But my hope is the flower and the fruit and the leaf and the branch
And the sprig and the growth and the germ and the bud.
And she is the growth and the bud and the flower
Of Eternity itself.
Should I say that? Have they heard it from me before? These lines from Charles Péguy’s The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, which always strike me as like reading Whitman through stained glass, push up through my mind every year when I sit down to write an Easter sermon. “Where there’s hope, there’s life.” Is that Samuel Beckett? No: to my surprise, I find that it’s Anne Frank.
Easter is the central feast of the Christian year; the Sunday to which all other Sundays point. And yet I know that my sermon is only a tiny part of what’s going on; it will be heard by very few and remembered by fewer. It will fill all of ten minutes of the liturgy.
The message of Easter: that Jesus of Nazareth was the complete expression of what it is to be God and what it is to be human; that he was crucified, dead, entombed and, after three days, rose again—not resuscitated, but resurrected to a new life beyond our grasp but not beyond our hope—has been embedded for centuries into the full, sensory multimedia experience that is the church.
The story is told all around us. As a child Jean-Marie Aaron Lustiger, the late cardinal archbishop of Paris, was converted by two visits to the cathedral in Orléans, where he and his sister were evacuated in 1940. He was transfixed by the glorious flowers and the banks of lit candles on Maundy Thursday. He went back the next day to see it all again—but he found the cathedral stripped bare. “I did not know that it was Good Friday,” he said, experiencing “the ordeal of that emptiness.” He got it.
A predecessor of mine here, John Caraway, made his contribution to the Easter message by arranging to have his own cadaver tomb—the latest fashion in the 1440s—placed beneath a new Altar of Repose, the altar where the reserved sacrament is surrounded by flowers and candles on the night Jesus spent praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s right next to the door to the Sunday school. The children have for generations walked past it without batting an eye. But one night every year we see John Caraway’s sermon: there is his body carved as a decaying corpse, as it may be in Purgatory, looking up. Above it, surrounded by fresh greenery and lit candles, is the Body of Christ placed for adoration. Good one, Father. I can’t top that.
I have to try, though. That jazz riff on the Resurrection that gives a glimpse of a hope that puts all our fear and grief into context. The news presses in, and it’s mostly bad. As it happens, this year I was commissioned to write a set of meditations on the Stations of the Cross for the composer Nico Muhly and the harpist Parker Ramsay. It’ll be having its premiere at King’s College Chapel on Holy Saturday as The Street. It ends, as traditional Stations do, with Jesus being laid in the tomb. Station Fourteen. The end of the line.
What do I say next? What do I really believe? “If Christ who once was slain ne’er burst his three days’ prison/Our faith had been in vain. But now is Christ arisen.”
That’s it. I write down the title: “Everything Before the ‘But’ is Bullshit.”
