Magyar Egyház, 1980 (59. évfolyam, 1-10. szám)

1980-03-01 / 3-4. szám

8

MAGYAR EGYHÁZ

MAGYAR

CHURCH

EASTER: FROM SHADOWS TO LIGHT

SCRIPTURE: “May he strengthen you, in his glorious might, with ample power to meet whatever comes with fortitude, patience, and joy: and to give thanks to the Father who has made you fit to share the heritage of God’s people in the realm of light.

“He rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us away into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom our release is secured and our sins forgiven. He is the image of the invisible God . . . He is . . . the first to return from the dead, to be in all things alone supreme” (Colossians 1:11-15, 18, The New English Bible).

The women were there watching. They were weeping. They were waiting. And it was a good thing, too. Without that watching, weeping, and waiting in the shadows they might never have been transferred (“translated” is the old word) into the marvelous light of Christ’s resurrection.

“Mary stood at the toinb outside, weeping.... ‘Why are you weeping?’... ‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away’. Jesus said ‘Mary!’ She turned to him and said, ‘Rabboni!’ (which is Hebrew for ‘My Master’)” (John 20:11, 13, 15-16, The Netv English Bible).

If you had been faking the story of Jesus’ resurrection, you wouldn’t have written about it as the Gospel writers did. If you had been inventing a story like that, you’d have done it more dramatically; you would have made it more startling. You wouldn’t have it happen quietly in the early morning before anybody was up and around, so that only a few concerned people heard about it in hushed whispers. Wouldn’t it really have been more effective to take a leaf from the notebooks of the big producers in Broadway, Hollywood, and Europe and make this tremendous event happen in broad daylight, in full view of crowds of people, and certainly so that the Roman Governor Pilate, and the ecclesiastical top brass such as Caiaphas could he overwhelmed by it? Thunder, lightning, and perhaps even an earthquake would liven up the script. But this quiet garden, with

frightened, sobbing women finding the stone door rolled away from the tomb; Peter and John, not a host of people, finding grave-clothes lying on the ledge; Jesus walking toward one of the Marys, seeming to her for all the world like a gardener; and the risen Lord coming to the disciples in that secret upper room where they huddled behind bolted doors! The shadows of doubt, despair, bereavement, death, and fear are dissolved as in a burst of burning sunlight. Those first followers of Christ were changed dynamically and in depth, every single one of them. Instead of sneaking off to escape their enemies, they went around in broad daylight saying openly that Jesus Christ was alive again and, of all things, saying it to people who had watched him die and seen him buried. They knew well the risks of talking like that. The very men who “ran scared” on Good Friday were pestered, persecuted, and hounded to death because they persisted in telling the world that Jesus Christ, who had suffered crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, had risen again.

Yes, said Paul, who had experienced the risen Lord long after the first Easter; yes, God “rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us away into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom our release is secured and our sins forgiven.” You Colossians, he wrote, ought to “give thanks to the Father who has made you fit to share the heritage of God’s people in the realm of light.”

But it’s two thousand years later, now. Two thousand years of history lie between us and the resurrection. The powers of darkness seem to be having a field day, even in our own favored nation in what a recent writer called the second decade of our greatest affluence. To a majority of our contemporaries, Easter is a kind of lyrical interlude; but it’s all a bit of the stuff of which dreams are made: a lovely legend, a myth in the everyday meaning of myth. They would make their own confession of a nineteenth-century poet, Arthur H. Clough, written in Naples, Italy, one Easter Day: “This is the one sad Gospel that is true, Christ is not risen.”

But God comes, as God came decisively in the resurrection. We can’t tidy up all the details of the