Diocese of Chichester

A very happy Easter to you.And good luck with holiday plans!Friends of mine plan stay with former colleagues who have moved to Normandy, so a big improvement on last year’s soggy campsite in Wales.But this plan does include the challenge of getting three children under the age of 11 through a 12-hour journey.And here’s the question you dread: ‘Are we nearly there yet?’The response, ‘Not yet, darling,’ wears thin after 2 hours and you still haven’t reached the Newhaven ferry.

The endurance of an interminable journey flows out of childhood into adult life.The ‘not yet’ category applies to the expected delivery of spare parts for your boiler, signed contracts for your business, or confirmation of your hospital appointment.It is also a feature of the Easter story and our Christian life.

Jesus says to Mary, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.’The theme of ‘not yet’ runs throughout the gospel of St John, going right back to the wedding at Cana, when Jesus asks his mother to hold back because his hour had not yet come.

This gospel is an exploration of how our experience of the living God, seen in Jesus Christ, is always just beyond our comprehension.We have to learn to wait on God who does not materialise just when we would find it convenient.

We do hear in the gospel what sounds at last like an end to our waiting, when Jesus says that the hour has come for him to be glorified.But he describes this glorification in the mystifying terms of a seed that falls into the earth, and once again we have to wait for the sign of its new life.The hour that Jesus speaks of is painfully measured out in the agony of the crucifixion.Glory slips through our fingers and eludes us, as we are confronted by dereliction and death.

After so much waiting, is it any wonder that Mary Magdalen wants to catch hold of something tangible that will vindicate her faithfulness.But once again she hears those words: ‘not yet’.

The children who cry out, ‘Are we nearly there, yet?’ are rightly wanting to be reassured that we shall indeed arrive at our destination together, and it will be amazing, everything that we have been told it would be, and more.At times, the journey seems to defeat us.Our willingness to continue together has to be won by the parents who will remind us that this was always what a serious journey is like: there seemed to be no end to our travelling, but at last we did arrive at a destination worth waiting for.

The Church is a family that is on just this kind of journey.It is, as we were promised, a challenging pilgrimage, life-long, with no guarantees, and fixed on a destination, the glorious reality of which we cannot fully see.But we do believe that the truth and immensity of God is the only reality there is.

Right now in our history we are passing through a phase of impatience, wanting a guarantee of arrival at our destination and it terms and conditions.Most people have given up the challenge and struggle to believe in an unseen glory which is our destiny and they have settled instead for immediate satisfaction, without God.But the evidence of just how satisfying this proves to be does not look encouraging.

War, economic instability, environmental catastrophe, and a crisis in human identity combine to form some of the drivers for levels of anxiety, especially among young people, that are unprecedented in our lifetime.

Mary Magdalen is representative of our age as she reaches out to clasp the risen body of Jesus.She wants to hold on to Jesus in a way that she can comprehend.But she is not yet ready for that intensity of relationship with him that is described as being clothed with light and living in eternity.‘Clothed with light’ is how other gospels describe the glory of the resurrection.This light is the recovered unity of the rainbow spectrum – a beautiful metaphor for the freedom and perfection of friendship with God that was ours in the Garden of Eden and is glimpsed in the New Testament when Jesus is transfigured on Mount Thabor and is described as ‘clothed in light’.

During this past week, I have valued the writing of Sheila Cassidy, a doctor who had been tortured in Chile, and ended up working in St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth when I was a curate there in the 1980s.

Her meditative observation of life is in large measure derived from being imprisoned and tortured, as a result of her identification of the dispossessed people of Latin America, and from seeing similar signs of loss and alienation in Aids patients here in the UK.

She writes unflinchingly about the stature of waiting, in Latin America and, in a different way, in the hospice. She asserts the fundamental hope of glory that the resurrection holds for us, while observing that ‘there is a terrible agony in watching someone [being] hollowed out with a knife, even if the end result is an instrument on which is played the music of the universe.’These are people, she says, ‘on whom a light has shone, and everlasting joy is theirs’.They are a chosen people, precious, free and beautiful, ‘The spouse of him who is the God of all the earth’, is how Cassidy describes them.

This is the destination for which we strive, the outcome of our waiting.The risen Lord, so clothed in the glory of the resurrection that we cannot fully comprehend his presence and identity, is the Bridegroom who takes to himself the bride, made perfect by the shedding of his blood.This bride is not an institutional structure but humanity – us – redeemed in our diverse entirety.

The ‘not yet’ of St John’s gospel finds fulfilment in the marriage describedin the Revelation of St John, the final book in the New Testament.In that dazzling and complex book we are given a vision of what it means to arrive at our goal and destination, beyond the ‘not yet’ of our time and space.And here we see the martyr saints, an innumerable company of the baptised who have born witness to Jesus Christ and, against all the odds, have remained faithful to him.And what are they doing? They are singing.

This is vindication of Sheila Cassidy’s remarkable description of being hollowed out by any number of life’s traumas, and finding that through the formative experience of endurance we become an instrument of music, like a flute, through which the breath of the Holy Spirit flows to draw forth the eternal music of heaven itself.

That same breath inspired the prophets of the Old Testament who speak to us as the voice of God, as Jeremiah does, saying, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love…take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance…’.Music and dance are the manifestation of our destiny, which John describes as the marriage feast of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, once slain, now risen and enthroned in glory, while creation and all humanity is made new, a complete and perfect society, described as a single city that is at unity in itself, the heavenly Jerusalem, imagined in the radiant splendour of a bride adorned for her husband.

When Mary Magdalen eventually finds the apostles, she doesn’t begin with the details about a gardener: she simply says, ‘I have seen the Lord’.Like John’svision of the end time, this ‘seeing’ is transformative, giving content to the reality of our destination, and accounting for the ‘not yet’ of sacramental signs and symbols which are the gifts that sustain us on our journey into the day of resurrection light and life, where, a different John, John Donne, observes there shall be ‘no darknesse nor dazzling, but one equall light, no noyse nor silence, but one equall musick, no fears nor hopes, but one equall possession, no foes nor friends, but one equall communion and Identity, no ends nor beginnings, but one equall eternity’ in the habitation of thy dwelling.Risen Lord Jesus, bring us, at the last, to that place.