It's never been straightforward for Christians to find the right words for Good Friday or Holy Saturday.
In order to try and make sense of Jesus' death,
We have come up with theories that can seem overly intricate,
Or for many people,
Impossible to reconcile with the belief that God is absolute,
Unconditional love.
So,
What can we say?
The Christian claim is that the whole awful event of Jesus' death is bound up with a gift to us of such importance that nothing compares with it.
It's hard to imagine exactly what people in the Gospels must have felt on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
There must have been a barely manageable sense of shock,
Bewilderment and loss,
What we might call trauma today,
A torrent of painful memories,
Images and emotions.
As those who knew and loved Jesus are carried into that Sabbath,
There is also time,
Quite simply,
For silence.
The silence might have felt like a vast emptiness,
But perhaps that stunned,
Exhausted silence is not just natural,
But absolutely necessary,
A vessel in which something begins to happen.
In the Gospel of John,
We're given an extraordinarily significant and deeply poignant account of Mary Magdalene's encounter with the risen Jesus.
Mary is weeping outside the tomb.
As she weeps,
She looks in and sees two angels sitting where Jesus' body had been.
They ask her,
Why are you weeping?
And she replies,
They have taken my Lord and I don't know where they laid him.
Then she turns and sees Jesus standing nearby,
But she does not recognise him.
Jesus asks her,
Why are you weeping?
Who are you looking for?
She mistakes him for the gardener and pleads with him,
Asking where the body is so she can take care of it.
And then Jesus says her name,
Mary.
To be named in Jewish culture was very significant.
It meant to be personally known,
Acknowledged,
Held in relationship,
A recognition at the deepest level of being.
Hearing her name spoken,
Mary recognises Jesus in the depths of her being and says,
Rabbuni,
Teacher.
Then comes a wonderfully tender and deeply human moment.
We might imagine Mary overwhelmed with joy.
She wants to hold Jesus.
But as soon as she recognises him,
Jesus begins to teach and says something that can sound very strange at first.
Do not cling to me.
Why does he say this?
It's not because he's leaving again.
It's not a rejection.
It's an invitation.
Do not cling to me.
It's as if Christ is saying to Mary and to each of us,
I am here.
I am closer than you can understand in a way that cannot be grasped.
Don't try and hold me.
Let me hold you.
Sometimes,
In the midst of pain,
Confusion,
Loss,
The only thing we can do is wait.
The only thing we can do is decide to trust and remain in the darkness,
To remain in the silence.
Somehow,
Beyond our understanding,
Something begins to happen in the silence.
Something begins to grow and unfold,
Which helps prepare the friends and followers of Jesus for the joy and the shock of the resurrection.
The silence following Jesus' execution was not a void.
Silence is the condition,
The context in which we can grow,
In which our minds,
Our field of vision can open.
The silence between Good Friday and Easter is not an emptiness.
It is a womb.
God holds Jesus' family and followers in the silence and prepares them.
God holds us in the silence of meditation and prepares us.
What are we being prepared for?
Christians,
Writes the theologian Herbert McCabe,
Are not people who think that because they have faith they have an advantage,
That they are better informed about God,
Or have discovered the secret of coming to the Father.
Christians do not claim to have any secret and private knowledge about God,
Or to have discovered any new secret way to the Father.
We come to the Father in Jesus Christ,
McCabe says,
Not because He has revealed to us the way by which we may go.
We come to the Father in Christ simply because Jesus is the way in which the Father comes to us.
Not first our way,
But the way the Father comes.
When the Father comes to us in the human life of Jesus,
It is not to show us how to know how to be successful at coming to Him,
Or successful at anything else.
He comes to us,
After all,
In human terms as a complete failure in one who suffers and is defeated.
He comes to us as a condemned and despised and executed criminal.
In other words,
We don't need to worry about finding a way to God.
God is here and always arriving.
With God's help,
We can open to this.
Do not cling to me,
The risen Jesus says to Mary.
In meditation,
We practice in the pattern of the cross.
We relinquish the need to grasp,
To manage,
To control,
To resist,
And allow ourselves to be held.
In trusting surrender,
We echo the movement of the crucifixion,
Where Jesus entrusted Himself completely,
Not escaping suffering,
But yielding to the mystery of God within it.
Our practice is our quiet consent to this same path,
A letting go into love,
Where what can feel like loss or unknowing is in truth the doorway to all truth.
A few weeks ago,
I received an email from one of our practice community,
Which opened a conversation I think is very relevant for today,
Holy Saturday.
With their permission,
I'd like to share some of this with you.
During a group conversation online,
They had mentioned feeling as if they knew very little about God,
And that they were not open-hearted enough,
And that they were trying to let go of a self-imposed pressure to acquire knowledge.
They reminded me that I'd responded by saying that there is no rush,
That we can expand in all eternity,
That the opening of the heart is endless.
They wrote,
It's so hopeful,
But how can you know that?
Can you explain it more?
What I have gathered from church is that you are stuck with the heart and the capacity for love you have when you die,
And you have to strive for that.
If,
On the other hand,
The opening never stops,
And this makes sense to me,
If you are freed of any resistance to God's love after death,
Why wouldn't you keep on growing closer to his image?
I need not worry any more about having so little time left.
They continued,
The online conversation was a double revelation for me,
Quite unexpectedly in a couple of minutes,
Seeing that I could let go of the pressure to acquire knowledge,
And of time pressure,
Accepting things as they are,
Just getting on with the practice,
And being present with an open heart in relationships as best I can.
Trusting that it is all in God's hands.
Do you think this is real?
I sometimes feel what happened during the last year is simply several sizes too big for me.
My spiritual nerves are stretched thin.
There is so much to take on board and I get tired.
But I also feel blessed.
I replied,
I think you've asked two related questions.
Whether it's possible that we continue to expand for all eternity,
With the opening of the heart being endless,
And whether we are fixed with the heart and capacity for love that we have at the moment of death.
In his letter to the Philippians,
Saint Paul writes,
I do not yet reckon myself to have seized hold,
Save of one thing.
Both forgetting the things lying behind,
And also stretching out to the things lying ahead,
I press onward to the mark,
For the prize of God's call upward in Christ Jesus.
Paul uses the wonderful Greek word,
Apécteses,
Often translated as stretching out or stretching forward,
Meaning an unceasing progress.
In his great spiritual work,
The Life of Moses,
The fourth century theologian,
Saint Gregory of Nyssa,
Writes about how our eternal life in God is not about reaching some fixed point,
Some static point of perfection,
But an endless stretching out and opening.
An infinite expansion within God,
An ever deepening communion.
As Gregory explains,
God's very nature is goodness,
And we naturally desire to know this goodness.
And since God's goodness has no limit,
Our desire has no stopping place.
But stretches out within the limitless.
There is no end point to the expansion of our awareness within God's infinite awareness.
No end point to the expansion of our capacity for love.
Because the infinite has no end point,
No boundary,
No limit of any kind.
This is the promise that awaits us,
And which we can touch in this life,
Even as a mere shadow of what lies ahead,
As the first fruits of the Spirit.
In a work called On the Soul in the Resurrection,
Gregory writes that the resurrection is the restoration of our nature to its original condition.
That all the wonderful qualities we recognize in God will fill us.
And whatever else of this kind we recognize in God,
In God himself and in his image,
Which is our human nature.
Are we stuck with the heart and capacity for love we have when we die?
In the first letter of Peter,
The author of which is unknown,
We read,
The good news was proclaimed to the dead.
Whatever path we may have followed in this life,
If someone hasn't heard or accepted the good news of the truth before they die,
They will receive it after they have died.
No one is excluded by the God of infinite unconditional love.
As Christ says,
Behold,
See,
I have set before you an open door that no one can close.
We cannot close it.
No church can close it.
It is unclosable.
Do not cling to me,
The risen Jesus says to Mary.
When we meditate,
This is what we are practicing.
We practice ungrasping.
We let go of our ideas about God and open to God's idea of God,
Christ,
Unconditional love.
Do not cling to me.
It's as if Christ is saying to Mary and to each of us,
I am here.
I am closer than you can understand in a way that cannot be grasped.
Don't try and hold me.
Let me hold you.
Let me show you that I have always been holding you and always will.
Let me take you on a journey into love that will never end.
The End
