My friends, look at the processes of resurrection that are occurring at this very time!
Not my words but the words of Clement of Rome to the Church in Corinth, writing in the first century.
I spent Easter eve at St John the Divine, Kennington and Easter morning at St Mary, Barnes – and glorious they were. But I have enjoyed Clement of Rome’s words that I came across as I returned from a few days Easter leave in the Creuse region of France.
“Look at the processes of resurrection that are occurring at this very time!”
I love the immediacy of it. Though life is often full of hardship and loss, the fruits of the resurrection are all around us – happening right now! – if only we had eyes to see.
This Easter season I was reminded of a book by a former Divinity Professor at Cambridge, Nicholas Lash. It is not an easy book but the title has long fascinated me. ‘Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God’ (SCM, 1988). I like the title because it seems to imply – with Clement of Rome – that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not confined to special experience or high days and holidays but is all around us. Everything that we do and say and see and touch is suffused with the blinding light of Christ’s glorious resurrection if only we had eyes to see!
But do we grasp this?
The playwright, Dennis Potter (1935-1994), not a believer, in his final interview before he died captures beautifully the glory of Christ’s resurrection, and what it means for our redemption. He writes as follows, reflecting on a spring blossom that might easily pass us by.
Below my window in Ross…there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that…There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it…” (https://www.theguardian.com/ theguardian/2007/sep/12/greatinterviews last accessed 23 April 2023).
The glory of it. Easter in ordinary! And Potter reflects, importantly I think, of seeing in the present tense. If you do that ‘boy do you see it!’ he says.
I was struck this Easter how in John’s Gospel, it is precisely when Judas goes out to betray Jesus that Jesus speaks of glory.
“When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him’” (John 13: 31)
It is another striking insight into our topsy-turvy faith – loss, betrayal and hardship leading to glory.
May you know Christ’s glory at this time, see it all around you. Easter in ordinary!
