RESURRECTION

It’s strange, isn’t it, how words and phrases from the texts we use for worship become embedded in the mind ? It’s no bad thing to see how much we can remember of the texts we use so often, and to integrate them into our personal prayers, and it’s interesting sometimes to listen to people’s “extempore” prayers and to realise how much they are formed by the language of worship. We are formed spiritually by all sorts of different experiences and influences. Occasionally a phrase becomes even more significant than that, so that whenever it is read, or heard, or prayed it almost flies off the page at you.

For me one of those phrases is in one of the Eucharistic Prayers (Prayer B in the Common Worship order), a prayer that I have prayed at the Altar for over twenty years, and have heard in various forms for longer than that. The prayer is one the most ancient of prayers at the Eucharist, dating in part from the third century, and is shared with only some small differences by Anglicans and Roman Catholics, and the phrase that always strikes me is this – the statement that Christ “revealed the Resurrection by rising to new life”.

What does this mean? If it is simply a reference to the physical raising of Christ from the tomb on the first Easter Day, then it seems a rather unusual way of describing it. There must be more to this enigmatic phrase than that. As I have pondered and prayed these words I have begun to understand them in terms of revealing resurrection as the pattern by which Christians live, and the environment in which they move. Resurrection is a present experience, a foretaste of what we shall know as our final and complete experience of God, and the result of the event of God’s raising of Jesus.

I find this helpful as I come towards Holy Week and Easter. Rightly we affirm the physical event of the empty Tomb and Jesus raised to newness of life, but Easter remains detached, an event in the past and the promise of an event in the future, unless we recognise the experience of resurrection now, encompassing everything we are.

The Christian already shares in part the risen life of Jesus Christ; already he or she experiences something of the power of the resurrection. This is what I begin to understand by that teasing phrase in the Liturgy – Christ’s physical resurrection reveals or manifests the experience of resurrection now.

What can this mean ? It surely reminds us to look for and expect those signs of resurrection in our midst: lives turned about, healing and wholeness received, new beginnings made and new hope given where hope had seemed lost. Someone once said to me that there are countless little dyings and risings in our Christian lives, places where God is at work to do a new thing and where there is a new creation. Living as a Christian, we discover, is not simply a matter of finding enough grace to “get by”, but is about something new, about being called out of our graves into transformed life.

Significantly Orthodox Icons of the resurrection depict Christ as he rises from the tomb bringing with him Adam and Eve, symbols of humanity, of you and me (there is an example of one of these Icons in St Bridget’s porch). Resurrection is revealed and shared in Christ’s rising to new life.

Are our churches communities of resurrection where God is doing a new thing, and where lives are being transformed ? Have we the courage to be open to the resurrection life and to allow this new work in our midst ? Praise God we can tell stories of lives made new, and see them in our midst, and praise God that this is more and more part of our experience, but how much more could there be !

Fr Harry Williams in his influential book “True Resurrection” says this: “Resurrection as our ultimate future can be known only by those who perceive resurrection with us now encompassing all we are and do. For then it will be recognised as a country we have already entered and in whose light and warmth we have already lived.”

Alleluia, Christ is risen !

Roger Clarke

March 2008