New every morning – Good Friday and Easter 2020

Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24

I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath;

he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light;

against me alone he turns his hand, again and again, all day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones;

he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation;

he has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has put heavy chains on me;

though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer;

he has blocked my ways with hewn stones, he has made my paths crooked.

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

"The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him." 



Whatever the triumph and fanfare of Easter, we will be still in lockdown and in exile from our normal lives.  Our normal lives may remain always now a memory.  The menace of pandemic reigns.  It is as though Good Friday and Easter have merged. 


The messages and images of Good Friday draw together all the cruelty, injustice and suffering people know.  The drama invites us to see God bearing it also, ineffably in Christ, even through death.  Saturday is the continuing experience of sorrow and loss which so many of us know.  Easter Day dawns… and quietly, gently, mysteriously, it may be over many days, in different ways for different people, we enter a newness, a freshness… for Mary in the garden at the tomb, and for the disciples it was indeed new every morning.


I chose the passage from Lamentations because it seems to mirror this merging.  The Book of Lamentations, usually considered far too gloomy for the kind of worship people expect, is a series of Hebrew poems dating from after the rape, pillage and demolition of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.  He marched most of its surviving citizens to some 50 years of exile in Babylon.  Somehow, precisely in the desolation, these writers come to know themselves addressed by God, through the pain and loss, and they can lift up their hearts.  Jesus’s followers too, men and women plunged into grief, horror and loss, found joy in the depths.  Like the Babylonian exiles, we are now confronting uncertainty, unable to imagine the future, each day receiving glimpses of fragility and menace.


The experience of resurrection, however it comes, is at the edge of what words can express.  That doesn’t stop teachers trying, however – and these are Fr Richard Rohr’s words:   At some point, such people were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life.  They broke through in what felt like breaking down.  Instead of avoiding a personal death or raging at it, they went through a death of their old, small self and came out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them.  This process of transformation is known in many cultures as initiation.  For many Christians, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the preeminent example of this pattern.  Following Jesus, we need to trust the down, and God will take care of the up.  Although even there, we still must offer our yes.


Resurrection takes root in us quietly and deeply, it may be over months or years, once we know how to be still and silent, with empty hands, asking for nothing.  Meister Eckhart, a teacher from the Middle Ages, wrote: Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.  Resurrection comes in the silence and stillness, as Jesus met Mary in her grief, in the garden, in the morning.