EASTERING PAIN

EASTERING  PAIN 

The bitter cup is emptied,

The cruel death defied.

Hell’s haunts in mercy visited

That faith might spring again

This Eastertide.

Like sudden dawn in tropic night,

Like children’s laughter

Breaking on the frost,

Like Spring unloosing Winter’s blood  -

This Easter Day

Is brimmed with life

And drunk with light.

Strange ways of God,

That He

Should in tenderness

Take hold of me.

                                    A. S. Lewis

UNDENIABLE FACT

         Jesus was dead. He wasn’t in a faint.; he was dead. And then his body went missing. And the writings are such as to make us say it wasn’t a massive hoax. After all, what have the followers to gain by keeping up a massive hoax. It just brought them pain, torture and death. They became changed people. One minute they are betrayers, deniers, and fugitives; the next minute they’re saying their leader is alive and they’ll go any length for him. And they were sensible people, practised in daily living and work. And then Jesus appeared. He could not be pinned down. Rather, by his “descent into hell”, he had entered the heart of the world, the essence of reality, and turned it inside out. That is why the earth shook and the boulders  split, not being able to contain the Lord of creation who transcended it. Jesus is Lord by nature and conquest ! And the writings about his appearances were from a time when witnesses were still alive and could have been questioned. So, the facts are written down, and in pretty undramatic language so as not to work up an emotion but to call for faith, becoming part of the lives who hear and read them. These facts have been handed down and scrupulously guarded by a community that hasn’t shattered in 2,000 years. On the basis of those facts, we in 1998 form one community in an unbroken line with the believers of the 1st. century, to the very men and women who saw and heard and lived with Christ.

BECKONING ONWARDS

                        The vocabulary of “re-surrection” can be wrongly taken to imply a mere “return” or “coming back” to life, as if Jesus were simply resuscitated or reanimated after his death and burial. That would be to forget how his resurrection meant his entering into an awesome new stage of glory. Jesus has gone through that human experience we call death into a transcendent existence for which there is no adjective in the human dictionary. Christ’s Resurrection hides a meaning that is just beyond us, and what we now perceive is only through a smoked glass. But precisely because it is just ahead of us, it beckons onwards, since we are dealing with the God of Exodus and infinite possibilities, who keeps bringing out of his store ever new things. Lithe and nimble, this Resurrection God confronts our cynical and tired hearts, trapped in tragedy in the middle and muddle of our personal lives. “I’m doing a new thing”, he says. “Come on, courage. Live now in this newness, in this hope as an eternal being. Lay hold on loving, and it will be your crown eternally.”

WOUNDED HEALERS

                        Even after the Resurrection we prefer the keep the cross of the wounded Christ in our churches, for we are a community of wounded and hurt people, needing the Wounded Healer. The church as the re-presentation of Jesus has the mission of walking in the midst of a world wracked with  pain and obsessed with its own self-destructiveness and sin. Having overcome death himself, Jesus knows better than any of us that no human problem  - neither A.I.D.S., nor the bomb, nor the blighting of the environment  -  need paralyse us. He assures us: “I AM the First and the Last and the One who lives.”

EASTERING PAIN

                        To separate the cross from the resurrection is to destroy the central mystery of our faith. The experience of many generations has affirmed the affinity between our pain and the pain of Jesus. Jesus does not always show us the way out of the disappointments of life nor provide an explanation of their meaning. He does, however, fill our suffering with his presence. Suffering  which we refuse to integrate into our lives  works out negatively. This suffering can have many faces: health problems, addictions, career setbacks, political changes, humiliations and betrayals, our spiritual mediocrity, and a host of others. Our disowned negative experiences can stifle our love, hollow our generosity, affect our honesty, and trap us in petty self-absorption. The cross of Christ, perceived in unity with the resurrection, offers  great strength to take on the inevitable and render it fruitful. Thus assumed into the Paschal Mystery, our suffering is also our Eastering.