Fr. Henry O’Shea:
I, Lazarus, have seen the brickwork sky,
Its throne is made of night!
Its salt and lime are drying to the eye,
My wandering…
a sound! a rumble, and a flash of light!
Andrew Fairchild
In exactly two weeks time – despite all current existential terrors and dangers in and from Iran, Ukraine, South Sudan, Washington, Doonbeg and Moscow, just to name a few – we hope to be celebrating the greatest feast of the year – Easter.
Is Easter for us just one of the growing string of bank-holiday weekends here in our country; a chance to gorge on Easter-eggs, get sozzled and/or stoned, eat too much or take a quick break in the Bahamas – or Bundoran – or all of these together?
In the night from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday morning, from the 4th to 5th April we, the Church, will re-tell once again, in the Great Vigil, the wonderful story of what God has done for us in the past, what he is doing now and what he promises for the future. And in re-telling the story, we will re-live it. And in re-living the story we will renew our looking forward to all that it promises.
One of the most stirring readings in the Easter Vigil is the account from the Old Testament Book of Exodus of how Moses led the people of Israel through the Red Sea – as the account says, ‘water to the right of them, water to the left of them’. In the course of subsequent centuries the people of Israel – not to be confused with the present Zionist regime – meditated on this experience and came to realise that this text was not just about a political or historical event. This reading was not just about the rescuing of an oppressed minority from a hostile, unwelcoming environment in Egypt, the land of exile. Rather, they began to see that this account was about God’s leading them into a new way of being with him.
This account was and is about their, about our, being rescued from the Egyptian captivity of an aimless, hopeless and endless circle of human inadequacy, greed, injustice, exploitation, dissatisfaction, despair and fear. This account was and is about a saving of the people of Israel from themselves, the saving of us from ourselves. This account is about their and our being made able to imagine, being made able to believe, being made able to live, being made able to love, and above all, being made able to hope.
In all the gospel passages in the weeks leading up to Easter, we are told something about the mind and workings of the God whose great deeds we are going to sing about this Easter and at all our Easters, including those that happen outside the actual season. And in this singing we are also told about the demanding possibilities opened to us by the mind and workings of this God who, we believe, became man in Jesus Christ. We are reassured that what we might regard as humanly impossible can become incarnationally possible.
Today’s gospel, with the story of the raising of Lazarus, is a kind of preview, showing as it does Christ’s capacity to give life, to be the life of the believer. The writer of the gospel passage has Jesus say: ‘I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me even though they die, they will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’ And then Jesus asks Martha, asks each one of us, ‘Do you believe this?’ And then Jesus goes on to call on the Father in whose power he raises Lazarus to life. This speaks to the Lazarus in all of us.
Remembering that all the readings at Mass have to be listened to through the echo-chamber of their reference to Christ, today’s first reading from the Prophet Ezekiel promises that our graves will be opened, that he will put his Spirit in us and we will live. In the Letter to the Romans St Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, has made his home in us and that it is this Spirit who does give and will give meaning and resurrection to our own living, meaning and resurrection to our own dying.
When Christ promises to settle us in our own land, on the soil of the new Israel of the baptised, he is not promising only a bodily resurrection. He is also promising to bring us – and reminding us that he has already brought us – safely across the Red Sea of the officially nice and holy, bringing us safely across the Red Sea of the any current consensus, safely away from those who want to snatch from us our responsibility for our own lives and hearts – those who want to diminish us, confine us, within the constraints of their own frightened, regulating, essentially tiny minds and shrivelled hearts. We are told that along with this liberation, we are beckoned across to a responsibility which is big-minded, big-hearted, honest, open to the truth; able to recognise that truth with a sensitive and sensitised conscience; able to do that truth.
In the situations in which we find ourselves, one might ask if what has just been said doesn’t sound like so much bluster, bad poetry or whistling in the wind. One thing is sure: this is not a time for glib, superficial answers, fraudulent explanations, not a time for scoring theological or anti-theological points.
The present world crises are proving not just a challenge to do, a challenge to live the truth. All day every day we experience examples of thousands of people risking and even laying down their lives for others. Crises can bring out the best in people. Crises require us to put our hearts and hands and, indeed, our money, where our mouths are. Crises such as the one we are going through in these weeks and months, these Red Seas we are crossing, put things in perspective. Crises challenge us to use our intelligence, ingenuity and generosity to conquer them but also force us to ask ourselves what is really true, what is really valuable, what is really worth living for what is really worth dying for. We are challenged to love our fellow humans not just in a milk-and-water theoretically benevolent way –‘be kind’ – but by doing, or sometimes not-doing; by being there for one another, however much we may differ in areas of belief and aspiration.
As the community of those who are saved from ourselves, from our smallnesses, from our absurdities; as the forgiven community of those rescued by the skin of our teeth from the death of our sins, we Christians try to be worthy of Jesus’s compassionate words, ‘This sickness will end, not in death but in God’s glory, and through it the Son of God will be glorified.’
This is what we are looking forward to singing about at the great Vigil on Holy Saturday night.
O bright the door that leads me back to life!
But, bidden! I must change my sleep for strife!
Thank you, heart-friend!
I thought that you’d forgot!
Who made me breathe, ‘I AM!’ when I was not.
Forgive! I cannot hear, my head’s like snow,
AH! That’s it, ‘loose the man, and let him go!
Andrew Fairchild