what happens, you don’t read them again), and the great novels and plays near the top (I once knew an octogenarian who read through Shakespeare every year). Thus measured, the passion narratives score highly. The action is swift, the dialogue terse and pregnant. A dozen brilliant human cameos: Jesus and Judas; Peter; Caiaphas; Pilate (and his wife); Barabbas; Simon; the bandits; the mockers; the centurion; the women; and Joseph – each one deserving careful mulling over. The whole drama swirls to and fro with friendship betrayed, new worlds evoked, justice denied, empire appeased, faith insulted, innocence abused. And still we are only in the foothills, aware of the crags looming above us, of the drama’s central character, of the questions he posed for his contemporaries and still poses for us, of his strange words and even stranger silences. Tales of torture and death are always ugly and awesome; this torture, and this death, still provoke thunder and lightning. When Matthew tells us of the earthquake, we somehow feel that nothing less would do. If these events were not pivotal to human destiny, what else could take their place? How can we not reread this tale without ceasing?
The story brings to its head the tale of the strange prophet-Messiah from Nazareth. This itself, in the evangelists’ telling, brings to its climax the entire drama of Israel – which, in Scripture, is the focal point of world history. Here we are offered that which unmakes and remakes the world, ourselves included. Here, could we but scale the crags, is the answer to our deepest questions, our most agonizing longings. And it comes, not as a theory, not as an explanation, but as a story which opens up to embrace or perhaps engulf us, sweeping us off our feet like a giant wave, carrying us off, out of our depth, away on the dark sea of God’s passion. And still the figure at the centre beckons, woos, disturbs, frightens and compels us. Like the Psalms, this story contains all that we are and feel, and lays it bare before the presence of an overmastering love.
Paul, echoing Isaiah, speaks of Jesus’ obedience (to the plan of God; to Adam’s call, and Israel’s) and vindication. Isaiah himself pictures a strange teacher, called to listen, to sustain the weary, and to undergo suffering. Elsewhere (e.g. Romans 8.31–39), Paul with considerable daring applies this same passage to Christians. Those who tell, and live by, the story of the cross may learn to hear between its lines the story of the martyrs, ancient and modern, and the call to take our own share of this world-changing, world-healing, passion. Those who go this way may have to face and suffer much. But they will not be put to shame.
Easter Day
Jeremiah 31.1– 6
Colossians 3.1–4
John 20.1–18
Again you shall plant vineyards; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. Jeremiah echoes Deuteronomy’s promise of covenant renewal, and points forward to John’s Easter garden. Mary was on the right track, mistaking Jesus for the gardener. In typical Johannine irony, he was indeed the gardener (though not the way Mary thought), the true Adam, planting again the vineyard of Israel, bringing God’s people home from the exile of death and sowing them like seed in their new land.
Only imagery like this can begin to do justice to the reality of Easter. Too often the story and its meaning are flattened out into subsidiary truths: a belief in life after death (which most of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries held anyway), or the truth that Jesus is still alive, and we can come to know him. John’s poetic genius tells a larger story through hints and allusions. Easter is the beginning of God’s new creation, new covenant, God’s whole new world. John’s readers are invited to live in that new world, to become partners in the new covenant, to be under-gardeners in the new creation. With the rolling away of the stone, a great door has swung open in human history, and we are summoned to go through, to make our own the undiscovered country on the other side.
Scarcely surprising, then, that the story is full of puzzles. Where were the angels when Peter and John (if it was John) went into the tomb? Could only Mary see them, and if so why? Why did John describe the linen cloths and the headpiece so carefully? And – perhaps most perplexing – why did Jesus forbid Mary to hold on to him? What does his explanation (‘I have not yet ascended’) mean, and how does it relate to his subsequent invitation to Thomas to touch him and see?
The only way of coming to terms with all this is to grasp the nettle. Easter invites us to recognize a new level of being, a new mode of existence. Jesus’ resurrection (unlike Lazarus’s) was not a mere resuscitation. It was a transformation into a new sort of physicality, catching up the old within it but going far beyond. This is a body that somehow lives in earth and heaven simultaneously (easier to imagine when you remind yourself that, in biblical thought, they are complementary and overlapping spheres of God’s created order), though it is sometimes more appropriate to think of it as basically inhabiting one or the other. It is the beginning of that new creation which will only be complete when heaven and earth are finally married. The fact that we are obviously at the borders of language here is no shame. Where else should you be on Easter morning?
Part of the strange truth of Easter is that it is about us, too. ‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ You are already a citizen of the heavenly world. So why still behave as though you weren’t?
The Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.14a, 22–32
1 Peter 1.3–9
John 20.19–31
Jesus’ resurrection scattered new meanings all around, like light reflecting a thousand ways off a priceless jewel. The first thing was the validation of Jesus’ messianic ministry. His powerful deeds had commended him to Israel, but not everyone had believed that God was at work in him. The resurrection unveiled the truth; and the way of getting a handle on it was to tell the scriptural story and to show that it had now reached its dramatic conclusion. The story of David, culled here from various psalms, pointed the way. Nobody could have supposed that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah (despite what some have suggested, there is no pre-Christian evidence that any Jews believed in such a thing); but the resurrection declared, before anything else, that Jesus really was, and is, the Messiah. His life really had been messianic, and God had validated it. Early Christianity was messianic to the core; the explanation was that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
The second meaning that quickly followed was that the Messiah’s followers now shared in God’s new world. We too easily read 1 Peter 1 in terms simply of a supernatural ‘salvation’, the heritage which is ‘kept safe in heaven for you’. But the image is not of us going to heaven to experience it, but of heaven as the celestial cupboard where God keeps the wonderful things that will one day be brought out for all to see. The resurrection has opened up the vista of a whole restored creation, under the saving lordship of the Messiah. This is the heritage that can never go mouldy. And those who belong to the Messiah discover that the new creation has already infected them; the new stirrings of faith, hope and above all joy within them are the signs of this new life, new birth, so that they are simultaneously out of tune with the way the world still is and joyfully in tune with the new world that will appear when Jesus is ‘revealed’. Peter, like Paul in some passages, thinks here of Jesus as present though invisible. The risen Lord will one day be seen again, as he was in the upper room, and those who now love him will find their true selves (their ‘souls’, v. 9, though the word to a Jew hardly carried the disembodied sense it has for us) rescued from the trials that beset them in the present.
John’s
