Tuesday 25th March 2008
EASTER: YOU HAVE ONLY TO KEEP STILL.
I wonder why there aren’t 4000 people here in the cathedral this morning? Why are we not turning people away apologetically? Why doesn’t the blistering message of the resurrection get everyone racing to church?
Here’s one answer. There was a film a few years ago called Waterworld. I think it starred Kevin Costner, but it was about a world in which there had been a global catastrophe and massive floods, and everyone had to live on the water in specially constructed marine villages. The underlying philosophy behind the film was clear. A post-modern world is a water world, where everything is liquid; there’s nothing solid any more, no objective truth, no dry land. Implicit in this scenario is the danger of going deep; you get drowned. Stay on the surface, it suggests, keep moving or you’ll sink. In other words – stay detached, move fast, don’t stop. Multiply experiences, don’t stop to analyse them. And whatever you do, don’t go deep.
If that reflects our post-modern culture then people aren’t going to want to delay long on the mystery of the resurrection. A few hot cross buns, a couple of Easter eggs, a day out with the family and the first barbecue of the year, and we’ve done Easter thank you very much. Ours is a twitchy culture, always on the look out for the next big thing, the brightest celebrity, the best new experience. Resurrection? Sounds like too much hard work. And in any case, we’d have to slow down.
And here we come to the crunch. To encounter the risen Lord, it’s a fair bet you have to slow down substantially. We’re so obsessed with speed in our society, with instant delivery, that it’s truly counter-cultural to slow down. But that’s a sine qua non for encountering the risen Lord, who isn’t rushing about justifying his existence. He simply isn’t.
That’s one of the messages to come out of our Exodus reading today. There are the Israelites, shivering on the bank of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians – drat it – are advancing as awesomely as they would in any
But that’s the rub. You only have to keep still to meet the risen Lord, and we’ve forgotten how to do it. A group of European explorers were ploughing through the jungle with their porters and going at a gruelling pace. Eventually the porters got to a jungle clearing and just sat down. The Europeans tried to get them going again, but ‘no’ they said. ‘We’ve come so far and so fast that now we have to let our souls catch up with us.’ Good thinking!
‘You only have to be still’ and then God can act. You only have to stop rushing noisily about, trying to be noticed, and to convince yourself that your life is actually worthwhile, and maybe the divine stranger will come into view. Don’t you rush too much? Certainly I plead guilty. And that way I so easily miss the risen Lord who wants to walk the Emmaus road with me at a different, more human pace.
The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama wrote this: ‘Love has its speed. It’s an inner speed. It’s a spiritual speed. It’s a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depths of our lives, whether we notice it or not, at 3mph. It’s the speed we walk, and therefore it’s the speed the love of God walks.’ Doesn’t that make sense? You only have to keep still says Moses, and you’ll experience the presence, the deliverance of God, walking with you. If only…
But if we can slow down to God’s pace, the pace of friendship, of intimacy, of discovery, we then open ourselves to the gifts of the resurrection. Mary was sitting, shocked, at the empty tomb. The two disciples were plodding home slowly to Emmaus. The main group of disciples were waiting indecisively in the upper room. Peter’s fishing boat was sailing slowly by the beach where the mysterious figure was preparing breakfast. They were all still enough to encounter the risen Lord. ‘You only have to keep still.’
And then you can be open to the God of surprises, the God who breaks into our lives to name that joy that overwhelms us from time to time, or to meet that empty ache we sometimes become aware of when the inner cocktail party in our minds is persuaded to be still. The God who breaks in mysteriously when our longings are infinite and our language simply isn’t rich enough. The God who takes our breath away when he enters through the locked doors of our minds.
Ten weeks ago we had a first grandchild, Henry. I know it’s extraordinary in one so young, but there we are. To the eyes of an inhabitant of Waterworld Henry is undoubtedly wonderful; but to the eyes of faith Henry is miraculous. It’s all in the seeing, and the seeing is bound up in the stilling. So often Jesus tried to persuade his disciples that faith was not a matter of subscribing to a number of doctrines, but of having eyes to see a richer and more compelling truth. The truth is always bigger than the facts. Truth includes the facts, but it’s much richer and more satisfying than facts alone. It’s a mistake I fear Professor Dawkins is prone to make.
Seeing truly is much more satisfying than intellectual assent. Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelech that in the evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and in the mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelech, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things any more.’ And that’s the tragedy.
The disciples were still and so they could see. They could see the mysterious reality of their risen friend and Lord. They could see the marks in his hands and the wound in his side. They could see him in the upper room, even though they then lost him from sight. They could see him eating a piece of broiled fish and talking with Thomas. They were open to be surprised by joy.
The question for us is whether we can be still enough to encounter the risen Lord and the questions that he asks of us both personally and corporately. Personally he offers a new life in his company. ‘If any one is in Christ there is a new creation,’ said Paul, putting his finger on it as usual. But corporately, in society as a whole, we need that encounter too. For example, the threat of a waterworld may be truer than we think. (Have you noticed, by the way, how many
Never, however, will that voice be silent which we hear most clearly when we are still, and which says with quiet authority, straight to the heart, the message that our world needs more than ever: ‘Peace be with you.’ He said it twice, in case they hadn’t got it: ‘Peace be with you.’
May it be so. May we be sufficiently at peace, sufficiently still, to meet the risen Lord. In the meantime we hear
To Emmaus - at three miles an hour.