The Chaplain writes…about our celebration of the Easter Mystery
By the time that this reaches your hands, we shall be well into the season of Lent, and already on the horizon will be the yearly celebrations associated with Holy Week and Easter.
Why is this season so very important to us as Christian people, and why do we spend so much time through Lent and Holy Week contemplating the mystery of cross and resurrection which is at the heart of our faith?
There is of course a basic cyclical pattern written through the world of life, and mirrored in nature – winter, spring, summer, autumn. And this pattern is reflected in our own lives – there have to be periods of winter darkness and sterility preceding spring’s new vitality, summer’s time of maturation and autumn fruit. In our spiritual lives, I think that this is even more true, and it is something recognised by spiritual writers of every generation. In our praying, for instance, there are times of effervescent and prolific activity, followed by change and growth and its fruit, followed by a winter season during which we take another step as our desire for God is purified and honed.
So it is not surprising that the liturgy of the Church has its cycles in which differing aspects of our faith come to the fore. From Advent through to Pentecost, different mysteries are held before our eyes that we may drink deeply from these wells though never exhaust their meaning. This is now the season of penitence – a time when we recognise what we are like, the truth of our being. Not to bring us to the misery of despair, but rather that we recognise where we are, the truth about ourselves. Because in recognising that truth, if we do this well, we recognise God’s mercy, God’s grace and his loving purposes being fulfilled in us. That doesn’t make us proud – it should increase our humility, as well as our thanksgiving for the work of grace in us.
And as Holy Week and Easter dawn, we recognise each year more and more the sheer wonder of God’s mercy and grace declared in Christ. The Holy Week story is one of betrayal and failure, but also one intermingled with love and self-sacrifice in love’s name which has the final victory. Our part in that story is not meant to be comfortable, but when we reach Easter we know that no matter what God’s mercy and love triumph. In Christ, in us, in our world.
Not that it looks like it, often enough. But ultimately our true hope is that this will be so, and that hope has already begun in what Christ’s resurrection shows us.
Liturgy is not just a mental exercise of remembering. When we celebrate the Eucharist, we are transcending time itself. Or at least time in the sense of chronological time, days, hours, minutes. What the New Testament refers to as chronos (s- the space of time we inhabit. However, the New Testament has another word translated time – kairos (s), which transcends ‘chronos time’. Kairos is significant time, or the opportune moment. In celebrating the liturgy, chronos time becomes kairos time – which is why we should never normally look at our watches (!!) during the Eucharist. (Canon Reginald Cant at York Minster who when I was recently ordained taught me a very great deal about being a priest, would always say to young clergy that they should actually take off their wristwatches before they said Mass! It’s a discipline I have never actually followed, but there is a complete logic to it.) In the Eucharist, one kind of time dissolves into another.
And this sanctification, or perhaps better, transformation of time is a very important part of what is going on when we celebrate the liturgy. Through word, sacramental action, music, ritual, and other physical things, we meet God in our midst. Ordinary chronos time becomes extraordinary kairos time, the ordinary separation of heaven and earth disappears – at least in part – as we open a window into heaven.
So Holy Week and Easter is so vitally important as a time of liturgy where we don’t just remember a particularly heroic act of self-sacrifice. Of course we do that, but we are also involved in something infinitely greater. We are actually participants in the great mystery of Christ’s Passover so that it may be more and more lived out in our own lives. Our own specific chronos time, our time and days allotted, is transformed into kairos time, the Christ event is continued in our own living.
Now of course this doesn’t just happen in Holy Week and Easter. But the importance of this (chronos) time each year is that we discover more profoundly and live more fully in the (kairos) time of the suffering, dying and rising Christ. We celebrate the central mystery of our Christian faith in a way charged with many levels of significance, through its particular and unique seasonal liturgies.
So as we approach this season, we need to be generous with our (chronos) time so that we may better inhabit the kairos time of the Risen Christ, whose triumph we celebrate throughout the fifty days of Eastertide.
I pray that you will find a time of fulfilment in the coming Holy Week and much joy through the Easter season – and indeed beyond – through faith renewed and nurtured through these sacred days.