View From The Pew
by Gerry Hunter
(Posted Apr. 10th, 2000).
By Bishop Michael Ingham.
So few us visit graveyards these days. When I was a child my family would take me for walks on Sunday afternoons, and often we would stroll through our local cemetery. Where I lived every neighbourhood had one. We would look at the headstones, and read the inscriptions, and my parents would tell me about some of the names they recognized, people they had known. I developed a sense that death was natural, and that the dead remained part of our community.
I also learned that the dead were not to be disturbed. A grave is something sacred. To come upon an opened grave, especially the grave of someone you loved, would be a shattering experience. Hard enough to bring yourself there in the first place - especially so soon after that death - but no one could be prepared to meet a gaping hole where a decent stone should be.
That is what happened on Easter morning.
The disciples arrived early to find the stone rolled away from the tomb. There is something repulsive about a gaping tomb, a black darkness indecently exposed, light shining were it is not supposed to be. They must have been horrified, expecting to be met by something unspeakable and foul. It would have occurred to them that the body they loved had somehow been disturbed, perhaps even vandalized. We should not imagine their first reaction was - Alleluia, he is risen! Quite the opposite. They would have feared some atrocity, some further violence visited upon his remains that would not leave him in peace even now, after such a cruel death.
It must have taken great courage to go in. Easter courage.
What are we to make of it - 20 centuries later, when many of us don't even know what are graveyard looks like, let alone a resurrection? Well, the Easter story has many levels of meaning. Let me suggest just three of them.
At one level it is a story about Jesus. It tells us he is alive among us now, that he is with us, alongside us, going before us in ways we cannot yet imagine or understand. Easter tells us that in Jesus there is something qualitatively different - our tradition has called it his divinity - which goes beyond the merely human and transcends the normal boundaries of nature. Easter makes a supernatural claim about Jesus that sets him apart from all other people and sets his name - for Christians - above every other name.
At another level, it tells us about God. It tells us about a God who can open our graves, a love that is as close to us as our own heartbeat, who can drive away our fears, a life-force that can roll away the stones that imprison us in the dark tombs of our lives.
Burial is a powerful image. We know that dying is not just an event at the end of life. It's something that happens along the way. It's the taking away of our lives while we are still living. Somewhere in all of us live graveyards of some sort, places where we have buried our hopes and dreams. Some of us are imprisoned by sadness and loss, and cannot come out.
Some of us are buried beneath guilt and shame that steals away freedom and happiness. Some people bury their conscience in order to secure some goal of success or power and find that it turns to ashes in their grasp. Somewhere in each of us there is a life-force which has become submerged.
Resurrection is the opening of these graves by God, these inner places where we have become lost and helpless. Resurrection is God coming to deliver us from whatever darkness keeps us from living. It happens precisely at those moments when we have no strength to help ourselves, when the stones that shut us in are too heavy to move. We never encounter resurrection except in times of suffering. It is a grace that comes to us in the midst of desolation giving us strength in the face of sorrow.
And at another level Easter tells us something about the universe itself. It tells us that this power of resurrection pervades all existence, everything that is. At the heart of creation there is a goodness that is constantly overwhelming death and bringing forth a new creation.
We live in an extraordinarily complex and expanding universe that is constantly unfolding in new ways, where both death and resurrection are discernible patterns, where extinction and rebirth are mysteriously repeated over and over again in the evolving systems of stars and planets.
It is a pattern that lies at the heart of the universe itself, and it was this which was revealed in Jesus on Easter morning. At the centre of everything there is a God who redeems death, who brings new possibilities out of every kind of destruction, who refuses to provide the grounds for the despair that always rises up from our unopened graves.
New life means taking risks, crossing boundaries that imprison and bury the human spirit, trusting that when we entered these places we will find them full of angels, full of hope and rebirth. Risk-taking requires great confidence in God, great faith in the power of the risen Christ.
I wish you all the Easter courage of the disciples, all the hope of new life that it brings, all the strength of him who is able to lift from your life the burdens that imprison your spirit.
Bp. Michael Ingham
By Gerry Hunter
Bishop Michael Ingham’s Easter Message
We seem to have a new tradition developing here in the Diocese of New Westminster. Last Christmas, our Bishop published a message which offered its readers some new approaches to that sacred feast. As the most sacred feast of the Christian year approaches, we would expect that some alternatives for that feast would be forthcoming from the same source. We have not been disappointed.
Readers of Topic, the diocesan paper, were presented with the latest choices on the front page of the April 2000 issue. They appeared in the Bishop’s Easter message entitled, “Easter Message Of Courage And Hope.”
With a fittingness that becomes more and more evident as one reads the message, it begins with a walk through a graveyard. Indeed, the fittingness is operative on several levels, since the message would serve well as an illustration for Os Guinness’s book, “The Gravedigger Files.” The message writer leads us, naturally enough, to the tomb in the garden on Easter morning. There, he explores some of the “levels of meaning” to the Easter “story” (note: not “event”).
At the first level, the writer explores Jesus. This person is presented as a man about whom “there is something qualitatively different - our tradition has called it his divinity - which goes beyond the merely human and transcends the normal boundaries of nature.” Now this is the first new option for celebrating Easter. We can, it is posited, confer, through the vehicle of our tradition, extraordinary qualities and characteristics upon someone. We can (think of it) even confer divinity! This is much more exciting than hunting Easter eggs, don’t you think? And, it’s about as firmly connected to Christianity, as is that quaint pastime.
There seems to be a glitch in the process, though. What we accomplish is to come up with a mechanism “that sets him apart from all other people and sets his name - for Christians -- above every other name.” It seems the process needs a little work. The Christian Easter is about a Jesus, but this man was given the name (that name is “Lord”), which is above every other name, period. If you choose to explore this option in your Easter observance, you should do so with this in mind, because you’ll come up with a different Jesus.
If you are going to take the above option, it seems you must also take the second option, too. After all, “God, the Father almighty” raised “Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,” but we’re about something else, it seems. Not too worry. The writer offers us “a God, … a life force”. It’s rather disappointing that there’s nothing really new in this option, so we won’t be coming up with anything particularly Christian by choosing it. But really, if you select option 1, you are pretty well stuck with coming up with a god other than the one who revealed himself, even if there’s not much original in the choice. Maybe you could use that god until you get the hang of doing so, and then, in the future, get more creative? I suppose we won’t know until there are a few more festal messages to read. But we have every reason, it seems, to expect to get better at it. What we are trying to make is rather like ourselves, on the showing of the writer. “Somewhere in each of us there is a life-force which has become submerged.” The writer is not asking us to be very ambitious, and perhaps, if we get stumped, we can go look in a mirror for hints on how to proceed.
As the final part of our optional observance, the writer gives us a new setting for it. It’s quite a place. It’s a place where “this power of resurrection pervades all existence.” In this setting, we note, we dispense with the resurrection event, and concern ourselves with “resurrection power.” It’s just as well we came up with something. After all, having made, in option 2, a god much like ourselves, we can’t really incorporate grace into the new scheme of things. Perhaps this is the replacement.
But getting back to the new setting. It’s really quite a place. “At the heart of creation there is a goodness that is constantly overwhelming death and bringing forth a new creation.” “Extinction and rebirth are mysteriously repeated over and over again in the evolving systems of stars and planets.” Very different from the place where the garden event took place on the first Easter. That place, we are told, is going to pass away. Today, there’s a big search on to discover whether or not this will happen in a “big crunch,” or by “heat death,” but no one in it is suggesting it will last forever. So, this new proposed setting sounds very exciting indeed. It has kind of a never-never land feel to it.
So, what will it be for you this year? God, the Eternal Father, raising his only begotten Son, so that when this place passes away, we might be with Him forever? Or the proposed alternative of a self-made Jesus, a life force God, and never-never land? But, choose carefully. I once met a professional football player at a community event. His little boy was with him. Someone asked the lad what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a football player like my Daddy.” His father smiled, and said, “Son, you can’t do both.”
Our choice, too, is a mutually exclusive one.