Bishop's Easter Message 2007

The three days at the end of Holy Week are often called the Triduum, from the Latin meaning ‘three days’. The three days are, of course, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, and they lead into the great festival of Easter. These three days mark the Christian Passover, and again the word for Passover in both Greek and Latin is pascha – from which we get the word ‘paschal’ as a way of referring to the Easter feast and to Christ as the Paschal Lamb.

All this reminds us that our Christian celebration of this central feast of the Christian Year is rooted in the Jewish celebration of deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and the Exodus journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Behind the Passion narratives of the Gospels lies the annual celebration of the Jewish Passover, the yearly remembrance of the God who delivered his people from slavery – a theme with particular relevance this year when we remember the abolition of the Slave Trade two hundred years ago, and the Christian faith and motivation of William Wilberforce and his friends who succeeded in bringing this about. In Jesus’ day the people of Israel were once more in occupied territory. The Roman Empire was the one super-power of the Mediterranean world and far beyond. Roman law and order brought much promised good. Roman roads enabled swift communication. But like all empires it rode rough-shod over the identities and liberties of those whom it ruled. Just as in our own day it can seem a self-evident truth to the United States and other Western powers that their form of government is the guarantee of liberty, and the system which all will welcome with open arms, but yet this can remain an alien system in the very different cultural background of the Middle East, so Rome was not welcomed by the countries and peoples it occupied. The Exodus story had a resonance in the Palestine of Jesus’ day, just as it did for Martin Luther King, and black Americans and Africans. Deliverance from Egypt, release from slavery, victory over the principalities and powers of this world, were themes then as they are now.

Was Jesus going to lead an uprising? Was he coming to Jerusalem to overthrow the occupying power? Were his rabble of disciples from uncouth Galilee a motley army who would, with the Zealots – and after all Simon the Zealot was one of the Twelve – be the shock troops of a rebellion? Was Palm Sunday with its Hosannas the beginning of an uprising? Some certainly thought so. And the Jewish authorities, with their careful accommodation with the Romans, moved to ensure their accommodation with the Romans would not be jeopardised. One of Jesus’ closest circle, Judas called Iscariot – a member of the Sicarii or bandits – decides enough is enough. He does a deal with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver, and leads a posse of soldiers to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. (Gethesemane means oil-press, and so the Garden of Agony, where Jesus wrestles as to how he is called to act and what he is called to do, is the place where not olives, but the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed, is pressed out). He is led off to trial – before Pilate the Roman Governor. His disciples forsake him and run away, for fear, for safety, for disillusionment – they had been misguided in following this Messiah.

The Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, a corrupt politician with an eye on his future, is presented in the Gospels as a weak and prevaricating man. All he wants – as all too many in power in our own world want – is not to serve the truth but to ensure that he is not supplanted. In St John’s Gospel Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king – does he claim an authority which will put him in opposition to Caesar, to the Roman Emperor. ‘King’, says Jesus ‘is your word. But, yes, he is a king – but not a king in the sense which Pilate understands. If that were the case his servants would be fighting, but the kingdom with which Jesus is concerned is ‘not of this world’. It is not that it has nothing to do with this world, but it is about the rule and authority of God. As Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ The kingdom of God is the rule of God. Jesus before Pilate shows us obedience to that rule as overriding allegiance to earthly rulers and powers. The state is not ultimate. Only God is ultimate. Only God in the end is judge. That is the truth, and so Jesus tells Pilate that it is to witness to the truth that he has come into the world. And Pilate replies – in famous, mocking words – ‘What is truth?’ As Francis Bacon famously wrote, ‘“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’

So Jesus is condemned, and led out to be crucified, and we find what the truth is in that crucified man, with arms outstretched in an embrace of love, nailed to the cross of a criminal – a victim of the corruption of both politics and religion that agree in the words of the High Priest, Caiaphas, that ‘it is expedient that one man die for the people.’ Whatever you do, don’t rock the boat. But the truth of Good Friday, which is truth for all the world, is that what is ultimate is not the political shenanigans of the powerful nor the religious compromises of the devout, but the truth of a love, which St Paul discovered, ‘bears all things, endures all things and hopes all things’ – a love, which that great mediaeval saint, the Lady Julian of Norwich, saw, ‘comes down to the lowest part of our need.’ It is this love which we celebrate on Good Friday we come to the foot of the cross. It is this love which both judges and saves us. God embraces in love, and forgiveness, and mercy, and draws us in that love to share in his own life.

The God whom we see and know in the Cross of Christ is a God who goes further yet. Holy Saturday – the day between Good Friday and Easter – could be said to be the most profound, yet the least observed day in the whole of the Christian calendar. It is the day of darkness, of utter nothingness, the day of the disciples’ total despair. God himself is blotted out from the world. God the source of all life is in the realm of death.

In a moving biblical reflection given to the bishops of the Church of England earlier this year, the Bishop of Sheffield told how he had gone to speak to a sixth form about Good Friday and Easter. He had asked the young people where they thought Jesus was between Good Friday and Easter. One teenage girl put up her hand and answered the bishop’s question. ‘I think he was in deepest hell looking for his friend, Judas.’ It was a breathtaking reply. That is what the love of God is like. That is what God is like. A love that will not let us down and will not let us go, a love that descends into deepest hell for you and for me. Holy Saturday points us insistently to that ‘love so amazing, so divine’ which ‘demands my soul, my life, my all.’ On Holy Saturday that love seemed to be blotted out. On Easter Day that love rose victorious in triumph, so that St Paul can sing, that ‘neither death, nor life, nor things present nor things to come, nor life nor death, nor things in heaven, nor things in earth, can separate us from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ If that is true, if that is the true and firm foundation of our lives, then we can celebrate Easter as the feast of new and eternal life, of the victory of love and grace over sin, and death, and all that is evil. And we can sing ‘Alleluia!’ ‘Praise be to God!’ because we are set free. Our lives are not to be bounded by the posturing and power-broking of the narrow political concerns of this world, nor by the need to possess and find security in possessions, nor by constraining addictions of every kind, nor by an anxious and fretful selfishness, but we are indeed set free into what St Paul calls ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God.’ It is that which we celebrate every Easter – and not just every Easter year by year, but in that weekly Easter Sunday by Sunday, celebrated on the day of resurrection, where we take bread and wine and give thanks in obedience to the Lord’s command, and know the Lord who makes himself known to us as the one who is risen indeed in the breaking of the bread, as he did to his disciples in the Supper at Emmaus. If our world is a world in which Easter has occurred then all is indeed different, all is transformed, and changed, and we are indeed, as St Augustine said, ‘Easter people and “Alleluia!” is our song. The love of God which comes down to the lowest part of our need, is the love which catches us to the heavenly places, to the heart of the God who made us for himself, so that our hearts indeed are restless until they rest in him.

A very happy Easter to you all. May God bless you and keep you and fill you with the joy and peace of his presence.

+GEOFFREY GIBRALTAR