Confessing Evangelical

Credit where it's due: I don't always see eye-to-eye with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, but his article in last Saturday's Telegraph, "Easter - the awkward time of year", was great stuff.

Dr Williams opens by asking why it is that people are so much more ignorant of the story of Good Friday and Easter than that of Christmas (following a poll - of a type now as traditional at Easter as chocolate eggs - suggesting that only 48% of Britons know why Christians celebrate Easter). He writes:

The truth is that Easter is awkward. The stories themselves are angular and strange - a tormented saga about a judicial murder and a horrific public execution is followed by a series of events that challenge not only our assumptions about how the natural world works, but also our desire to read a story with a good strong ending. Jesus returns from death, but he is not a ghost or a resuscitated corpse - so what is it we are talking about? ...

Hardly surprising that the Easter stories drop readily into the Too Difficult file as far as our society in general is concerned. They seem at first to operate too far outside any frame of reference we can cope with.

This contrasts with the Christmas stories, which have "an accessible, affirming feel to them", and whose "central images are much more universal and manageable - mothers and children, innocence and new life, warmth in midwinter."

But as Dr Williams continues, "perhaps it is just the awkwardness of the stories that ought to persuade us to look again". He points out the way in which the Gospel writers illustrate the events of Jesus' life, and especially His suffering and death, with references to texts from the Old Testament:

Of course, these stories are meant to tell us what happened - but there is a repertoire of images and echoes to draw upon. God’s favoured children are regularly the victims of betrayal and contempt; there is an established way of telling this sort of story.

However, when the writers turn to the Resurrection narratives, "the impression is more fragmented and the time scale not always easy to decipher":

The women flee from the tomb, and then suddenly run into Jesus, according to Matthew. Luke tells us of an odd encounter on the road out of Jerusalem, when two friends of Jesus get into conversation with a stranger and recognise him as Jesus when he breaks bread with them.

John has the poignant story of Mary Magdalene, alone in tears at the deserted grave hearing her name spoken in a voice she knows. People hurry between the tomb and the city and the Galilean mountains, sharing baffling incidents, sometimes interrupted by Jesus inexplicably being there among them. Finally Jesus is seen no more; what is left is the fellowship of disciples trying to put it all into words.

It is both the importance and the strangeness of these events that gives rise to the disjointed nature of the narratives:

When someone stumbles and searches for words, especially someone who is otherwise fluent and coherent, you may well conclude that something has happened for which their experience hasn’t prepared them ...

Even a few decades after the first Easter Sunday, the people in the best position to write about it are still catching up with the experience, not just processing it through a set of conventions.

It's vitally important to realise that Dr Williams is not saying this to put in doubt the historical veracity of the Resurrection; quite the opposite, as he points out in words that had me punching the air in delight at his demolition of one of those oft-trotted-out "sophisticated" explanations of the Resurrection (emphasis added):

Some scholars have cast doubt on the historic value of the stories because of their apparent confusion and unclarity, and have argued that all we have is a symbolic narrative expressing the fact that the disciples felt their faith miraculously renewed after his death. If that were the case, they made a disastrously bad job of it.

The feel of these texts is far more that of people struggling to make sense of something that has happened outside their heads, not inside, wrestling with an intractable set of experiences and meetings, not finding a helpful metaphor for their emotions.

Dr Williams concludes that "the untidy character of the stories leaves the reader or listener with work to do":

The resurrection isn’t a happy ending to a sad story. It is the beginning of a new story, a new phase in the life of the disciples - potentially a new phase for the reader too.

That seems to be what the abrupt end of Mark’s gospel suggests. The women ran away in terror, and... "Well?" we ask impatiently. And the writer lifts his head and says, "Why do you think I’m writing this? And what are you going to do about it? Because nothing is the same now" ...

So it is natural enough that the Easter stories don’t settle as comfortably in the mind and imagination as the Christmas ones. But when someone moistens their lips and looks at us awkwardly and says, "I don’t quite know how to tell you this", we are right to suspect that what’s coming is not just an interesting bit of information or a mere historical anecdote. And we listen that bit harder.

If Easter is awkward, it is because it is always a shock to be told who we really are and what we really might be.