Articles - From the Vicar

How long was their grief - so inconsolable -
With a friend's place empty at the table?
Not long at all. In less than a weekend
All the deadened senses were reawakened
And the blurred world focused to a new vision.
Anyone stricken with real deprivation
Hasn't hit rock bottom in three days.
They were spared years of weeping, numbness, haze.
Everything, really. Ask the truly bereft,
The losers of all hope, the loved and left,
Who know the weight of ashes and cold clay.
They were bumping into the dead one not long after
And breaking bread with him in tears and laughter.
They were celebrating by the third day.

Mark Jarman's poem (from Unholy Sonnets, Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press, 2000) points up the difference between the experience of the followers of Jesus -'celebrating by the third day' - and the long Good Friday that is the experience of 'the truly bereft/The losers of all hope'. Each of us will be able to name individuals or groups or nations 'who know the weight of ashes and cold clay' and for whom the daily reality of the cross casts a seemingly permanent shadow over any possibility of resurrection. The followers of Jesus, by contrast, had things easy......

......And yet I do not see Jarman's poem as undermining of resurrection faith. Rather, it is a sober reminder to those of us who embrace that faith of the persistence of suffering and of the challenging questions that such suffering poses to the way our faith is lived out and communicated to others. It is the manner in which Christians respond to these challenging questions that will determine the effect our faith has on others. One possible starting point might be for us to see the resurrection not so much as a single event that took place on the first Easter Day but as a process of transformation from death to life that began on Calvary and continues today. The rising of Jesus Christ from the dead is central to our understanding of this process of transformation and gives full substance to the prayerful hope with which, as an Easter people, we seek to serve a world in which weeping and numbness are more frequently encountered than laughter and tears of joy.