Death at Easter
This was written for the Church Times in March 2007
Murder has been very much in the news over the last weeks. A man stabbed in a flat in Rhyl, a beautiful young woman visiting Japan found dead in a bath of sand, violent street killings of teenagers. The stuff that nightmares are made of has left fathers weeping in front of television cameras, families in devastating grief, struggling to come to terms with loss. It isn’t just the shock and bereavement; it’s also the injustice of a precious life taken for nothing; the pointlessness of loss.
For these people, even the ones committed to the Christian faith, Easter may well seem particularly far off this year. For the news that ‘death is swallowed up in victory’ is hard to grasp when death is a very present reality and there is little of victory to celebrate. And those whose experience this week is only of suffering and spiritual emptiness, the Christian story with its happy Easter ending can sound like a distant and irrelevant fable.
Sometimes in the church we may, inadvertently, reinforce this. For in our worship and our prayers we can often give the impression that Good Friday is simply something we go through in order to get to Easter Sunday. I have listened to sermons which have focussed on Christ’s death more as a theological necessity than a brutal and isolating reality. Sometimes the implicit message has been that because the ultimate outcome is jubilant, we do not need to get too involved in the psychological details. We hear Christ’s prayer in the Garden, we read the account of his passion, we acknowledge the injustice and barbarity of the crucifixion, for these are all vital chapters of the plot. But then we must move on. For Christ himself cried ‘It is finished’ and our faith does not need to wallow in the pathos and despondency, but rejoice in the triumph of resurrection.
Yet if we move too quickly we risk having a superficial faith, one which deludes itself that it is possible to taste the rich banquet without first drinking the cup of suffering. Even more, we deprive so many people outside the church of a vital route into the presence of God. For those who are not yet able to experience anything of resurrection may need to be brought first to the God who knows pain. Those whose experience is of bitter tears and unrelenting loss may need to find the God who has also experienced abandonment. For what Christ went through at Gethsemene was not play-acting. It was agonising fear, a dread of what lay ahead and a longing for an alternative route. What Christ experienced at Calvary was not a temporary set-back, easily endurable because of the glory that lay ahead. It was nothing other than the sense of deepest desolation.
Good Friday brings us a story of crucifixion which is cosmic in its implications but very personal in its associations. It throws a lifeline to those people whose world falls apart, whose family and friendships are shattered by the coldness and evil they meet in hard places. It relates to those who know what it is to feel utterly Godforsaken, who know how dark it can get in the middle of the day. People who go through their own hour of emptiness and anguish need us to acknowledge the God of Good Friday before they can ever begin to experience Easter Day. For it may be some time yet for them before the earth shakes, the rocks split open, and the grave is shown to be empty.
Cambridge
March 2007
