Minister 's Letter - April 2009
Dear Friends,
"When Easter stops being a surprise, it stops being Easter." (N.T. Wright) What the Christian Church does year after year is to so immerse ourselves in the rigors of Lent and Holy Week that we actually screen out what we know comes next. 40 days of preparation should at least be followed with 40 days of celebration but alas the church in our own culture doesn't do celebration very well.
We reflect on, and mourn, the ruin of the world and the folly of humankind. We look in the mirror and see our own shame and sin. And then we contemplate Jesus' suffering and death at the heart of the whole thing: the place where the arrogance of empire, the frenzy of religion and the betrayal of friends all rush together and do their worst. Faced with all that, it's not hard to bracket out Easter. After all, that's what most of the world does anyway.
"Wait without hope," wrote TS Eliot, "for hope would be hope for the wrong thing." If you frame Easter in the terms of the perceived problem, you belittle it. Whether you think in terms of pie in the sky or a better society, all you get is a happy ending after a sad or sinful story.
And whatever Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing in writing the final sections of their books, they were not telling the story of Jesus' resurrection as a happy ending. They were telling it as a startling new beginning. Easter morning isn't a slow, gentle waking up after the difficult operation. It's the electric shock that brings someone back to life in a whole new way.
That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.
Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds like madness, but this is truly what I saw." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.
It sometimes seems that the church can hardly cope with this any more than the world can. Perhaps that's why, after 40 days of Lent, many churches celebrate Easter for a few hours and then return to normality. But nothing can be "normal" after Easter. New creation has begun, and we are summoned to get on board, but as I say, alas - the church in our own culture is not very good at celebration.
And if Easter is all about the surprise of new creation, there is every reason to suppose that it will ripple out into the world in ways we would never imagine. Frankly, those who are obviously wild and bad are radically converted and set on fire with God's love, whilst drab churches hide behind their warnings against extremism.
Extremism? What can be more extreme than God raising Jesus from the dead after the world has done its worst to him? Supposing the power of that event were to be released into the world, into local communities, into ordinary lives, here and now? What might that look like?
We have no way of telling, of course. That's the point. But I do know this. As we look around at our world, city - our own lives - it looks as though we all know we need new creation but nobody knows where to find it. Easter offers an answer so striking that most mock at it and don't know what to do with it. Forget the trivialities of eggs and the bunnies. Read the Gospels again, say your prayers, turn the music up, and let the party begin!
In Christ,
Christopher White
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