At this time of year I am always faced with the difficult question of who is going to preach at which service during Holy Week and Easter. And because I am responsible for the rota I have first pick. And that choice confronts me each year with the fact that I am inclined not to choose Easter Day, but the more sombre and difficult days preceding it. And that is disturbing. Why do I find it easier to reflect on suffering, and tragedy and betrayal and a fear, which is even so mixed at least with the desire to be courageous? Why do I find it more difficult to preach about what JRR Tolkien called the eucatastrophe’ the sudden joyous and unlooked for turn’ at the end of a story which has not denied the possibility of sorrow, failure and tragedy, but which does deny universal, final defeat because in the end there is only and gloriously a victory a good catastrophe.
It is the quality of eucatastrophe which is beautifully captured in Vaughan Williams setting (in the Five Mystical Songs) of Herbert’s poem Easter’ which begins:
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise.
There is a feeling both in the poem and the music which we can perhaps be shy’ of. I am assuming here that what I notice when it comes to preaching might be a shared experience. Is it the case that in our religious experience we are more attuned to dealing with sadness than with joy? Are we less mature and therefore more uncertain in relation to a joyful experience which might as it were sweep us off our feet and make us behave eccentrically’ even though we might of course be longing for such an experience!
The emotional pattern of Holy Week allows us to explore a variety of feelings. Palm Sunday is a kind of overshadowed’ celebration. We may shout Hosanna’ we may express a longing for salvation the word means Save now!’ But in the background there is a sense of what is to come; it is a picture comparable to the famous photograph of the student confronting the tank in Tienanmen Square. The story moves to the Upper Room and to the sadness of a final intimacy under- girded by uncertainty, betrayal and self deceptive bravura. On Good Friday we are confronted by the clash of what is both deeply personal and politically complex. Jesus has’ to die for political and religious reasons which we can only guess at and theological reasons which were inspired by a subsequent reading of this death in the context of Jewish poetry and prophecy. And yet the story is told in such a way that we can read into it our own experiences of grief and loss and anger. We may find some sort of consolation in the recognition that even the Son of God can die. We may feel that because God is somehow present’ on the cross, so he is still present in the suffering of our world now Jesus is in agony until the end of time’ as Pascal puts it. And that means that though we cannot understand how a God of love can allow’ such things, nevertheless, he consents to endure them with us and so makes them bearable. And that perhaps gives us a feeling of partial hopefulness, a sense that we can go on, that it is indeed worth going on. And then on Holy Saturday there is that curious feeling of tired emptiness that often follows bereavement or failure. We are assured by those who have gone that way before that it wont last, and that we will move on, but to what? That is the question posed by Easter Day. Easter Day is perhaps the greatest challenge to our belief, not rationally because all sorts of ways are available for explaining what happened which we will variously find satisfactory. But in seeking for understanding we are always in danger of loosing the felt meaning the Easter Joy.
If we read on in Herbert’s poem we find an extraordinary conceit’ a daring mix of imagery. The poet instructs his lute to awake to play the Easter music with all its art. And then he says
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.’
Thus Herbert implies that if we do not know the joy of Easter day we will have missed the meaning of Good Friday we will not have seen that the cross was for us’ the expression of something being so powerfully on our side that there is in the end nothing we should fear, no sin we can be defeated by. And that of course is the lesson of Herbert’s other great and best known poem, Love bade me welcome’.
Eucatastrophic joy, welcoming love, the conviction that something is on our side greater than anything that can be against us, that is the message of Easter. There was a bishop of the Church of England, now retired, who from time to time began his Easter day sermon with the words, I want to speak to you today about Christian joy ‘. Those of us who heard him more than once mocked the way in which he said those words; I wonder sometimes whether the fault was in us and not in the words we heard.
With my love and prayers for a joyful Easter,
Father Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker