Spring in Glass Houses

Extracts from 'An Easter Essay: On spring-cleaning, the breaking dawn and why terrorising chocolate bunnies is justifiable.' (I wish I'd written this essay, but am glad someone else did!)

'Whilst they have been off fighting Christmas, Easter's been left to lope into obscurity. Christians are outraged at the inconsistent noise of Christmas but silent at the absence of Easter. Is it just not important enough? Is the death and resurrection of Jesus really just an average affair? ... Easter is a mediocre affair and nobody protests.'

'This Easter God is defined not by absence, irrelevance or obscurity but by presence. In humanity, He stretched out his arms of love, dying for us on an execution tree.'

'It is time for this Easter to be brought out of exile and given a spring clean. We rebel against its fading significance and terrorise the chocolate bunnies that hide it. We simply announce that Easter is utterly relevant. And with unrelenting optimism celebrate that right in our midst Jesus is Lord!'

[From Spring in Glass Houses]

Bring him home

Art is always transgressive. What I always say is, we need to transgress in love. We today have a language to celebrate waywardness. But we do not have a language, a cultural language, to bring people back home.

- Ty Fujimura, of International Arts Movement

 Makoto Fujimura - The Art of "The Four Holy Gospels" from Crossway on Vimeo.

[HT: JB]

Torrential timely truth

The News of the Cross

Christ on the cross - simply with us in our suffering, or achieving for us an eternal hope of new life? Art speaks powerfully - and in this instance, the old debate is reheated: to fix our eyes on Jesus, crucified perpetually, or the symbol of his death and resurrection? I tend to think that seeing the empty cross reminds us, as Krish says, of the reality that we worship a God who died, but who also was raised to life, reigns, gives eternal life knowing the Father, and will return to judge the living and dead.

The argument runs that it is with a crucifix that one comforts the one facing death - that they see Christ with them in their suffering, his arms outstretched in love. Now that is true. But it is not the whole truth. What point is there in a good man who suffered alongside: even a supremely loving, welcoming man who suffered alongside, if that was all he did - if he stayed there? No, he came and suffered for us and for our salvation, and to all of us facing death, he holds out life. The cross is empty - he announced his task accomplished, and gave up his spirit to the Father. His tomb is no memorial, but empty - never needed again. Our tombs, and our sufferings? Merely borrowed, merely granted for a little time. For he was delivered up for our trespasses, and raised for our justification. [Rom 4.25]

[HT: Krish, who participated in the debate]

The dogma is the drama

Sayers, again:

"[T]he history and the theology of Christ are one thing: His life is theology in action, and the drama of His life is dogma shown as dramatic action.

"For Jesus Christ is unique - unique among gods and men. There have been incarnate gods a-plenty, and slain-and-resurrected gods not a few; but He is the only God who has a date in history. And plenty of founders of religions have had dates, and some of them have been prophets or avatars of the Divine; but only this one of them was personally God. There is no more astonishing collocation of phrases than that which, in the Nicene Creed, sets these two statements flatly side by side: "Very God of very God. ... He suffered under Pontius Pilate." All over the world, thousands of times a day, Christians recite the name of a rather undistinguished Roman pro-consul - not in execration (Judas and Caiaphas, more guilty, get off with fewer reminders of their iniquities), but merely because that name fixes within a few years the date of the death of God. ...

[We are inclined to think of the history as:]

"The characters are not men and women: they are all 'sacred personages', standing about in symbolic attitudes, and self-consciously awaiting the fulfilment of prophecies. ... Sacred personages, living in a far-off land and time, using dignified rhythms of speech, making from time to time restrained gestures symbolic of brutality. They mocked and railed on Him and smote Him, they scourged and crucified Him. Well, they were people very remote from ourselves, and no doubt it was all done in the noblest and most beautiful manner. We should not like to think otherwise.

"Unhappily, if we think about it at all, we must think otherwise. God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own - in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a goverment renowned for its efficiency, He was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators. His executioners made vulgar jokes about Him, called Him filthy names, taunted Him, smacked Him in the face, flogged Him with the cat, and hanged Him on the common gibbet - a bloody, dusty, sweaty, and sordid business.

"If you show people that, they are shocked. So they should be. If that does not shock them, nothing can. If the mere representation of it has an air of irreverence, what is to be said about the deed? It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all."