Abbot Columba McCann: I wonder: when is the last time you threw a tantrum? Can you remember throwing a tantrum, perhaps as a teenager? Imagine a young person is really angry at their parents. When the parents are out he takes some eggs out of the fridge and flings them at the kitchen wall. That feels good! So he goes a little further. He takes a slab of butter and uses it to write obscenities on the kitchen floor. Then he really gets into the swing of it. He slits open a bag of flour and throws it everywhere. Then just to make it even worse he throws sugar on the floor so that it will crackle under his parents’ feet. Finally, to make it all look a bit dirtier, he takes a tin of cocoa and empties it around the room. Then he leaves the house, slams the door and goes off to meet his friends.
Well you can imagine the reaction when the folks get home, faced with utter chaos in their brand new designer kitchen. Pretty awful, to put it mildly.
And yet you have in all that chaos all the right ingredients to make a beautiful chocolate cake. I know because I have made them myself. All you need is to put them together in the right way. And so you create a chocolate cake.
It’s not a million miles away from the description of how God creates, as recounted in the first reading from Genesis. This particular piece of writing, more like a poem than a documentary, is not too interested in ideas like creation out of nothing, or the big bang, or how long it really took, and so on. It’s hard to find the right English words to translate the original Hebrew description of what it was like before God got to work: tohu vavovu. Formless and empty, void, desolate, waste and void, without shape. And it was dark, with some kind of watery mass. All a description of chaos, you might say.
But the breath of God, the Spirit of God was breathing, blowing like a wind over all of this incoherence.
There are chaotic moments in all our lives: moments when things don’t make sense or are empty; moments when you don’t have a clear shape about what is going on; moments when you may feel out of control, where everything is uncertain. But all the ingredients are there, and God is ever-creative.
God brings light into the darkness; God brings order out of chaos; God brings beauty out of wasteland; God brings forth life where there was none. And how? God’s Spirit hovers over everything that happens. And God speaks. When God says ‘Let there be light’, there is light. When God speaks, it happens.
Amid the awfulness and chaos and sheer depravity of what was done to Jesus on Good Friday, the Spirit still hovered. The Spirit raised Jesus from death. The same Spirit hovered over the waters of our baptism. Tonight we baptise John and Sara’s baby: Fionbarra Edward John. The Spirit hovers over him tonight and for the rest of his life. The same Spirit accompanies us. The word of God continues to speak. Every time we hear the voice of Christ and respond, God continues to create in us and through us. Every time we respond to the words of Jesus with faith, our world becomes a better place. If we keep responding, always open to God’s Spirit, attentive to the presence of Christ, we finally grow up into what we were always intended to be: the image and likeness of God himself.
The amazing fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus is that God, not chaos, always has the last word, and it is always a word of light and life.