All of life is Easter: three quotes on Christian feast days

"All our life is a festival. Since we are persuaded that God is present everywhere on all sides, we praise God as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel God's inspiration in all that we do.... Whenever we pay attention to God, every place and every time becomes truly holy."
—Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.7.39.

"So the whole of our lifetime is a festival. For when Paul said, 'Let us keep the feast' [1 Cor 5:7-8], he wasn't referring to the Passover or Pentecost. He was pointing out that all time is a festival for Christians.... For what good thing has not already come to pass? The Son of God was made human for you. He freed you from death and called you to a kingdom. Now that you have gained such good things – and are still gaining them – how can you do anything less than 'keep the feast' all your life? So let no one be downcast about poverty or illness or the cunning of enemies. It is a festival, all of it – our whole lifetime!"
—John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 15.6.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.
—George Herbert, "Easter", from The Temple.

A lived Sunday: resurrection and life

Easter Sunday is going about as expected. At the morning service, my one-year-old son is grumbling about something-or-other, and my daughters are distracted by some churchy activity sheets. During the sermon I sit in the infants room coddling my son, chatting about Sydney and mountains and travel. The preacher seems to say something about newness. I feel vaguely guilty for missing the message, but smile and continue the conversation.

After the sermon has finished, someone up the front comments that “the world has changed.” I wipe my son’s spit from my sleeve. We share in the sacrament. There are a lot of bodies in here today; all of them keen to feast on a bit of bread and wine. By the time the cup comes to us, it is half saliva and half bread—the congregation seems undecided about dipping or drinking—I dunk my chunk of bread into the cup, hoping that there is enough moisture left in there to soften the dry and overhandled corner that I got so that I don’t have to make another appointment with the dentist.

“Christ is risen.”

“He is risen indeed.”

“Toilet Time, kids.”

“You can have one biscuit, but then we need to go.”

There is a new world coming—now arriving and pressing up against ours. They are slowly merging, these two worlds, in an explosion of life, like two water balloons colliding in slow motion.

We drive to a nearby National Trust house for some good old secular bunny spotting and egg hunting. The Spring flowers are taking hold in the expansive gardens. The daffodils peer up at us tentatively as we breeze past them. We find the first bunny. It is flanked by warped mirrors. We take the time to chuckle at our distorted appearances. My oldest daughter stands before the mirror with three humps: the one that somehow shows three simultaneously squashed and stretched reflections. She has that smile of quiet delight that she so often wears. She sees that the world is not on a fixed course, but can be playfully reordered when it reflects a new image. She finds joy in the novel distortion of the given order.

“Can there be any day but this?”

Some bunnies later, we stand in front of the maze. There is a princess in need of rescue in the centre, being watched over by another rabbit. We laugh and run, letting my youngest daughter chart our path. We take every single wrong turn. Each dead end is hilarious—a new start. A return. A new vantage on the world. We turn and run and turn and run. We jump the mud puddles and rescue the princess and shout encouragement to the other souls lost with us in the maze. This chaotic mess of paths designed to frustrate and mislead has us thrilled and beaming.

“Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.”

We drive home eating ice-cream. Dancing down the street, we make our way to our friends’ house for dinner. One of the girls reminds us that “dinner” can mean “lunch” here, so we should call it “tea”. Our friends are Russian, so I doubt it will be a problem. The food is delicious and the conversation is lively. We wander home in the dark, warmed by friendship and cake. The family collapses into their beds as though in a carefully rehearsed synchronised dive.

I sit in silence as the day comes back to me. The preacher made some kind of connection between resurrection and newness. The loveliness of that grimy cup and the icebergs of bread that it bore weighs on my mind. A shared cup is a handled cup, it is not pristine. It strikes me that if newness is newness, then it doesn’t replace the thing itself, but only the oldness of the thing. The Christian hope is not to be made into somebody else, but to live a new life in Christ. It is still life that we live.

George Herbert claimed that there is but one true day, all others being noble attempts. What he did not say is that the day of the resurrection of the Lord—the one true day—has not passed, but has come. Its brightness shines through all the brittle perforations of the world: distorted mirrors, fussy infants, and confounding mazes. Today, God makes this world strangely new. The resurrection is witnessed in the stuff of life. 

Christ is risen, and he comes to us now in the homely cup bearing all the smears of fellowship.

Pilate poses, Christ exposes: an Easter hymn

A hymn from Paddling by the Shore: Hymns of Kim Fabricius (2015).

(Tune: Infant holy)

Pilate poses,
Christ exposes –
power challenged and defied;
Christ appearing,
people jeering –
sin and righteousness collide.
Life the winner,
new creation;
for the sinner
full salvation:
Christ the Lord is crucified!
Christ the Lord is crucified!

‘Midst the shambles
soldiers gamble,
bandits braying at his side;
earth is shaken,
dead awaken
at the dreadful deicide.
An absurd day –
wait! – surprises! –
on the third day
Jesus rises:
Christ the Lord is glorified!
Christ the Lord is glorified!

Stabat Mater: standing beside Mary in Holy Week

Here in Sydney, two of our classically trained seminarians are doing a series of Holy Week performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. If you're in Sydney and would like to come along to a performance, the details are on Facebook. I wrote this short reflection on the Stabat Mater for the programme notes:

Holy Week is more than a memorial. It is a time of participation. We celebrate Holy Week as a way of participating in the great story of Jesus’ rejection, suffering, and death. We are among the crowd that cheers and waves palm branches when Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. We are with Jesus when he shares his last meal with his friends. We share in their astonishment when our Lord stoops down to wash our feet and tells us to do likewise. The next day we join our voices to the crowd that cries out, “Crucify him!” And we are there when Jesus takes up the cross and lays down his life for the ones who have rejected him.

The 13th-century hymn, Stabat Mater, is a powerful expression of our participation in the events of Good Friday. In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus’ mother was standing by the cross as her son hung dying between two criminals (John 19:25-27). The Stabat Mater places us there with Jesus’ mother. We contemplate the cross with her. We see it through her eyes. We shed her tears. Our heart is pierced like hers. We identify with her shattering experience of grief and trust.

The Stabat Mater leads us from the grief of Christ’s mother to the sufferings of Christ himself. As we stand with Mary beneath the cross, we ask that our own lives would be pierced by Christ’s wounds. The hymn invites us, like St Paul, to “bear in our bodies the death of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10). It reminds us that the crucifixion is not just a mournful spectacle observed from a distance. We don’t watch the death of Christ in the same way that we watch a sad movie, shedding a few tears so that we will feel better afterwards.

When we fix our eyes on the crucifixion, we are contemplating the depths of God and the hidden depths of our own lives. The cross reveals the deepest truth about ourselves. It tells us who we really are. It shows us that we are loved; that we are wanted; that our lives have already been fully judged and fully forgiven; that “neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

Composed in the final weeks of his life, as he lay dying from tuberculosis at the age of just 26, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s setting of this hymn is a profound musical exploration of human mortality, grief, solidarity, and ultimate hope. 

If you don't know the hymn, the words are below with their lovely melancholy Latin rhymes. You can see a performance of Pergolesi’s setting here – or better yet, come along and join us for a live performance in Sydney!

I      Stabat mater dolorosa                 The grieving mother stood
juxta crucem lacrimosa                 weeping beside the cross

       dum pendebat filius                      where hung her son.

II    Cuius animam gementem           Her soul, lamenting,

       contristatam ac dolentem             sorrowing and grieving,

       pertransivit gladius.                     pierced by the sword.

III   O quam tristis et afflicta             O how sad and afflicted

       fuit illa benedicta                         was that blessed

       mater unigeniti                             mother of an only son.

IV   Quae moerebat et dolebat           Mourning and grieving

       et tremebat cum videbat              and trembling to behold

       nati peonas incliti.                       the torments of her glorious child.

V    Quis est homo qui non fleret        Who would not weep

       Christi matrem si videret              to see Christ’s mother

       in tanto supplicio?                        in such agony?

       Quis non posset contristari          Who would not grieve with her,

       piam matrem contemplari            looking upon the blessed mother

       dolentum cum filio?                     suffering with her son?

       Pro peccatis suae gentis              For the sins of his people

       vidit Iesum in tormentis              she saw Jesus in torment

       et flagellis subditum.                   and subjected to the scourge.

VI   Vidit suum dulcem natum           She saw her own sweet child

       morientem desolatum                  dying, forsaken,

       dum emisit spiritum.                    as he gave up his spirit.

VII  Eia mater fons amoris                 O Mother, fount of love,

       me sentire vim doloris                 that I may feel the power of sorrow,

       fac ut tecum lugeam.                   let me mourn with you.

VIII Fac ut ardeat cor meum              Let my heart burn

       in amando Christum Deum          with the love of Christ the Lord,

       ut sibi complaceam.                     That I may be pleasing to him.

IX   Sancta mater istud agas               Blessed mother, do this:

       crucufixi fige plagas                     impress the wounds of the Crucified

       cordi meo valide                           firmly upon my heart.

       Tui nati vulnerati                         The precious pains of your wounded

       tam dignati pro me pati                child, suffered for my sake:

       peonas mecum divide.                 share them with me.

       Fac me vere tecum flere              Let me truly weep with you,

       crucifixo condolere                      mourn the Crucified One

       donec ego vixero.                        as long as I live.

       Iuxta crucem tecum stare             To stand with you beside the cross,

       te libenter sociare                         to freely join you in your weeping,

       in planctu desidero.                      this is my desire.

       Virgo virginum praeclara             Virgin, peerless among women,

       Mihi iam no sis amara                  be not now harsh to me:

       Fac me tecum plangere.               grant that I may weep with you;

X    Fac ut portem Christi mortem      That I may bear the death of Christ,

       passionis fac consortem               share his passion,

       et plagas recolere.                        remember his wounds;

       Fac me plagis vulnerari                That I may suffer his wounds,

       cruce hac inebriari                        inebriated by this cross

       ob amorem filii.                            with love for your son.

XI   Inflammatus et accensus              Ablaze and aflame,

       per te virgo sim defensus              may I find a defender

       in die iudicii.                                 on the day of judgement:

       Fac me cruce custodiri                 Guarded by the cross,

       morte Christi praemuniri              armoured by Christ’s death,

       confoveri gratia.                           cherished by grace.

XII  Quando corpus morietur             When the body dies,

       fac ut animae donetur                  may the soul be granted

       paradisi gloria.                             the glory of paradise.

       Amen.                                             Amen.

Jesus: the easter interview

by Kim Fabricius

In these days of risibly, embarrassingly clichéd post-game/match interviews with the victors, imagine the BBC’s Sue Barker at the tomb on Easter Sunday morning…

SB:  Jesus, that was awesome, just awesome.  And that boulder – wow!

JC:  Yes, brilliant, Sue, brilliant. A miracle, really.

SB:  Describe to us your feelings at this moment. 

JC:  To be honest, I’m just happy to be here. It’s so [starting to cry] … the feeling is amazing … [collecting himself] …

SB:  On Friday, we all thought it was finished when you cried out, er, “It’s finished!”

JC:  Me too, Sue. But it isn’t over till it’s over. 

SB:  Satan plays hardball, doesn’t he?  

JC:  He sure does. Satan’s a beast. And at torture and execution the Romans are top-drawer. It was gut-check time. I had to dig deep.

SB:  Defence wins championships.

JC:  It wasn’t about defence, Sue. After all, I was nailed to a cross.

SB:  Still, Jesus, your writhing was terrific.

JC:  I’ve got to thank Peter, my coach, for the writhing. All those dawn whipping sessions – they paid off. No pain, no gain. My wailing could have been better, especially with that crown of thorns, but no excuses. It is what it is.

SB:  And the way you stayed calm when the mob and the two thieves taunted you.

JC:  Just the one, Sue. The other was onside. But, mentally, you’ve got to take the crowd out of the game. At the end of the day, it’s all about character, motivation, focus, doing your job, stepping up to the stake. And faith: you gotta believe.

SB:  You’ve taken a lot of criticism for recent performances: that apocalyptic discourse was weird, and Judas – you’ve got to admit you showed poor judgement about Judas. And at Golgotha, it must have been hard with your mum there.

JC:  Yes and no. Mum has always been a huge support … except for that one time … or two … or maybe three. Come to think of it, she was dead against this gig from the get-go. Still, she’s my mum. Anyway, I’d like to thank her for trying to smuggle the chicken soup past the centurion.

SB:  Anyone else you’d like to thank?

JC:  I’d like to thank my father for raising me.

SB:  Anyone else?

JC:  I’d like to thank my Father for raising me. 

SB:  You just said that.

JC:  No, I mean …

SB:  Jesus, I’m sure everybody is dying to know: what was it like in the tomb? It must have been hell.

JC:  Well, yeah, so to speak. But really, Sue, I couldn’t tell you: I was dead.

SB:  Yes, of course… Anyway, now you’re alive. That’s got to be the greatest come-back of all time.

JC:  Well, I dunno. Lazarus may have something to say about that. And Johnny Cash.

SB:  Always humble, hey Jesus? Look, we’ll let you get back to your fans. Just two more questions: any plans for tonight, and what about the future?

JC:  After the ice bath, an MRI, and a few stitches, I guess me and the lads will have a few carafes. Then a fortnight in the Algarve. Then it’s one patibulum at a time.

SB:  Congratulations on a wonderful win. Ladies and gentlemen, Christus Victor!

[Tumultuous applause.]

On children's participation in the liturgy: some Easter observations

There are many schemes for helping children to participate in worship. I don't want to sound ungrateful. So let me start by acknowledging that I have, at one time or another, been a beneficiary of all these schemes. I bless the Sunday school; I salute the children's pastor; I love all those who know how to tell a good story and sing a good song for my children; I wish them well. I am even willing to forgive the many ecclesiastical colouring-ins and craft-activity thingies that are periodically scraped off the backseat floor of our family car and shovelled into the bin. I will not speak against any of that. But I must confess to feeling uneasy about two broad approaches for dealing with children in church.

The best-loved and most successful approach is what is known as liturgical babysitting. There are many different kinds of liturgical babysitting, but they all follow the same award-winning formula: (1) remove the children from the service at the earliest possible convenience; (2) in a separate room as far from the main worship space as is humanly possible, provide supervised games, crafts, and other activities; (3) don't forget to establish some random points of connection between said activities and something to do with the Bible; (4) finally, shuttle the little treasures back to their parents after the latter have enjoyed an entire hour of that exquisite spiritual bliss that nothing but the temporary deprivation of one's own children can induce. I suppose it would be churlish to criticise a system that is so perfectly calculated to meet the spiritual needs of adult worshippers. Suffice it to say that this approach would be an ideal solution to the problem of children's participation in worship, except for the fact that it involves no participation and no worship.

In reaction to liturgical babysitting, some churches have taken the approach of adapting the entire liturgy to a child's point of view. Bible stories in sandpits, creative responses to the story in paint and play dough, eucharistic juice and cookies – this sort of thing is aimed at getting children to participate for themselves in the great rhythms of the liturgy. There is a lot to be said for this, but there is also a risk of turning the Christian mysteries into a cult of childhood, so that adult participants are infantilised and deprived of the freedom to worship as adults. Anyone who has scoured the underbelly of liberal protestantism will be able to recall one of those grim gatherings at which full-grown adults are exhorted to draw crayon pictures on butcher paper or to exchange infantile remarks about their tenderest feelings. When Our Lord told us to become like little children, he was not referring to crayons and sandpit therapy. And a faith that is not large enough to accommodate growth into a full adult experience does not deserve the respect of children either.

But I have, as I say, been a beneficiary of these schemes. And I trust nobody will cast the first stone without having spent forty or fifty consecutive sleep-deprived Sunday mornings trying to pay attention to the sermon while a brood of offspring are yapping at your heels.

But still. Let me tell you what I observed today.

It was Easter day, and it was not yet dawn. My children and I had spent the previous day at the circus, and we had got home very late. So they were not in optimum operating condition when I shook them awake at five a.m. with the whispered news that Christ is risen. "He is risen indeed," my son growled back at me, with what I thought was a rather petulant emphasis on the word indeed. I dragged the little blighters out to the kitchen. I fortified them with cups of tea and biscuits. Chocolate biscuits, you understand, on account of Easter. Somehow we all got out of our pyjamas into clothes and shoes, and a few minutes later we staggered bleary-eyed off to church for the five-thirty Easter vigil.

Now I will not be giving away any secrets when I inform you that my six-year-old son is not famous for his churchmanship. Not once has he ever been mistaken on the street for a cardinal or for St Francis of Assisi. I say this not to impugn his character but only to explain that the little chap will not sit quietly through a lengthy Easter liturgy at the crack of dawn merely on the principle of the thing. The boy won't just sit there and take it like a man. He has – children are so taxing in this regard – he has to like it at the same time.

And this morning, reader, he liked it. It was not one of these puny compromise liturgies either. It was very Easter, very Anglo-Catholic, the whole shebang. Gathering in the dark around a fire to light the paschal candle. A procession with candles into the dark cold church. The choir and the hymns and the incense. The many many scripture readings. The not-particularly-short homily. The filling of the font and the renewal of baptismal vows. The prayers and the gifts and the sung communion liturgy. The organist doing things on the organ.

The centrepiece of the service was a vast and very beautiful sequence of readings, each followed by a short prayer. When we started at the beginning of Genesis, the world was still buried in darkness. By the time we got to the Gospel it was brightest day; the magpies were warbling their Easter antiphons; the church windows had bloomed with colour. Here is the list of readings in the order that we had them:

• Gen 1:1-2:4a
• Gen 7:1-5, 11-18; 8:6-18; 9:8-13
• Gen 22:1-18
• Ex 14:10-31; 15:20-21
• Isa 54:9-14
• Isa 55:1-11
• Prov 8:1-8, 19-21; 9:4b-6
• Ezek 36:24-28
• Zeph 3:14-20
• Rom 6:3-11
• Antiphonal reading: Ps 114
• Gospel reading: Matt 28:1-10

I haven't tallied up the exact number of verses, but let's just say it was about half the Bible, give or take a few minor prophets. Never would such an audacious feat of reading be attempted in any tailored-for-children program, whether of the liturgical babysitting kind or the paint-and-play-dough variety.

And yet my son – six years old! – a boy! – he liked it. No, that is putting things still too mildly. He had a blast.

But before you start psychoanalysing the little tyke and checking his temperature and whatnot, I will come right out and tell you why he liked it so much. For the reason is very simple. The boy had a candle in his hand. A burning candle. If ever you want to command the full respect of a six-year-old boy, give him Fire. That is the way to a boy's attention, if not to his heart. That is the way to show him that you mean business.

This morning while the readers went on with their heroic reading vigil, while the long Lenten night gave way to a great and dawning joy, my son clutched his candle. He stared longingly into the flame. He stuck his little thumbs into the wet wax and dribbled wax on to his hands. He practised breathing on the flame to make it nearly – but not quite – go out. He counted all the other candles in the room. He sized them up with a professional eye, comparing flame to flame, before finally determining that his own flame was the finest of the lot. And after each reading he punctuated his subtle reveries with the response to the reading: "Amen!"

Later he was also allowed to pour the water into the font when we remembered our baptisms. And I have never seen him pay more attention to the eucharistic mysteries than he did today, when a huge glass bowl full of Easter eggs was placed on one corner of the communion table. My son watched that table like a hawk. He watched it with a candle burning in his hand. From the look of contemplative scrutiny on his little face, you'd have thought he was Thomas Aquinas.

That is how it was this morning. 

It got me wondering about all that time and effort that goes into creating Sunday school programs and inventing the latest whiz-bang child-friendly liturgies – when all this six-year-old boy needed was for somebody to let him hold a candle. 

As far as I can tell, it's not that the liturgy is inherently inhospitable to smaller people. The great symbols of our worship are things that children instinctively love and understand. Indeed, they are such good honest things that even adults can understand them: water, bread, book, flame.

Is it too hard to imagine that children could be encouraged to participate not in some sanctified playgroup in a back room, but in these same symbols, as glorious for their simplicity as for their depth? When my son held his candle on Easter morning and bellowed out the church's great "Amen" after every reading, was he just experiencing a child-friendly version of the real thing? Was his rapt waxy-fingered attention anything less than genuine worship, since even with his limited understanding he was able to draw upon the symbols of faith and to make himself at home within their world of meaning?

And if there had been no hypnotic chocolate Easter eggs on the communion table, would my son still have called out the ancient Easter greeting as I was tucking him into bed tonight? "Christ is risen," he called to me. I had already put out the light. I had turned to leave the room. The paschal call came to me across the lonely gulf that forever separates the adult from the world of children. Across the chasm my son's call reached me. I turned to him and in the half light I saw his expectant face turned up towards me. His eyes waited for the reply. An adult, a man of broken dreams, a barely-believer, I whispered my faith thinly back across the divide, hoping (knowing) somehow my son would have ears to hear me: "He is risen indeed." That was the last and truest thing we said to one another. Then the boy sank into sleep and the man left him there alone, and neither of them knew the things whereof they spoke.

Easter brief

Easter sermon by Kim Fabricius

Text: Mark 16:7 (The Message): “Now – on your way ...”

Well – what are you waiting for?

A Good Friday faith

Good Friday sermon by Kim Fabricius

The crucified Christ puts a question to his church – and the question is this: Is it possible to have a disinterested faith, a faith without strings, a faith held not because it’s to your advantage, because you get something out of it, or because it’s deeply satisfying – indeed, it may be to your disadvantage, a burden, even an affliction – but you hold it because it holds you, grips you, the hand of God around your throat. Can we have such a faith?

Never has the question been more urgent than it is today, when the appeal of the evangelism that is making all the running is precisely that faith is a good personal investment. From the vulgar health-and-wealth gospel in the States to the slick Harrod’s gospel of the Alpha Course, from the personal growth gospel of the late M. Scott Peck to the gospel of self-knowledge of Myers Briggs, from the signs-and-wonders gospel of God TV (“Bam!”) to the gospel of churches with the Colgate Smile and the smell of Ivory Soap, where no one has cancer or depression, a mess of a marriage or a kid on crack – openly or subtly the appeal is that here is an offer too good to refuse, here is a faith that pays, if not in pounds and pence, then in happiness, wholeness, enlightenment, experience, consolation, or whatever it is you happen to be searching for. It’s a commodity gospel for a consumerist culture.

Meanwhile a grim grin spreads across the faces of the masters of suspicion, those sophisticated atheists who charge Christians with sloppy and indulgent thinking, with creating a god in their own image, a fantasy deity who meets my needs and fulfils my wishes. Not the New Atheists, of course – they’re the fleas on the lions of the classical atheists like Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. And don’t they have a point, indeed a prophetic point?

What kind of faith, then, am I commending? An old story the rabbis tell should do the trick. The story of a Jew who escapes the Spanish Inquisition and makes his way, with his wife and child, in a small boat across a stormy sea to a rocky island. A bolt of lightning flashes and kills his wife. A whirlwind strikes and hurls his child into the sea. Naked, terrified, wretched, lashed by the tempest, the Jew makes his way onto a barren island. And then, raising his hands, he speaks to God.

“God of Israel, … I have fled to this place so that I may serve You in peace, to follow Your commandments and glorify Your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in You. But if You think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to You, my God and the God of my parents, that none of it will help You. You may insult me, You may chastise me, You may take from me the dearest and the best that I have in the world, You may torture me to death – and I will always believe in You, I will love You always and forever – even despite You.”

That, I would suggest, is a Good Friday faith. A God-for-nothing faith in a good-for-nothing God. A God who does not promise me success or reward, a faith that does not underwrite my own religious agenda. In the crucified Jesus we see, as Rowan Williams puts it, that “God becomes recognised as God only at the place of extremity, where no answers seem to be given and God cannot be seen as the God we expect or understand.” In the crucified Jesus we see that faith is a balm only as it is a wound, a blessing only as it is a curse – we learn the lesson of Job, the lesson of Jeremiah, the lesson of the Psalms of lament, the lesson of Israel, the Suffering Servant. Such that all authentic evangelism should include an honest dose of dis-evangelism, and carry a health warning with its welcome.

Yet how is the cross conventionally understood? As a place of heroics, where Jesus goes to the gibbet like Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine. Or as a tragic if necessary but temporary intrusion on the way to the happy ending of Easter, as if it were a gym: “no pain, no gain”. Or as a “power encounter” in which God overcomes evil by superior force, now an energy source into which Christians can tap. Or as an episode in which Christ is humiliated, but don’t worry, he’ll be back – and this time it’s personal. And then there are the various models of the atonement which demonstrate, in neat and tidy categories, why the cross was necessary, QED, the worst exhibiting what James Alison calls “an Aztec imagination”, and even the best what he terms “physics envy”, what with their compulsive need for theory. “Oh, so that’s it, now I get it, now I understand.” The thing is, if you do, you don’t.

I have my own theory as to why these conventional readings of the cross are so widespread, apart, that is, from our endemic vanity and our capitalist cultural captivity: it’s because post WWII Christianity has never come to terms with the Shoah, the Holocaust, that most God-forsaken of historical moments. Which would explain why it is no coincidence that the most penetrating and profound theologies of the cross – though they themselves would, quite rightly, dispute, even resent my tribute – they are the Survivors, and the relatives of Survivors. Indeed my source for that rabbinic tale comes from the most extraordinary, incandescent disruption of a text I’ve read since Elie Wiesel’s Night, 23 pages of spiritual semtex entitled Yosl Rakover Talks to God, set in the Warsaw Ghetto as the Nazi tanks close in for the final kill. One of the last remaining resistance fighters cries out to God just as did the forsaken boat-wrecked Jew in the story: “None of this will avail You! … I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You… ‘Sh’ma Yisroel! Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’” Yosl’s last words. And, of course, the last words of another, more famous Jew, in the face of his own dereliction and death…

So let the Good Friday lesson for us Gentiles, grafted by grace into the vine of Israel, be this: to see the light we must see it at night, experience the darkness of God that covers the land as Christ cries out in the agony of torture and abandonment. We must let go – we must be stripped – of all the personal securities, the traditional pieties, the cherished practices, all the usual landmarks by which we find our way around the religious landscape. We must be dispossessed. We must wait. We must yearn. We must hope. We must trust – trust (inverting Bonhoeffer) that the God who forsakes us is the God who is with us. Here is a faith with nothing in it for me – but Him. Him. Only Him. Truly Him. Always Him.

An unwelcome kindness

Maundy Thursday sermon by Kim Fabricius

John 13:8: Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.”

“Kindness,” wrote the French mathematician and Christian thinker Blaise Pascal, “Kindness is welcome only to the extent that it seems it can be paid back.” If you want a one-sentence explanation of why our first reaction to the Good News of Jesus Christ is one of recoil and refusal, this is it. The Gospel is unwelcome because it is a kindness that can never be paid back. And we don’t like that. We are embarrassed by an absolutely free gift, we only feel comfortable if what we receive is something we think we are owed, or something we think we can in some way return. This was the case in an honour and shame culture like first century Israel, and it is the case in a culture like ours too, where social bonds are regulated by contracts, and personal relationships by mutual consent, a transactional culture that privileges our autonomy and protects us from dependency. In such cultures, Peter’s protest against the kindness of Jesus, a kindness that can never be paid back, a radical kindness that demands nothing – at least nothing that we can calculate – I’ll come back to that – Peter’s protest becomes entirely understandable: “You shall never wash my feet.”

Of course Peter thinks that his demurral is an act of courtesy and respect, done out of deference; but at bottom it is his vanity and pride that are speaking. Peter does not want to be beholden to Jesus, to be in debt to him, to be utterly dependent on him. We are often told that such self-reliance is a virtue, but it is certainly not a Christian virtue. Because a Christian is one who accepts that he is always beholden to Jesus, always in debt to Jesus, always utterly dependent on the Lord. William Temple wrote: “Every disciple and every company of disciples begin by wanting to give service. But every disciple and every company of disciples need to learn that their first duty is to let Christ serve them. Our first thought must never be, ‘What can I do for God?’ The answer to that is, ‘Nothing.’ The first thought must always be, ‘What would God do for me?’”

But, yes, we resist: it’s a thought that is not part of our native human grammar. There is a good illustration of this resistance – and one that resonates with Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet – in an old Peanuts cartoon (and remember its author Schulz was a Methodist lay preacher who knew his Bible). The dog, the beagle Snoopy, comes up to Lucy and gives her a great sloppy “lick of love” on the ear. “Get away from me with your ol’ wet tongue!” Lucy cries in disgust. So Snoopy turns to Lucy’s brother Linus, the kid who’s always got the security blanket. “Hey!” he also cries, “Cut it out! Do you have to be licking people all the time?! If you’re not licking somebody’s hands you’re licking somebody’s feet! Stupid dog!” So Snoopy turns away, forlorn, musing (in the cartoon bubble above his head): “They all resent me because I’m so devoted!”

Just so Peter actually resents Jesus washing his feet – because Jesus is so devoted, selflessly, self-sacrificially devoted. Jesus strips himself and lays aside his garments to wash his friends’ feet, like a slave, even as he will be stripped of his garments and lay down his life for his friends, on a cross, again like a slave. For John, for sure, the foot-washing by Jesus prefigures the crucifixion of Jesus. And, true to form, Peter protests in just the same way at the foot-washing here in the upper room as he did at Jesus’ prediction of his crucifixion at Caesarea Philippi: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” he said then (Matthew 16:22); “Lord, you shall never wash my feet!” he says now. The appearance is humility, the reality is the desire to be in control and secure the social – and political – order of things.

Remember the film Gandhi? There is a scene in it where Gandhi meets with his fellow workers for Indian independence. They meet to talk tactics, but Gandhi, who is both a political and a spiritual leader, goes deeper than tactics, goes to the heart of the matter. He speaks to them of what he calls the “secret of service”, the “religion of service”. And he doesn’t just speak, he acts. Like Jesus when he washes the feet of his friends, Gandhi acts out a parable of service – by stopping a domestic who is serving the tea and taking his tray from him. Gandhi insists on serving his friends himself. And, of course, this takes his colleagues aback – they are horrified at this reversal of roles, at their leader acting the servant – just as Peter was with Messiah Jesus acting the slave. Because it is a humble and humbling thing to do, and – further – because it is done as an example to follow: “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (13:15). They too should act the humble servant, theirs too should be a leadership of service, to the point of … – But that’s just it – there is no knowing where it may lead, this foot-washing and tea-serving, this self-offering, this servanthood, this radical being there for others. Yes, nothing is being demanded of me that I can calculate – but that is precisely what is so staggering, so frightening, so life-threatening, because what is being demanded of me is – me!

Of course human nature rebels and resists – of course – because it means the ultimate overthrow of all human notions of authority and the dangerous backlash such subversion inevitably entails. Matthew 20:25-28 is the perfect commentary – the perfect sermon, if you like – on John 13: “You know that, among the Gentiles, the powerful lord it over them, and the big shots throw their weight around. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Well, our Lord couldn’t have spelled it our any better, though tomorrow he is going to pour it out even more – his life, I mean – totally, in fact – in the ultimate act of self-giving, self-offering, body and soul, where it all ends, where it all ended, really ended. So I’ll shut up. But there is one more thing Jesus will to do tonight, to see his friends through the weekend: as well as clean us, with his body and blood he will feed us.

Letter to a Chinese student, baptised on Easter Sunday

Dear K.,

I don't mind admitting that I'm always a bit worried when I turn up to church on Easter Sunday. Worried that we'll get it all wrong. That there will be no joy, no amazement, no startling sense of the magic of the thing. I worry that the songs will be gloomy museum pieces, the prayers morbidly introspective, the sermon a self-congratulatory piece of apologetics or a few sneering scraps of historical criticism.

I worry that we will sing our songs and pray our prayers and have our tea and biscuits and then all go home afterwards without actually celebrating anything. This worries me especially here, in Australia, where (you will have noticed) we are not very good at celebrating things. On occasions when other people would celebrate, we Australians mill about uncertainly, hands in pockets, vaguely or acutely embarrassed. You can turn up to a wedding, a funeral, the birth of a baby, even Easter Sunday, and you'll always find us standing about like that, exchanging dry remarks about the traffic and the weather, just when we ought to be shouting, weeping, rending our clothes, kissing strangers, firing pistols in the air. We like the idea of celebration, we have heard of it, but it is a language we never learned, and our bodies don't know the rules.

That's why Australians don't do Easter very well. That's why I was worried, as always – half hopeful and half already-depressed – when I turned up to church on Easter Sunday.

Yet there you were, a university student from China. You had come to be baptised.

You looked pretty nervous when they brought you ought in front of everyone. Someone poured water into the big marble font. You made promises. You turned to Christ. You confessed your belief in God the creator, God the redeemer, God the sanctifier. Then you made a profound bow from the waist – we Australians could never bow like that – and water was poured over your heard, three times, your baptism, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Watching all this, I thought we would hear mighty trumpets and see the sky roll up like a scroll. When the water ran down your head I clutched the pew in front of me, expecting earthquakes. When the Name of the Trinity was pronounced I thought it was the end of the world. I expected zombies or something of that order – that all the graves would open and the grinning dead would rise. When you stood up straight and faced us, I thought the last judgment had come. I thought every woman who had ever longed for motherhood would know all of a sudden that she was, miraculously, with child. I thought the violent and the proud and the ones who stir up war would all be cast aside like rag dolls, and the refugees and homeless would be out there dancing in the streets in shining clothes. I thought we would all find out we'd won the lottery and we would all join hands together, and all the children would go home to find their houses made of gingerbread.

But there was nothing like that. Just you, standing there facing us with your wet black hair, your lovely Chinese eyes, smiling. A candle burning on the table. Water dripping on the floor.

I thought: a baptism – a real Easter!

And for one big glad moment I believed everything, Christ's dying and rising, the truest thing that ever happened, I believed it all and saw the truth of it as clear as water, saw it right there written on your face, written all over your baptised body.

I left the church and went out in the dark. Everything was the same, everything was different. I walked under the trees. A car went by. It might have been raining. Right there on the path I danced a little jig. It was Easter Sunday, Christ was risen, you were risen with him, it was the first day of creation, and I felt for all the world like Fred Astaire.

Yours, &c.,

Meeting mystery: an Easter sermon

by Kim Fabricius

A few years ago, just before Easter, I went along to a meeting at the university where a leader from a local church spoke on “The Resurrection of Jesus”. His talk was a tour de force. The sceptics’ arguments against the resurrection – that Jesus hadn’t really died, that the disciples stole the body, that it was all either a hoax or a hallucination – these the speaker roundly refuted. And then, comprehensively marshalling the evidence in favour of the resurrection – the witness of the disciples, and especially the women (you wouldn’t invent the testimony of women in first-century Israel); the conversion of the persecutor Saul into the apostle Paul; the observance of Sunday as the Lord’s Day (not Saturday, the traditional Jewish day of worship); the birth and mission of the church, believers willing to die for their faith – marshalling all this evidence, the speaker claimed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. Frank Morison, an advertising agent turned lawyer, who wrote a best-selling book called Who Moved the Stone?, with its own comprehensive demonstration of the facticity of the resurrection – Morison himself couldn’t have been more persuasive.

I looked around. The audience was very impressed. “Awesome!” they said, openly or tacitly. But in my heart there was no hallelujah. In fact, I felt curiously deflated. Indeed the evening left me feeling as cold as that mobile stone. But why?

Partly, I suppose – not the speaker’s fault – because I’d heard it all before.

Partly, also, because of the way the speaker narrowed the significance of the resurrection of Jesus to life after death – and then to my life after death – which I take to be a rather egotistical reduction of an event so momentous that it embraces the renewal of all creation. Why care about my butt if the rest of the world is going to hell in a handcart?

Then there was the rather unpleasant way the speaker dismissed those Christians who might disagree with him, including some very eminent theologians – he mentioned a couple – whose depths he couldn’t begin to fathom.

But the main reason why for me the talk fell flat is this. It was as if the speaker had it all sorted out; it was as if the resurrection of Jesus were easy. But it’s not! The resurrection is bloody difficult! I don’t mean (if you like) the “technology” of it, I mean the way the resurrection is existentially disturbing, threatening, explosive. Above all, I left the meeting with no sense of mystery, and therefore with no sense of God, because God is mystery, ultimate, irreducible mystery.

Of course the speaker was, in fact, quite representative, doing what we are all tempted to do – me too – when it comes to God: construct the perfect argument, arrive at a definitive answer, achieve theological clarity and closure – Bingo! To extend the legal metaphor, we push ourselves forward as judge and jury to reach a unanimous verdict on how God makes sense. Alas, in trying to make God manageable, in attempting to master the mystery, we turn God into an idol, a deity under our control; at our worst, a god we co-opt for our own religious agenda.

The resurrection of Jesus, however, puts an end to all such self-serving manipulation of God. For note well: the resurrection of Jesus is fundamentally a message about God. “Jesus is alive!” doesn’t quite capture this significance. “Christ is risen!”, because God raised him, does. The subject of the resurrection is God. Indeed Karl Barth called the resurrection “a paraphrase of the word ‘God’”. The resurrection defines who God is: God is the God who raised Jesus from the dead. And in raising Jesus God identifies himself with Jesus and vindicates the cause that got Jesus killed – championing the poor and the shafted, challenging the rich and the powerful, rejecting the way of violence of good guys and bad guys alike.

Are you following me? Not too closely, I hope! For, again, that is the point – the point missing in that talk: the first followers of Jesus couldn’t follow it either! The Easter narratives – they are not straightforward accounts, they are “the witness of the overwhelmed” (Helmut Thielicke). It is not only futile, it is misconceived to treat them as “evidence”, to deploy them to “demonstrate” that the resurrection is a “matter of fact” which any disinterested observer must concede to be the case, such that those who don’t are either pig-headed or big-headed. For Jesus did not become an object of inspection available to anyone, he revealed himself only to those for whom the question of faith had already been raised – and dashed. It’s not that we don’t have history here, but it’s history not as we know it, Spock: it’s history that upends history as we know it.

Examine the Easter narratives. Look at how disjointed, inconsistent, even contradictory they are (a rather obvious fact that the speaker failed to mention). Look at how the writers struggle, tongue-tied, wholly inadequate to the task of articulation, unable to integrate the event into the language of experience. Look, finally, at the first reactions of the witnesses themselves: neither joy, nor relief, nor comprehension, but dread, dumfoundedness, and doubt. Jesus is hardly recognisable, he appears as a stranger, and he remains a resident alien – a mystery – now here, now there – even when the penny finally drops. It’s not “O happy days! It’s just as he said!”, but “Who dat man?!” and “What the hell was that?!” As a character says in a famous story by Flannery O’Connor, “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” As the old spiritual has it, the resurrection, no less than the cross, “causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” If you could feed the data into a human seismograph, you would get an earthquake that goes off the Richter scale. And why?

For one thing, the resurrection of Jesus radically ruptures the natural order of the universe. Everyone dies and dead people stay dead – what is more certain than that? But this provocative Galilean rabbi – he dies alright, but he doesn’t stay dead. Here, in a graveyard in Jerusalem, the world breaks open – and its reordering begins.

For another thing, when, in the iconic film, the Terminator says, “I’ll be back!”, what’s he coming back for? It’s such an ominous promise because he’s returning for payback. Just so in antiquity it was thought that ghosts often appeared to exact revenge, a belief that Shakespeare exploits in Hamlet. And Jesus – of course he’d been stitched up by the Sanhedrin, executed by the Romans, and jeered by the mob, but he’d also been deserted by his disciples. “Jesus is back, no one is safe, lock your doors!” – wouldn’t that be your first reaction? And though they’ll be wrong about Jesus, they’ll be right about themselves: all their weaknesses, failures, sins exposed. The shock of the resurrection is the shock of the unmasking of their stupidity and betrayals. Revealed is a picture that is not pretty: it is humanity’s ugly heart of darkness.

But despite this sordid reality of the human condition – hear the Good News of Easter! – in the face our faithlessness, God remains faithful, his mercy measureless, his grace relentless (God is infinitely resourceful at dealing with ingratitude). And so, after all – but only after all – after being thrown off balance and knocked flat by meeting mystery, we may indeed get up, know the joy of forgiveness, take courage, and – most important of all – Go! Go witness! For that’s the upshot of all encounters with the risen Christ: “Scat! Scoot! Go! Tell! And show what you tell, with your lives, that I’m still here, that I’ll always be here, not un-crucified but risen, still me but more-than-me – me-in-my-church – and so still at it, still revealing to the world what a proper human being and a proper human community look like!”

Enough already! As the King himself said – Elvis I mean!: “A little less conversation, a little more action, please!” So let’s sing, let’s pray, let’s eat. And then: Scram!

Jesus, the Easter bunny, and even more

A delightful sweet short video for children about the meaning of Easter, from Worshiphouse Kids:

Politics of the empty tomb

Some excerpts from Christ the Stranger have been posted as an Easter reflection at the ABC site: Rowan Williams and the politics of the empty tomb.

Rowan Williams and the Easter church

On Radio National this morning, Scott Stephens and I talked about Rowan Williams and the Easter church. You can hear the interview here – it goes for about half and hour.

Palm Sunday: a picture poem

O glad morning,
promised day, the day
you come to us, riding
to the holy city, Israel's king,
glorious through the Golden Gate. 

We cut the branches, and wave

your joy, your welcome as you ride, 

and shout your praises to the hills,

the Lord's messiah, David’s son, 

triumphant king, hosanna! We cast
our coats before you, carpeting your way.
Today if we kept silent even the stones
would shout the benediction of your name.

Come Friday, we will shout again,

and rend your clothes and call you 

king, and cut the thicker branches,

cypress, pine and cedar,

and fasten them 

with nails,

and

even 

the

sun

will

turn

to ashes,

repenting

the day.

Rowan Williams: three lectures on Narnia

This year, Rowan Williams' Holy Week Lectures were devoted to the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis. The lectures are available online:

Lecture 1: 'Not a tame lion'
Lecture 2: 'I only tell you your own story'
Lecture 3: 'Bigger inside than outside'

When my daughter and I sat down to listen to the first lecture, she turned to me, wide-eyed, and said: 'He even sounds like a character from Narnia!'