Thine be the glory

A friend of mine has a 50^th birthday on Sunday, Easter Sunday. I remember the Easter she was born in 1965. I was 13, and at a Scripture Union camp at Meigle in Perthshire. One of my most powerful memories of that week is of singing daily the hymn ‘Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son.’ I was stirred both by the words and George Frederick Handel’s confident melody.

I got to thinking of the significance of each 50 year period to the Jewish people in the Bible. Every 7 years their fields were to lie fallow to let the earth recuperate. Each 50th year was to be a ‘Year of Jubilee’. Not only would there be no cultivation, but outstanding debts would be cancelled, people who’d being working as servants to pay off debts would be liberated and could return to their folks, and all land ownership would revert to the families to whom it originally belonged. You can imagine how many would long for the liberation which Jubilee promised.

This radical way of doing economics was based on principles of equality, fair provision for everyone’s needs, keeping family groups together, and above all on reliance upon God.

Regrettably, there is no evidence that the God-given wisdom of Jubilee was ever put into practice in full. Instead it came to be seen as a vision of a future golden age of transformation, true freedom, and new beginnings.

Enter Jesus, who implied that he had come to begin making this vision of Jubilee a reality, not one year in 50, but forever, and to ensure that Jubilee would fully come.

As Christians, we realise on our clearer-seeing days that Jesus Christ brings us a personal Jubilee – forgiveness, inner freedom, spiritual homecoming, and a consciousness that we can rely on God. And so wee seek on our better days to live out the joy of Jubilee in our churches, and we work and pray to see the spirit of Jubilee seasoning a world where slavery, economic inequalities and debt are crippling realities.

But Jubilee still awaits a future fulfilment, when in God’s time Jubilee will come for the whole world. And there’s the thing. Jubilee is a powerful symbol. Christians are familiar with symbols – the cross, the fish, the bread, the wine. And both our theological ideas, and the words we use to talk about God are symbols, pointing beyond themselves to the great Mystery who is God. Symbols have power, and contemplating them moves us in the same way as some of us are moved by listening to music or drinking in art.

But sometimes we wonder whether in fact there is anything behind the symbols, or whether they simply inspire and console us by drawing out our inner strength and resilience. It’s possible, as the old communion hymn puts it ‘to see the signs but see not him’. Can it be, we ask in our lower moments, that the reason he is invisible to us is that the symbols are all there is?

Which is why the life of Jesus, and especially Easter is so important. Something happened that first Easter Sunday, something decisive and world-changing. Jesus, who claimed he’d come to show us the face of the Mystery, died. And yet, within weeks, his fearful, heartbroken followers had become bold proclaimers of a new Gospel, a Gospel of personal and cosmic Jubilee, convinced that Jesus had risen from the grave.

The implications of this, we believe, are profound. Jesus is not simply an inspiring symbol of fully-evolved humanity. Easter is not a simply symbol of our longing for new awakening. Jesus and the events of Easter are the evidence we long for that all the other symbols are not empty, that there is a loving being behind the universe drawing us, and it from darkness into light.

Because of Jesus, and the events to Easter we enjoy now those glimpses of personal Jubilee, and are confident (on the clearer-seeing days) that Jubilee will surely come.

To me, it’s deeply significant that someone should have their 50th birthday on Easter Sunday, the day God’s Jubilee began. To enter Jubilee, Jesus taught, is to be re-born.

‘Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son’ I sang at Meigle in 1965, the boy who cheated at the camp quiz, and lay in bed scared to death by the leaders’ ghost stories, and looked with awe at the future Scottish evangelist Bill Gilvear (who joined the camp after returning from harrowing experiences as a missionary in Africa,) and was stirred by words about the Jesus who was risen then, and is risen still.

At Easter we see more clearly not just the signs, but the one behind them. ‘No more we doubt thee, glorious Prince of life.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 2nd April 2015)