THOUGHTS TO PONDER

Journeying towards the answer

In the story of the Passion, Jesus has moved into Jerusalem through the cheering, palm-waving crowds to the agony of Golgotha, and the sorrow of loss and abandonment. When he was laid in the tomb, to the few who remained even then, it was surely the end.  The end of their hopes and of their dreams of a new creation.  The man who had inspired them, whose friendship had transformed their lives was dead.  Dead and buried.  The loss of a much-loved friend is a sore thing. I think of the questions they must have asked. They’re the same questions that echo down the ages: ‘Why?’  ‘Where is God now?’  ‘What meaning has life now? 

I wonder whether the journey begun at birth in Bethlehem with all the symbolism of light into darkness doesn’t move inexorably towards some kind of answer in the explosion of light on Easter morning.  ‘He is risen!’ we affirm, and the elements proclaim: ’He is risen indeed!’  The powers of death and destruction have been disabled. They could not keep the Lord entombed in darkness. Death has been ‘swallowed up in victory’.

Maybe one of the ways to avoid what Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’, the shallowness of a faith that denies sadness and suffering, is to recall (as we do weekly in our Eucharist) that Calvary preceded Easter morning,  that Jesus knew the depths of human anguish as well as the delight of His Father’s presence. It’s horribly easy to be glib about the glory of Easter, but whatever else it is the celebration of all that is life-affirming and death-defying. It is the fulfilment of the yearning for something more than the mundane, the transient and the distractions of the present.                                

The Scottish hymn-writer, George Matheson, having discovered that he was losing his sight wrote one of the loveliest hymns we have. He had no easy theological answer to the darkness that lay ahead, but he captured with great beauty what was true for him;

‘I trace the rainbow through the rain,

And feel the promise is not vain,

That morn shall tearless be….’

May it be so this Easter season…

Mary McMahon