who was constantly on the look-out for new experience, something which might cut across the boredom of his life.  The writer of Ecclesiastes complains that all is ‘vanity’, by which he means that human beings, despite all their apparent thirst for experience, tend to look only for that which may be easily integrated into the logic and the framework which is always already there.  But Christ is raised to shatter that logic, to undo the idolatrous gaze that works such vanity into all that is seen and touched and felt.  Christ is raised to set us free from such a thing.

This I believe, and this I declare to you today.  But I want you to note two important implications of this belief.  And these reflections are guided directly by Luke’s text.  First, resurrection belief is sustainable only if one believes what Luke says about the disappearance of Christ at the very moment that we recognise him.  Remember what we heard from Moltmann. The resurrection is an event without analogy.  No matter how much we try to understand and describe him, the risen Christ will always and everywhere elude and elide our grasp.  We see him as in a glass darkly; he is a flash of light at the corner of our eyes, which, if we turn to take squarely into the full ambit of our gaze, will disappear into invisibility.  The Celtic tradition speaks of the Christ who always comes in the guise of the stranger, a stranger who is gone even before one realises who he was.  In precisely that mode, the Emmaus story tells us that no matter how ingenious our resurrection accounts and theologies become, they will certainly not secure a Christ who may be domesticated for our own use and purpose. 

Which leads into my second point, and a rather perplexing one at that.  Perhaps you will have noticed how Luke structures his story after the model of a first century worship service?  First there is a Gathering of companions, who come immediately from the circle of despair, and they are joined there by Christ.  Then there is a Service of the Word, a recounting of the Scriptures and a preaching; and it is Christ himself who does this; yet he is not recognised by those who hear.  Then there is a Eucharist, where Christ is again the anonymous presider who breaks bread, blesses, and share it with his companions.  And then there is a Mission.  The disciples, having finally discerned the risen Christ, are then driven out by the burning in their hearts to dis-confirm and question the logic of the world from which they came.  What is Luke telling us in all this?  Simply this: that the risen Christ ministers to us in the gathered worship of the Christian church.  That he reveals himself to us in the reading of Scripture, the preaching of the word, and in the breaking of the bread. 

But how can this be?  How is it that this ordinary human language of worship may become the language of Christ?  Didn’t I just say to you that Christ comes to interrupt our language and to un-say all that we might say of him!  Well, there is a great mystery here, a mystery very much at the heart of everything I am trying to do in my own journey through life.  And a mystery tied very much to the mystery of Christ himself, who, in the incarnation, is said to be God in an ordinary human life.  Perhaps all that one may say about this mystery is something like this:  That in the human language of Christian worship, Christ himself arrives in the midst.  Not to confirm what we intend to say, but rather to so dispossess our symbols of the meaning we intend, that, somehow, even as we say it, we hear it said back to us with a meaning not our own, in an inflection and tongue not our own, so that our hearts burn with confusion, and terror, but ultimately with the holy joy of people who are being liberated from their bondage to the same old thing. 

I pray to God that Christ may do just that, even with what I have said to you this morning.  Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus, come!

I want to acknowledge the work of three other theologians of the resurrection in the composition of this sermon: Ebarhard Jungel, Jean-Luc Marion and Nicholas Lash.

Christ is risen to heal the world

Texts: Romans 6.3-12; Matthew 28.1-10

Tonight we celebrate the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, an event that - in the faith of the church – bears no comparison or analogy within the ordinary space and time of this world.  It is an event that has happened only once, and will never happen again in exactly the same way.  The resurrection is so unique, in fact, so singular in its eventfulness, that we are able to say a lot more about what it is not, than we are about what it is.  That’s just how it is when God decides to change world.  The old rules no longer apply, even the laws of biology or physics, and suddenly what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong!

Amongst the many things that the resurrection is not, for example, is a resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus.  We know this because, according to the eye-witnesses, the risen Jesus’ body does not behave like a re-animated body should. It can change its basic appearance, so that even the closest friends of Jesus do not recognise who he is. It can appear and disappear from sight, at once here and then somewhere else in an instant. It can walk through walls. It can even ascend into the air.  Resuscitated bodies don’t do that stuff.

Another thing that the resurrection is not, is a moment of re-birth or re-turn in the cycle of life as we know it.  This may be bad news for those of you who take Bunnies and eggs to be legitimate symbols of ‘Easter’.  Because actually they are symbols of a certain kind of Easter, the pagan ‘Easter’, the Easter that is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility, Oestre.  This Easter celebrates, and is actually all about the turning of the agricultural seasons through autumn, winter, spring and summer.  This Easter is about the re-birth of light and life and fertility after a long fallow, enwombed, winter.  It is the Easter that the ancient Christian missionaries sought to overcome, but never did, because here we are in the midst of a bunny-and-egg obsessed culture in the southern hemisphere, which celebrates such things according to the northern agricultural cycle!  Such is the strength of the pagan myth!

Enough, then, of what the resurrection is not.  Allow me to explore something of what the resurrection is.  Tonight's gospel reading shows us that in the face of the resurrection of Christ, the theologian must become a poet.  When he speaks of the resurrection, Matthew does not speak of the thing itself, but only its effects.  This is to invoke what the English poet, Percy Shelley, called ‘negative capability’, the capability of a event that we cannot directly see, touch, taste, smell  or hear, to nevertheless produce effects that we can sense and interpret.  In Matthew’s account, the resurrection is something that happens in the dead of night, the dead of this night (but without the benefit of coal-fire electricity and street lamps).  The darkness represents an event that cannot be witnessed directly, like a nuclear explosion, or the implosion of a vast star into a tiny singularity.  Matthew wants to insist, nevertheless, that the event is very real and that its effects are profound.  That is why he invokes the image of the Angel who brings lighting and an earthquake to unlock the tomb and let the dead Christ free; that is why he speaks of an Angel who is, himself, bright, swift, and devastating as lightening.  The Angel is an image from Jewish apocalyptic literature, a literature that seeks to bear witness to things hidden since the foundation of the world, to represent, though the hyperbolic devices of poetry, the revolutionary action of a God whose actions so fundamentally change the rules that whatever rules we are working with are for ever playing catch-up.

Let us then, like Matthew himself, confine ourselves to speaking of the risen Jesus in terms of his revolutionary effects. The first thing to say is that Jesus is risen to trans-value every value, to re-value, in fact, every thing and every person that is considered mere rubbish by the powers that rule our world. Christ is raised to go before us into Galilee, the Galilee of where we happen to live, the Galilee of Melbourne, shall we say.  Christ is risen to effect in that Galilee a revolution of values whereby those who are called ‘sinners’ become saints and those who are called ‘saints’ or ‘models of virtue’ are shown, in fact, to be sinners.  Christ is risen to give life and worth to anyone generally considered to be either ‘dead’ or ‘worthless’, like aborted babies and the severely disabled, locked away from public view (as they are) in institutions, in order to protect the general public from distress.  Christ is risen to reveal that the many who claim to be  really ‘alive’ and living the good life are already dead, dead inside, living only on the phantasmal power of their insatiable desire and wishful thinking.   Christ is risen to raise the least important people of all, whether they are children or seekers of asylum or whatever, to membership in the royal household of God.  Christ is raised to shine a light on the so-called ‘leaders’ who rule it over us, to show that their care, in far too many cases, is only for themselves.  Christ is risen, finally to reveal that many whom this world considers wise (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) are nothing more than ranting fools, while the so-called ‘fools’ of this world, those who live out a simple faith in the God who is love, are actually wiser than any mind can measure or equation can tell.

Even more than this, Christ is raised to create a new world, a new universe.  Christ is raised to effect a revolutionary transfiguration in the very cosmos we inhabit.  His crucified and risen body straddles, you see, both this universe - the universe think we know - and the new creation to come that God has promised.  Through his body broken on the cross, Christ has opened a conduit, a portal if you like (you Harry Potter fans, you), into this new cosmos, where the rules have been changed so that the power to kill and to break, to maim and destroy, has been rendered as nothing.  There, it is only the love of God shown in this crucified Son that prevails.  In this perspective, the day of resurrection is simultaneously the last day of this creation, and the first day of a new creation.  What happens now is that the new will unfold within the old, until this world has finally fulfilled its purpose: to find sons and daughters for the God who is love.

Note that while the portal has indeed been opened in the risen body of Crucified, the purpose was never to suddenly transport us to that world - immediately and instantaneously - but to create, instead, a colony of witness in this world for the world that is coming but has not yet arrived.  That is what Matthew’s talk of evangelism is about.  You know, the woman being sent to tell the men, and the men being sent, with the women, into Galilee to wait for and bear witness to the resurrected Christ.  ‘In the resurrection of Jesus the new creation has indeed arrived’: that is the substance of their message.  But there is more.  ‘To everyone who believes in our message, Christ will grant a key to the portal of life, that everyone who believes may experience the liberating power of the new creation, even before it has fully arrived!’  This is the promise of the risen Christ to all who would believe.  To every soul who is willing to die with Christ to the hateful values of this world and its values.   To every soul who would submit to Christ’s teaching and allow his or her self to be undone by it.  To every soul who is willing to be broken and remade after the image of the Crucified. Christ is risen, friends, to do nothing less than heal and transform both our selves and our world into a place of goodness and beauty. A world like the one that is to come.

That he does so in a mysterious and rather hidden way goes with the territory.  For the story of Jesus told by Matthew is not, in the final analysis, the story of two worlds, one that comes before the resurrection and one that comes after.  It is the story of an ordinary and not particularly powerful man who is always already - from the beginning of the story to its end - a visitor from the new creation, whose only power is the power of love.  If he was to take Galilee or Melbourne or anywhere by storm, with weapons and armies to effect his will in a campaign of shock and awe, this would be to contradict everything that his Father, the God who is love, is on about.  Instead, in the gospel story, he takes a route at once more subtle and far more powerful: the strange and hidden way of friendship, servanthood and loving sacrifice.  And we who have died with him in baptism are called to do exactly the same: in every thought, in every deed, in every relationship, in every moment; trusting not to the power of this world, the power of our ferocious self-protection or self-interest, but to the hidden power of self-giving love that flows from God’s future, through the portal of Christ’s crucified and risen body, into the hands, the feet, the faces and the voices gathered thus on this night of revolution.  To the church, which is Christ’s very body - crucified and risen, like him, for the healing of the world. 

Christ is risen.  Hallelujah!

Holy Week and the Great Three Days of Easter - an introduction for the uninitiated

Christianity’s most important festival occurs each year in Holy Week (sometimes called 'passiontide') and the first day of the Paschal (Easter) season. Beginning with Palm/Passion Sunday, Holy Week commemorates the last week of Jesus’ life. Through a series of public services of worship, Christians everywhere join with Christ as he enters Jerusalem, shares a last meal with his disciples, is arrested, tortured, crucified and buried. Finally, at the Easter Vigil - which takes place sometime after sundown on the evening of Holy Saturday - Christians all over the world gather to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and renew their baptismal promises to follow Christ faithfully.

Palm/Passion Sunday

There are two parts to this opening service of Holy Week. The first part is familiar to most Protestants. It is the Liturgy of the Palms, commemorating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to cries of ‘hosanna’ and the waving of palm branches. The second part of the service is not, perhaps, so familiar. The Liturgy of the Passion is a reading of the whole story of Christ’s suffering and death, which might be interspersed with the extinguishing of candles to symbolise the ebbing away of Christ’s life. Because the service is best completed in almost total darkness, the darkness at the moment of Christ’s death, many gather for this service in the evening.

Maundy Thursday

The Maundy Thursday service commemorates the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples. According to John’s gospel, Jesus took a servant’s towel at the evening meal and washed his disciple’s feet. He did this to show that he had come amongst them as a servant, and that they, too, were called to serve one another. In memory of this event, the liturgy gives opportunity for the worshippers to wash each other’s feet. Afterwards, worshippers share a supper of bread and wine together, in thanksgiving for that first supper or 'eucharist' Jesus shared with his friends. The service is completed with a reading of Psalm 22, which is all about being betrayed by a friend and how an experience like that can cause a person to feel betrayed by God as well. While the Psalm is being read, the church is stripped of all colour and light. In this way, worshippers are prepared to walk with Jesus to Gethsemane, where Jesus is betrayed by his friend Judas through the bitterness of a kiss.

The Maundy Thursday service should not be regarded as an event that stands on its own. It is part of one great act of worship that lasts for three days, in a multi-service rite known as the Paschal Triduum, or Great Three Days of Easter. For that reason, there is no blessing or dismissal at the end of the Thursday event. Instead there is the simple expectation that all will gather again for the events of Great Friday.

Good (and Great) Friday

There are two kinds of service on Good, or Great, Friday. The first, an ecumenical 'Stations' or 'Way of the Cross' procession, has its origins in a private devotional practices from fourth century Rome. There the journey of Christ to Golgotha, carrying his cross, was commemorated by a rhythmic movement of walking, reading and prayer. Today it has become a means by which separated churches may come together to publicly share their sorrow at Christ’s death. An ecumenical Way of the Cross is often planned for the late morning of Good Friday.

The second service of Good Friday may best be celebrated at 3pm, in memory of the hour of Christ’s death (Matt 27.45). This second component of the paschal Triduum incorporates a reading of the story of Christ’s death, a series of ‘reproaches’ as from God the Father towards a world that would crucify his son, and a final movement of silent prayer that is known, traditionally, as the ‘veneration of the cross’. Here a great wooden cross is laid on the floor of the church and people are invited to stand or kneel before it, to touch the cross and offer their prayers of penitence and thanksgiving for Christ’s great sacrifice. Many church traditions have no eucharist on Good Friday because the period between the Supper on Thursday evening and the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening is a fast.  In those churches that cannot abide a fast, the eucharist is sometimes celebrated silently, or in an abbreviated form, using the blessed symbols from the night before.  In any case, this service can be very, very moving. Again, there is no dismissal or blessing at the end of the service. Instead, the participants are invited to continue their worship at the final component of the Triduum, The Great Vigil of Easter.

Great and Holy Saturday (The descent to Hell)

The Western Church has always been a little perplexed about what to do with Holy Saturday, and especially the notion from 1 Peter 4.1-8 that Christ, upon dying, went 'in the Spirit' to all those trapped in the underworld who had not heard the gospel and preached to them that they, like the liviing, might repent.  Again, one should not take such accounts as 'history' but as theology. Peter wants us to know that the gospel is preached to all creation, from its heights to its depths, and all people are called to make a response.  One way to celebrate these themes is to meet on the morning of Holy Saturday around a cross that is layed on the ground with a burial shroud over it. The service then takes the form of morning prayer, except the psalms, prayers and canticles are taken from 'Matins for Great and Holy Saturday' in the Eastern tradition.

The Great Vigil of Pascha (Easter)

The Great Vigil is the most important service of the Christian year because it celebrates what, for Christians, is the central event in human history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The service begins sometime between sundown and dawn with a 'Liturgy of Light'. Worshippers gather outside the church around a fire from which a new Paschal candle is lit. The Paschal (Easter) candle is a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. It burns in the church every Sunday during the fifty days of the Easter season to remind us that Christ is risen.

Following behind the raised candle, worshipers then process into a darkened church where they are seated for the 'Liturgy of the Word', a reading of selected passages from the whole history of God's dealings with humankind. As each reading passes, the worshippers say a prayer and light a new candle. The church gets gradually brighter. At the final reading, an account of the resurrection, all the lights go on, the Easter banners are unfurled, and the congregation rises to sing a joyful song of praise to the God who alone is able to give life to the dead.

What follows is a 'Liturgy of Baptism', in which catechumens who have long been preparing to embrace Christ are finally welcomed into the church through baptism, a washing with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Rising from the water, each new Christian is annointed with oil, as a sign that God's Spirit has now taken up residence in their lives as advocate and guide. Ideally, a bishop can be present to say the prayers of 'confirmation' over them before all the other worshippers - those already baptised - renew the vows made at their own baptisms or confirmations: to turn from evil and to follow Christ, and to live in the faith of the church. The congregation is sprinkled with water as a sign of renewal in that vocation and mission.

Finally, worshippers share the 'Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper' as a sign that Christ is for ever amongst his people as the crucified and risen one, feeding and nurturing them for their mission in the world. The newly baptised joyfully receive the supper for the very first time! A blessing and dismissal indicates that the Paschal Triduum is now over. At this point, the champagne often flows very freely indeed!

Feast of the Resurrection (or Pascha)

A morning service on Easter Day can be relatively informal. Because many worshippers will have been up late the night before, this service may be built around a breakfast meal of bread, fish and wine. This mode of doing thing commemorates St. John’s account of the appearance of the risen Jesus to seven of his disciples on the beach of Lake Galilee where they were fishing (Jn 21). Worshippers may be invited to bring some bread, fish and wine (or grape-juice, if you prefer) to share with others. The service includes the ancient greeting ‘Christ is risen: He is risen indeed!’ and there are stories, prayers and Easter hymns aplenty. This is a morning of great joy and celebration at the new hope of resurrection. The celebrations continue over the next 50 days until Pentecost, which commemorates the giving of the Spirit of Christ at his ascension to the right hand of his Father. This is the season par excellence for the celebration of baptisms and various ceremonies of renewal in faith.

A final word about 'Christian' and 'Pagan' versions of Easter

You may have noticed that there is no mention in any of these specifically Christian forms of Easter worship of either eggs or bunnies. Some may find that surprising. In fact, the celebration of Easter using eggs and bunnies owes far more to pre-Christian Europe than to Christianity. The pagan celebration of Easter was essentially about the turning of the seasons from the dark of winter to the brightness of spring and the new harvest this would make possible. For pagans Easter was, and is, essentially a celebration of the returning fertility of the earth every year at springtime. In this context, symbols of fertility such as eggs and rabbits make perfect sense.

The Christian Easter celebrates something rather different, however. For Christians, the risen Christ is not simply another version of the 'Corn King' (C.S. Lewis' phrase) - a god or goddess who returns to life when the earth has been warmed by the spring sun in order to bless the fertility of the earth and guarantee a successful harvest. Christ is not, in this sense, an 'eternal return' (Nietzsche) of that which we have come to expect on an annual basis: the eternal fecundity of the earth, and a symbol of our endless capacity to become what we have always expected we can become as human beings. No. Christ is something more than this. Christ is the arrival, within human history, of something which neither nature nor history could produce on its own, from its own cycles or resources, as it were. Christ is the arrival of something genuinely new: a new idea, a new creation, a new way to live.

For in Christ, so Christians believe, God has acted to liberate human beings from the despair of their eternally cyclic imaginations. To the cry of the wise: 'there is nothing new under the sun', God poses not a confirming answer but an eternal question: 'What kind of world would be made if you abandon yourselves, your resources, your imaginations and allow yourselves to be re-made - from the outside in - in the image of this human being from another time and place, this Christ?' For what does the risen Christ mean, for Christians, if not the arrival within the possible of that which is not, strictly, possible: life, where there was only death; light, where there was only darkness; peace, where there was only conflict; hope, where there was only despair; purpose and vocation, where there was only accident? For Christians, then, the resurrection of Christ is nothing less than the contradiction of every expectation built on the principle of the 'eternal return'. It is the shattering of every pattern or model built on what has happened before. It is the beginning of a future which is genuinely new, genuinely revolutionary. SO new, SO revolutionary that we can barely glimpse its import.

For me, that is good news. Because I am tired of iterations that never solve anything, answers that simply confirm what we already think we know, solutions that never really worked in the first place. It is the good news that it is God who can save us. We are no longer condemned to save ourselves.

A holy Passiontide and joyful Paschal season to you all!

What's all this LENT stuff about, anyway?

Most of the Christian churches worship God within an ecumenically agreed pattern of biblical readings and sacred seasons known as the liturgical year. With its origins in Jewish festivals like Passover and Pentecost – which commemorate the most important events in Jewish salvation history – the Christian year is the Church’s annual pilgrimage into the significance of Christ’s saving life, death, resurrection and ascension for our time and every time. It is nothing less, therefore, than a theological interpretation of reality as a whole.

Lent (a word which simply means ‘spring’ in old Germanic, and is therefore somewhat anachronistic in this part of the world) is a season of preparation for Easter. Lasting for 40 days (excluding Sundays, which are always a ‘little Easter’), it is the time when enquirers into the faith are enrolled as candidates for baptism and enter their final preparations. Candidates are called to imitate Christ’s time in the wilderness as he prepared for ministry and faced the many demonic temptations of his age. At another level, they are called to join Jesus in an imaginative pilgrimage from Galilee to Jerusalem, where everything is lost, but far more is found.

Lent is also the time when the whole church is called to return to the watersof baptism and discern therein, again and again, the precise form its radical obedience to God ought to take for the year at hand. For baptism, to which the whole season points and for which it prepares, is at once the death of Christ and the death of his followers. It is our death to all that would maim and destroy on God’s hallowed earth; it is Christ’s exorcism of all that can kill the body but can never kill the divine life itself.

In the Great Three Days, which straddle the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter, the church recalls Christ’s baptismal passage from ruin to triumph, from death through hell and into the living hope of resurrection life. In the baptisms that are performed and celebrated as Easter dawns, the church embraces that hope and promises anew to live in the power of the resurrection yet one year more.

As preparation for this great Paschal festival of death and rebirth, Lent is littered with rituals that seek to inspire a fundamental conversion of life. The day before Lent begins – traditionally known as ‘mardigras’ or Shrove Tuesday – is a feast with a particular purpose, the feast one has before a fast or a famine. We mock its significance if we reduce it to either a mere fundraiser or a celebration of sin. It is the feast of plenty that one enters into knowing full well that such feasting is not entirely good for one’s spiritual health. It is the party with your family before you go into the wilderness to fast and pray and seek the face of God. It is the last supper before you take the narrow path that leads to salvation.  ‘Fat Tuesday’ looks, with an appropriate level of apprehension, toward the 40 days of lenten fasting, in which the Christian is called to develop a discipline able to resist the demon gluttony and learn to feast, instead, on the word of God that is able to save us from the fires of our own destruction. It is also about the fast called ‘justice’, by which we are called to become poor, like Christ, that others may be enriched.

Thus, the day after Shrove Tuesday, Lent begins in earnest with the fast known as Ash Wednesday. As the name suggests, the central symbol at work here is that of ashes. Ashes are a biblical symbol of fragility, ruin, and repentance in the face of our greatest evils. Humanity, the ritual suggests, is little more than dust and ashes in the last analysis. Though God has given us a good world, by our choice for greed and gluttony, we destroy each other and burn into nothingness everything that is good or noble or praiseworthy.

The imposition of ashes on one’s forehead, sometimes mixed with baptismal water or chrism oil, reminds us of this uncomfortable but ultimately undeniable fact. The ritual also speaks of the mercy of God by which the truly penitent may be brought to life once more. Ashes we may be, but the grace of Jesus Christ has the power to reanimate even a worthless pile of dust and ashes so that it can become the compost of a better world.

In this, Ash Wednesday is a beginning symbol and anticipation of the Easter event to which Lent is leading. It speaks of our ruin, but also of the possibility of rebirth and renewal through a power in the world that is even stronger than our will-to-destruction: the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Previously published in Crosslight on March 6, 2011.