Seeking to experience the Resurrection

The first Easter Sunday. Jesus standing in the resurrection garden bathed in soft, early-morning sunlight. Alive.

I believe it was a physical resurrection. The records seem to me to be written in the language not of myth, but of history. If the many, many Christians who believe that Jesus literally returned to life are correct, then there are important implications for our faith.

This week, I’ve been reading Ron Ferguson’s biography of the famous 20th century Scottish Christian George Macleod, who founded the Iona Community.

70 years ago, in April 1933 Macleod, then minister of Govan Old Parish Church attended an early-morning Easter day service in the Russian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, and his life was transformed.

In the course of the service, the priests dramatically enacted the wonder of the resurrection. ‘For sheer worship, I have never seen anything like it,’ Macleod wrote later. In that church, he saw in a new way that God is active not just in the lives of individuals, but in the whole of creation – spiritual, social, material – and that the church is God’s agent of change.

‘The Gospel of service’ – Christian activism - was no longer enough for Macleod. ‘We too must learn putting first things first – contemplation – God-consciousness,’ and seeking times ‘when the calendar becomes meaningless and Calvary eternal.’

I don’t know what George Macleod’s precise understanding of the resurrection was. But for me, my faith that there is hope not just for our souls, but for our bodies, our institutions and national structures, our planet, our universe is strengthened by the conviction that Jesus rose from death physically. The salvation Christ offers us is holistic, both spiritual and physical.

George Macleod had lived through, and, not yet the pacifist he would become, fought in World War I. Following that conflict, there was a longing to ensure that the sacrifice of so many lives had not been wasted, and that a better, fairer, kinder British society could be forged. Somehow, it didn’t happen.

‘No political party seems adequate in itself,’ Macleod wrote in a pastoral letter later in 1933, in words which seem startlingly contemporary. ‘It is hard nowadays to find anyone with a passionate faith in any one of them.’

Recently our daughter Bethany and I went to Eden Court to see Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach’s new documentary about the Labour Government’s vision after 1945. There was in that decade the same passion to ensure that those who had fought for freedom in World War II would in the peace find freedom from poverty and inequality. Many good things were achieved, but in the longer term the vision was not fully realised due to human and corporate failure.

Must we forever find ourselves mired in economic and political crisis, with frightened, uncertain politicians trying to sound confident? The reason we don’t trust politicians said Macleod in his 1933 letter is ‘because we know in our hearts that the real problem is moral rather than political.’ And for this reason many of our dreams turn to dust.

Last Thursday, Justin Welby was enthroned as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He claimed at the ceremony that over the last 1000 years the country has thrived at those times when it has most fully ‘sought to recognise that Jesus is the Son of God; by the ordering of its society, by its laws, by its sense of community.’

When we do this, he says, and I agree with him, ‘we make space for our own courage to be liberated, for God to act among us, and for human beings to flourish.’

This Easter four words came to mind from the old hymn describing Jesus dead in the darkness of Easter Saturday, ‘Waiting the coming day.’ In one sense these words point to a future when all will be made new, when all will be well.

But in another sense, to George Macleod, and Justin Welby and to all Christians – the day has come. Dawn broke that first Easter morning something like 1986 years ago. The sacrifice of Jesus was not in vain.

Easter gives us a vision of the living Jesus, eternally alive in body and spirit, his reality both a sign of God’s transforming power, and the source through which we encounter it. And so without being simplistic, it is true to claim that change and redemption is possible, for the most broken individual, for the most broken society.

Because the day has come, we can experience Easter personally, as a neighbourhood, as a nation, as a global community if individually or collectively we turn round in the darkness of whatever tomb we find ourselves occupying, and discover that the stone has been rolled away. We walk forward and take tentative steps into the afternoon sunshine.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 28th March 2013)