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Good Morning

Alleluia! Christ is risen! is the Easter Greeting that Christians offer one another as they wake up after spending Good Friday contemplating the horror of Jesus’ crucifixion and Holy Saturday bearing the stunned grief of the newly bereaved.

Yet for most people waking up on the second day after the death of a loved one, the cry is not one of joy but of pain as the realisation begins to dawn that loss and grief are here to stay.

In such circumstances, rumours of resurrection are not much help and perhaps even interfere with the first task of bereavement which, according to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, is to believe that the beloved is really gone. So the first disciples of Jesus, when pestered by the women amongst them who claimed an experience of the risen Christ, dismissed them as talking nonsense.

It remains the case that the events of Good Friday are more believable that the events of Easter Day. As much as we avert our faces from death when we can, deep down, we do believe in it. But what does resurrection mean and how can any sane person believe in that? Do people really believe that there are undiscovered planets called heaven and hell? Or that a part of us will live on in some invisible spiritual dimension? Or that our DNA enters some kind of chrysalis from which a new body will emerge?

Artists through the ages, though they have produced and continue to produce many wonderful crucifixion scenes in which God is identified with human suffering, have struggled to depict the resurrection in a convincing way, leading Ben Quash, professor of Theology and the Arts at Kings College London to conclude that ‘sometimes it’s better not to go there -’ for an image of perfect human gracing the sky surrounded by rays of light is unlikely to do much to help us imagine what the first disciples experienced on Easter morning.

Surprisingly though, Quash points to the possibilities in contemporary installation art for helping us more nearly to appreciate what beliefs in resurrection might be about. For such artists are focused not so much on the product – the sculpture or the painting – but on the experience for those participating. For the first disciples of Christ were convinced of the resurrection not so much by the fleeting physical apparitions, as by the lasting impact of Christ’s risen presence which they experienced variously as forgiveness; as healing; as a growing conviction that violence and destruction and death do not have the last word; and as a re-commissioning for the work of peace he had begun.

Waking up the day after Easter, the world is much the same as it was on Good Friday. Violence still threatens. Innocents still suffer. Loved ones do not come back from the grave. To believe or not in resurrection though, is not so much a matter of armchair metaphysics, as a challenge to participate in the forgiveness and healing and peace-making that are still working to renew our troubled world.

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