EASTER 2008

As we contemplate the glorious Resurrection of our Lord here at Easter, there is never a more appropriate time to ask ourselves, or anyone for that matter, “What do you think of Jesus?” This Tuesday past I was prompted to think of this as I read the first Lesson at Evensong from the apocryphal Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which begins, “For the ungodly said, reasoning with themselves, but not aright, ‘Our life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man there is no remedy: neither was there any man known to have returned from the grave’.”

Our lesson skipped several intervening verses in which the ungodly justify living life as if there is not only no tomorrow, but definitely not any hereafter. Then the lesson continues, “‘Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous; because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings: he upbraideth us with our offending the law, and objecteth to our infamy the transgressings of our education. He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself the child of the Lord. He was made to reprove our thoughts. He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like other men’s, his ways are of another fashion. We are esteemed of him as counterfeits: he abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness: he pronounceth the end of the just to be blessed, and maketh his boast that God is his father. Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him. For if the just man be the son of God, he will help him, and deliver him from the hand of his enemies. Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture, that we may know his meekness, and prove his patience. Let us condemn him with a shameful death: for by his own saying he shall be respected.’ Such things they did imagine, and were deceived: for their own wickedness hath blinded them. As for the mysteries of God, they knew them not: neither hoped they for the wages of righteousness, nor discerned a reward for blameless souls. For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it.” That is where the lesson ends on Tuesday in Holy Week. The very next verse is where the Lesson on All Souls’ Day begins, “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.”

As with Old Testament writings that anticipate the Messiah, these words from the Apocrypha apparently speak against any and all average righteous people, but clearly contain prophetic utterances concerning our Lord. One of the more erudite musings on that was written by Fr. Andrew (Henry Ernest Hardy) during the dark days of the Second World War in his book of daily Lenten readings, “Christ the Companion.” In contemplating the very same Lesson, he focuses on the passage, “Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him” (Wis. 2.17). In pondering “let us see if his words be true” when applied to our Lord and Saviour, Fr. Andrew looks not only at His blessed life among us in terms of how He was tested, but also at how hate and death came to prove whether His words were true. Fr. Andrew also adds two more quotations to that of Wisdom, specifically those insults and taunts that were thrown at Jesus as He hung on the Cross, “Let be, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him”, and, “He trusted in God: let Him deliver Him if He will have Him”, which is to say, those people also, in different ways were saying, “Let us see if His words be true.”

And here I shall quote directly from Fr. Andrew, “What were the words of our Lord Jesus Christ? We can sum them all up in the words of S. John’s Gospel (3.16): ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, to the end that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ God so loved the world! Is it true? Life came to Jesus with its testing, as it comes to you and me, with so much success and so much failure, so much pleasure and so much pain, so much contact with others, and all through His life He went about doing good. There came from Him always the manifestation of love and perfect integrity, so that, although He never spoke of Himself as other than the Son of Man, the manifestation of His life brought to those who were near Him the conviction of a character altogether higher than that of a son of man. Though life brought to Him poverty and pain, and tested Him in every way, yet life proved Him true. Life proved that, in whatever circumstances He might be, none could ever convince Him of sin, none could ever draw from Him anything that was not altogether perfect.

“Then hate came to prove whether His words were true. He came with a gospel of love. ‘Well,’ said hate, ‘let us confront Him with treachery, with suspicion and rejection. Let us whip Him with scourges. Let us fashion for Him torture and a cross.’ Hate challenged Him to prove if His words were true, and all those who watched by the Cross and saw Him tested in that furnace of affliction, the dark night of Calvary, saw how there came forth from Him no words but words of love. The words that came from Jesus when He was so treated had in them no kind of reproach – ‘Father, forgive them.’ His thought was for His blessed mother, for the penitent thief. It was the putting of Himself with all sufferers, it was the hungering of His heart for love as He cried, ‘I thirst,’ and then the commending of His spirit into the hands of His Father. Hate brought everything that hate could bring, to see if His words were true, and forth from Him came no return but perfect love.

“Death came to prove if His words were true. Death came with its shadows, and its cold finger touched Him, and He yielded up His royal soul and hung there dead. He was laid in the sepulchre, and none of the apostles expected He would rise. They had never taken that teaching in. They went down sadly to the tomb with no idea of the miracle of which they were to be the witnesses. Mary of Magdala was the first to see Him there in the garden, and to one after another of His chosen witnesses He appeared. Death itself proved His words were true, because those who had seen Him dead saw Him also rise from the dead.

“But resurrection in itself is not divine. We do not worship Lazarus because he was raised from the dead. There is nothing more divine in that than in a virgin birth. It was our Lord’s perfect life that made these things congruous, and when He came back on that morning in the garden of the Resurrection the disciples were indeed glad, for they saw the Lord. The Resurrection was the crowning of the life, as the Virgin Birth was the fitting entry for such a life into this world. It was the reversal by the higher court of God’s judgement of all the futile mistakes of the court of Pilate. So life and hate and death all proved His words true.”

Even if we have never thought things through as directly and completely as did Fr. Andrew, we still all know those things about our Lord, but when times of testing and tribulation and suffering come to us individually, as they inevitably do – the death of a loved one, a physical affliction that may strike us, loss of a whole variety of skills and physical vigour as we grow older, do we always maintain our focus on Him who is our life and salvation? Is, “What do I think of Jesus?” always at the forefront of our minds when difficulties arise? The fact of His Resurrection, and that it has opened up to us the gate to everlasting life, often becomes clouded by the distractions that beset us. And yet somehow, we must attempt to remain faithful to His having called us to higher and purer loyalty, so that when life and hatred and death, and suffering and old age and whatever else test us, we will not be found to be like those who scorn the hope that they see in righteous people, we will not mourn and lament as people without hope.

“What do I think of Jesus?” “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” Now, nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this remarkable story. God, says the Church, has created us perfectly free to disbelieve in Him as much as we choose. If we do disbelieve, then we and He must take the consequences in a world ruled only by cause and effect, where one must believe that humanity is the end result of nothing more than chance. The Church says further, that man did, in fact, disbelieve, and that God did, in fact, take the consequences. All the same, if we are going to disbelieve something, it seems reasonable that we should find out exactly what we are disbelieving. I can’t really say why the percentage of those here in the west who choose not to believe is now the majority, other than a massive corporate shrug, coupled with the observation that they find the story irrelevant, inconvenient to their busy lifestyle, and just too fantastic to believe. Truthfully, I suspect that the current generation of young people who have never even heard the story are the inevitable result of my generation having become very marginal, even wishy-washy in our belief, and therefore quite incapable of passing along the faith with any conviction whatever. A blank stare would be the response to the question, “What do you think of Jesus?”

But, as Fr. Andrew so succinctly distils it for us, a measured study of life, and hatred, and death as they came to test Jesus of Nazareth all proved His words to be true. It is quite inconceivable that one should deny that after having contemplated it honestly. It is quite inconceivable that someone would not be moved on Easter to acknowledge that He is risen from the dead, He has gone before that we might know His own spiritual experience.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

ANNUNCIATION OTTAWA 2008 +CR