Turning the World Upside Down

Turning the World Upside Down

Easter Day 2020

Friends this is the strangest  of Easter Day’s of any I remember, instead of a church full of candles and flowers, hymns and rejoicing here we are, it almost feels like we are in that Holy Saturday suspension, waiting, waiting for that first day of the week when we can burst from our confinement , and yet Today is Sunday and Christ is Risen.

So, it seems ironic that we should be celebrating in the midst of sorrow pain and death.

But you know last year I wrote these words in the April edition of our magazine and I quote:

There is a profound irony in the story of Holy Week and Good Friday which tell us that it is the perpetrators of violence against the man who takes up his cross to Calvary, who claim to be agents of light: the keepers of the peace, the protectors of the faith and the saviours of the nation. And the irony continues as on any human calculation these claims are reasonable:  for the Chief Priest and Elders, to wish to protect the nation from further violence or from the wrath of the Roman occupiers is humanly commendable.  But in the end it is Christ who, in the darkness of agony and crucifixion discovers the hope for the world as he takes its darkness into his being and transforms it, bring new life and hope into the world on Easter Morning.

Irony indeed but  truly the message of Easters is that Jesus by taking the darkness of the World into his being and by rising again transforms it, forever offering through selfless love life and hope into our world.

But the nature of the story doesn’t promise eternal sunshine and green pastures what it does is offer the promise that the day of resurrection has transformed all days forever, this is most beautifully expressed in  poem  Easter by George Herbert

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise

Without delays,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

With him mayst rise.

That, as his death calcined1 thee to dust,

His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

With all thy art.

The cross taught all wood to resound his name,

Who bore the same.

His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key

Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song

Pleasant and long:

Or since all music is but three parts vied

And multiplied;

O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,

And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to straw thy way:

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,

Though he give light, and th’East perfume;

If they should offer to contest

With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,

Though many suns to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we miss:

There is but one, and that one ever.

In the poem  Herbert askes ‘ can there be any day but this’ showing that from the darkness of the cross and the tomb the day of resurrection bring us back to the cradle of new birth and turns us and our world upside down. For Jesus was dead, now he is alive, from now on there is but one day the single, eternal day of resurrection and in its light nothing will ever be the same again.

Alleluia Christ is Risen

He is Risen indeed Alleluia. Amen