Holy Week 2020

Easter Day

John 20.1-18

In a scalding attack on the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, AS Byatt (Byatt) says that however the doctrine may work elsewhere, it is just not English. Setting aside her Fabian intellectualism, I know what she means even if she does not quite know herself, too set on being scathing to reach her usual level of perceptive subtlety. What I think Byatt means is that our way of 'doing' religion, emergent from the bloody forge of Tudor religious politics is, above all, to be civil and uncontroversial. For this reason Queen Elizabeth I tried to soften and then quieten Puritanism, a course of action which, after the Civil War, became an unquestioned tenet of Anglicanism.

By way of example, Byatt portrays an Easter garden in a parish  church and does not quite make the observation that the English have Springed and gardened the Resurrection into a piece of religious pastoral. It is almost as if - and this is me not Byatt - Jesus emerges from the tomb onto lush grass ornamented by a Wordsworthian show of Daffodils, and is greeted not only by angels but also by bouncing bunnies and lovely little lambs, such that our imagination is soft with nursery stories and an idyllic view of the English Spring which conveniently overlooks the poverty of milkmaids and shepherds.

The accounts in the synoptic Gospels are not very different in essence, except for the Lucan account of Emmaus to which we will come at last, full of incomprehension and even fear whereas John has a greater distance from events and is able to tell a much smoother, though certainly not bland, story.

The only real clue to the magnitude of the events described is Matthew's earthquake - perhaps because he is always ready to relate the story of Jesus to events on Mount Sinai, Matthew is very fond of earthquakes - where we get a real sense of drama. But, as I said earlier, Anglicanism is deeply suspicious of drama, and with good reason, which is why the Oxford Movement on the one hand and various Evangelical revivals on the other have stirred such controversy; we like our religion strictly Goldilocks!

But the Resurrection, seen in itself, without the acculturated softness of English pastoralism, is really too hot to handle; this man who was executed bursts out of rock, in an even more improbable trajectory than Lazarus, is known and recognised, confirming everything he said in his conventionally corporeal form. So let us start there. It is a hard thing to say but without the Resurrection nothing makes much sense. Our problem with it, as Christian pragmatists is that it is not only too big and too bold but it makes a promise which is altogether too big for the kind of religion most of us have adopted. We are, too often, social workers comforted by a bit of familiar liturgy; we do not, when it comes down to it, expect all that much of Jesus; we are far from sure about the Resurrection and, consequently, not very sure about "the Resurrection of the body and life everlasting" because we tend to be both Pelagian and Platonic, placing too high a value on good behaviour and pretty well committed to the idea that while our souls will get to something called Heaven, our bodies will not. We have allowed our enthusiasm to be damped down by fastidiousness, equally deeply suspicious of Evangelical enthusiasm and Roman Catholic ceremonial, equally suspicious of emotion and passion, satisfied with mild intellectualism; nothing too clever, of course, as "clever" in English is as dirty a word as "fanatic".

This is why the re-affirmation of faith we make at Easter, echoing the ancient practice of baptising new converts at this Festival, is so important. We are being asked to own up.

I say these things kindly: there is not one who has not, at some time or another, been disappointed -  not least in our Church, holy and spiritual pursuits -  but we must try as hard as we can, in a prayerful and humble way, open to the Holy Spirit, to make God bigger than we estimate rather than smaller; for the Almighty is not an occasional visitor, like a ghost that rattles the window, frightens the credulous and then flits away; the commitment we have to God in Christ is a contract which was written when God willed creation. We are in a permanent state of spiritual thrall but without the Resurrection that can be nothing more than mildly socially helpful, if we are lucky, or onerous.

Sitting at home with my prayer book and my thoughts, I have come to see how easy it is to be overtaken by consensual speech, by a decency of language and physicality about God which is always in danger of forming a symbiotic relationship with our necessarily polite social mores: Shakespeare and the King James Bible; the club and the narthex; tea and cake and bread and wine. There is a time for good manners and a time for challenging theology.

When we come back together we need to be inflamed by the drama, the sheer unlimited power, the Easter light banishing darkness, so that we can bring the good news to those who need it so badly because their lives are permanently stunted with the fear of death. But if we think we will succeed by bringing bourgeois religion to the bourgeois, they will say they have what they need already; and if we attempt to bring bourgeois religion to the poor they will say we have ignored them for too long. We have come to be seen as prosecutors not defenders and to be seen as trapped in the vanity of small difference. If we really mean what we say then we should prodigally scatter what seed we have and stop worrying how big the harvest will be.

It is for this reason that Resurrection must mean hope in both dimensions, in how we understand neighbourliness and how we understand what it means to be followers of the Risen Christ. As I said earlier, we will all understand doctrine slightly differently and our individual and collective obligations will always differ to some extent but we should all unite under the incomprehensibly, irresistibly bright banner of Resurrection hope.