BISHOP’S EASTER
MESSAGE, 2009
Is
Easter a noun or a verb? Most of us would, I suspect, say it is a noun. We
might also, if we were interested in the origins of words, go on to say
that our English word ‘Easter’ comes from the name of a pagan goddess of
spring, Eostre. The old Christian name for this festival was ‘the
Christian Passover’, often called simply the Pasch, from the Hebrew word
for the Jewish Passover Festival – hence that mysterious word ‘Paschal’ in
older Easter hymns.
We are used to keeping Holy Week,
starting on Palm Sunday and then moving through the great three days –
Maundy Thursday, when we commemorate the Last Supper, the Institution of
the Eucharist, and Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, the new
commandment (mandatum in Latin which gives the day its name) to
love one another, followed by Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,
and his betrayal by Judas; then on Good Friday, the starkest day in the
Christian Year, we come to the foot of the Cross to contemplate the three
hours of agonising dying, the mockery and the taunts, with the beloved
disciple and Mary the Mother of Jesus and the other women at the foot of
the Cross; and on Holy Saturday, Easter Eve, there is total nothingness,
the life which ‘was the light of men’ blotted out, engulfed in the
darkness of death; and so to the sunburst of the Resurrection on Easter
Day.
Although the early Church marked these
days and their happenings, in the earliest keeping of Easter it was seen
as one great festival and commemoration – the Passover of the Lord. There
were echoes of course of the origins of the Jewish Passover Festival in
the deliverance of God’s people from slavery in Egypt, but the Christian
Passover was greater – it was God’s deliverance of us all from the burden
and chains of sin and death and the powers of evil. The ancient hymns sing
of ‘the glorious battle’, God in Christ in our human nature engaging with
all that imprisons us, and routing the spiritual powers of darkness that
hold us captive. So on Easter Day we sing ‘The fight is o-er, the battle
done’, and of the victorious Christ binding Satan and bringing to an end
the tyranny of sin. He is victorious over death, and it is from the dead
that he is raised.
No one of the Gospels dares to describe
Easter itself, the moment of resurrection, for this cannot be captured in
the description of human words which belong to the old order. At Easter
the new creation breaks through the old order of sin and death, and Christ
– the same Christ – is raised to a new and transfigured life. He is
recognised – but not immediately; the empty tomb points as a sign, and St
John gives us the detail of the folded grave-clothes, for St John wants us
to see that Jesus is not like Lazarus whom he had raised from the dead,
and who then had to be unbound and set free. The resurrection of Jesus is
new life itself, an eternal life which is shared with us as St John again
makes clear by setting his Pentecost on Easter evening, when the Risen
Lord breathes his life-giving Spirit upon the disciples to be their
transforming new life.
It is because of this that Easter is
present, Easter is active, Easter is not something mysterious shut up in
the past, but a new and transforming life given to us. The poet-priest,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, was surely right to make Easter a verb, and to
speak of the Risen Christ ‘eastering in us’, and therefore of Christ
‘playing in ten thousand places, lovely in eyes and limbs not us, to the
Father, through the brightness of men’s faces.’
So St Paul, writing to the Christians of
Corinth, in the great fifteenth chapter of his first letter, makes a clear
and absolute connection between Christ being raised to new life at Easter,
and the sharing of that new life with us. Through our baptism we share in
that resurrection life, which is why Easter was and is the time for
baptism. But Paul also knows that the present reality of Easter looks to a
future reality, the completion and fulfilment of Easter in us at the Last
Day. What was true of Jesus who truly died and was taken into the
nothingness of death will be true for us. ‘As we have worn the likeness of
the man made of dust, so we shall wear the likeness of the heavenly man.’
What is promised is new creation, transformation and change. For
Christians death is not the end, it is not the horizon which closes off
our life; for Christians our horizon is the living Christ, and the hope
that already gives us.
In St Luke’s wonderful and moving story
of the unrecognised Risen Lord meeting two dejected disciples on the way
to the village of Emmaus from Jerusalem, Jesus points them to how the
suffering Messiah was already part of Jewish understanding. They ask the
stranger to come and eat with them, and he sits at table with them. He
takes bread, blesses it, breaks and shares it. ‘Then their eyes were
opened, and they recognised him; but he vanished from their sight.’. In
the Eucharist, in the breaking of bread, Easter comes to us over and over
again. Christ feeds us with his new life, his risen life, that he may
‘evermore dwell in us and we in him.’
May Christ indeed easter in you, and
bring you the joy of his resurrection, his new life, that, like St Paul,
writing to the Christians of Rome you may be convinced ‘that there is
nothing in death or life, in the realm of the spirits or superhuman
powers, in the world as it is, or the world as it shall be, in the forces
of the universe, in heights or depths – nothing in all creation that can
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ ‘Alleluia!
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
+GEOFFREY GIBRALTAR
St. Christopher’s
Anglican Congregation on
the Costa Azahar. 
