Members of the Theos team offer some reflections on Holy Week and the meaning of Easter. 11/04/22.

Telling the right story

To make the link between Easter and a musical set in a fictional town where the government controls everything including its miracles might seem a leap by any stretch of the imagination – but I’d suggest otherwise.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle, currently playing in London, is an absurdist political satire where the one institution left flourishing in the broken town is the asylum, labelled ‘The Cookie Jar’ with its inmates conveniently labelled ‘cookies’. The corrupt and unpopular mayoress and her seemingly gormless cronies conjure a fake miracle of water spouting from a rock, to manipulate people into approving and liking them. Water pours out, powered by a pump hidden inside the rock and pilgrims flock to experience it. The cookies are brought by their nurse to partake of the water but the cronies prevent them, so in turn the cookies scatter amongst the rest of the pilgrims, and it then becomes impossible to differentiate between who is from the asylum and who is not. The asylum inmates are only ‘other’ because they’ve been told they are.

Jesus was crucified by a government who created a narrative about him that convinced people he was dangerous and that they were better off with the shallow, unenriching life offered by their government. Jesus stood by who he was and stood up for those ostracized as ‘other’ by those who apparently knew best. He was punished in the harshest way for that. How many times do we see this played out in our world now where a country’s government has the audacity to say a situation is true when it is so very false? How often do we fall for fake miracles presented to us by leaders we have made idols? The violence of the Easter story shows us what happens when we do this but offers an alternative in the hope of resurrection from a man who includes without assessing and loves without labelling.

Anna Wheeler

Out of joint

“When I look back at my schooldays,” wrote the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, “the many different pieces fitted together so well it would be easy to imagine they had been placed there as a kind of ‘intelligent creation’”. I can see, he continued, “why the temptation to believe in some kind of a super human agency in the world can be so strong.”

Indeed it is… at least when things do fit together. In fact, this view became a centrepiece of theology – so called ‘natural theology’ – at least in England for many years. “The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence,” wrote the pre–eminent advocate of this view, William Paley. It was precisely because things seemed to work together so harmoniously that we should believe in God. “In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view… It is a happy world after all.”

Except, of course, that it isn’t a happy world after all. It is a world twisted in pain and anguish, out of joint, broken, in which children die in the rubble of buildings obliterated by a distant dictator. No philosophy, no worldview, no religion that fails at least take the reality of such suffering seriously is worth listening to.

On Palm Sunday, my church’s choir sang from the Book of Lamentations, “how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people… She weepeth sore in the night, and the tears are on her cheeks.” The words were painfully poignant.

And apposite for Easter week. I had not noticed until I heard them sing, how the motifs from Lamentations suffused the crucifixion. “I am the man who has seen affliction… He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship… ‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?’”

Construct your understanding of God (or superhuman agency or providence) on a happy world, where the pieces fit together perfectly, and it will soon come falling down. Sen got this. “Caution comes”, he went on to say, “with reflection on how terribly badly the lives of many others go… despite my own good fortune, there is clearly no lesson her about any intelligent and kindly creator.”

Immune to religion as Sen is (by his own admission), such a statement might come across as an attack on faith. But seen through the lens of Easter week, it need not be. Indeed, those of us without Sen’s religious immunity would agree. At least as far as Christianity is concerned, it is not things fitting neatly together that lies at the heart. It is things falling apart, a time, a life, a person out of joint.

Nick Spencer

On not looking away

In those first days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I – like many others – became obsessed with it. Endlessly scrolling for news and footage about the conflict, images of fearful or slaughtered men, women and children dominating my mind day and night; left in disbelief that such horrors could be happening in 2022. The obsession began to feel voyeuristic – human suffering reduced to 280 characters; dipping in and out of a horror while back in reality I went about my daily life.

I am due to give birth to my second child in a few weeks and recently decided that, when it came to the horrors of this world such as the Ukraine conflict and the daily news of global atrocities that make up our news headlines, I needed to look away. A protection mechanism, perhaps. A way for me to pretend that the world I am about to bring my son into is safe. In recent weeks, I’ve found myself skipping past news headlines of Ukraine, of Bucha, of maternity hospitals bombed and children murdered or left orphaned. I can’t bear to look.

There’s an account in John’s gospel of Mary, John and two other female disciples of Jesus at the foot of the cross, watching Christ being crucified. On seeing them, he tells his mother to behold her son – John – and for John to behold his mother. The Greek verb horao is used here to mean to see, to observe, to perceive. I wonder how Mary felt in this moment, observing her son in excruciating pain, perceiving his physical torment but also his sense of anguish and abandonment by the God in whom she had placed her trust. I wonder whether it would have been easier for her to stay away.

But love compels us to look, not to turn away. Who of us in our loved ones’ most painful moments would choose not to stand with them, to decide against holding their hand in solidarity, as if by staying away we can somehow protect ourselves? Love compels us to look, to bear witness to others’ suffering, not to pretend it’s not happening.

On Sunday at church, we sang one of those hymns that never fails to give me goosebumps: When I Survey the Wondrous Cross – its glorious words compelling us to see the sorrow and love, the blood, the crown of thorns. To really look and to find the profound beauty in Christ’s sacrifice.

Black liberation theologian James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree draws our eyes towards the horrific violence perpetrated against black bodies through lynching in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Like would have been true of Christ’s crucifixion, lynchings were often public, with people coming from miles and miles around to see mutilated black bodies for their own entertainment.

Our bearing witness to the suffering of others in the world must be as an outpouring of our recognition that things must not be so; that there’s a better way – an alternative vision of how the world is supposed to be, rooted in an understanding of who God is. As Cone writes:

“The gospel of Jesus is… a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.” 

Chine McDonald

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