Deadlines and Joy
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 28:1-10
Deadlines are central to student life. Almost everything is due in by a certain date and time – lab reports, essays, dissertations and theses. Presentations have to be ready by the class; exams take place at fixed times. I think deadlines have always been stressful: maybe Shakespeare pulled a few all-nighters to get Hamlet ready for the Globe for its first performance in 1600. As Hamlet says,
who would bear the whips and scorns of time.
Post-Covid, it seems that deadlines are even more stressful, and harder to make. Anecdotally, this may be a record year for extensions. Sometimes there are significant reasons which make deadlines hard to make, and it’s right to extend the time allowed. Indeed, I got pretty close to asking you all to come back in a fortnight to give me just a little longer to be ready for Easter. But as Hamlet also said, the readiness is all. And so I made my deadline. Indeed, without deadlines, I doubt I’d finish much at all. Deadlines are our friends: they give us motivation, and when they’ve passed, we are able to relax… until the next one’s due.
You may be wondering what deadlines have to do with Easter. Well, I’ve long loved these words by the playwright Alan Bennett about TV shows with built-in deadlines – you know, complete this extraordinary makeover in a weekend with just a thousand quid. He had a garden makeover programme in mind called Ground Force when he wrote:
And there’s always a spurious time-limit, thus making it another version of Ground Force, where a transformation has to be wrought in the space of three days. The timetable of the Resurrection would just have suited the programme-makers.
Now, I’m not saying that God was subject to a spurious time-limit, like contestants on Bake Off, Sewing Bee, Pottery Throw-Down, Masterchef and many many more. But it is true that Easter happens in time, in a historical moment, more or less dateable, and placeable. It was a shade under 2000 years ago, probably on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nisan in 30AD. And I’ve been to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which is fairly probably the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.
But what was the assignment? That is maybe the deepest question of all. Here’s my first draft.
God in love created a universe in which gases became stars and planets on one of which at least life emerged and evolved until human beings developed in all our complexity. Human beings, such a mixture of kindness and cruelty, happiness and sorrow, generosity and selfishness. Scripture is the story of our human stories in all our diversity, and of God’s interaction with his beloved world, guiding and blessing it, and sometimes grieving for our wilful spoiling of the planet and our fellow people. This year alone we continue to see such self-centredness – in war in Ukraine and in increasing climate change. And we recognise sorrow and loss – in victims of cruelty, in ways that illness and loss affect those we love, and our own selves. In scripture, we sense God’s imaginative ways of reaching out to his world and his people – in law, in community, in sacrifices and in prophets, all helpful but going only so far.
It’s as if the world approached a deadline, but submitted only rough working, a few ideas but nothing with the right shape or direction, a world far from just, far from peaceful, far from caring enough for our fellow-creatures. And so God chooses to reach out by reaching in – to enter creation in time and space. And this is the story of Jesus, God sharing the lines of a human life. This Holy Week, we’ve seen that human life in Jesus face so many dramatic events, and experience such a range of emotions – anointed and betrayed, accused and arrested, kissed and scourged, tried and convicted, crucified and killed. The lines of the world’s drama, Israel’s history and Jesus’ life converged in his death – deadlines indeed.
Students sometimes say seven is heaven. Seven out of 20 is enough to pass a module and get the credit. If God’s assignment had ended with the death of Jesus, defeated by hostile powers, would we not have to say his life had failed? Some intriguing ideas, but ultimately mistaken. 6.9?
Of course God wasn’t given a deadline, spurious or otherwise, by the makers of The Great Jerusalem Rise-Up. But with hindsight, it seems only right that the resurrection happened when it did. It was the first Sunday after the Friday of his death, and so the first day of the week, and the first time the women came to the tomb to perform the final acts of respect to his body which time had not allowed before the Sabbath. The Marys came to the tomb sad, grieving, frightened. They encountered the angel and they heard the amazing news – Jesus has been raised. And Matthew says they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy.
All Holy Week, Sam and I have been exploring emotions in our talks at special services. Today’s emotion is joy. Jesus was no longer dead. Somehow all that had led to the grave was overturned. All the lines which had circumscribed our lives – sorrow and loss, sin and guilt, anxiety and fear – these most deadly of deadlines – were over and gone.
Seven is heaven? I’m not going to grade the Creator and Redeemer of the Universe. Instead perhaps we can all know and feel this resurrection in our lives, this failure to fail as a student from the Ministry Discernment Group put it in a talk on Good Friday. Jesus is risen, and is with us by his Spirit, and we are invited to be part of his community of love, of comfort and of commitment.
In August last year my wife Maya and I went to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play there. This play, a dramatic and musical re-telling of the story of Jesus’ last week up to his crucifixion has a long history. The village, in Bavaria, southern Germany, first performed it in 1634, to fulfil a vow. The community promised God, in a time of plague, to perform the passion play every ten years. It is said that no-one in the village died of plague thereafter. And so the Passion Play has largely happened every decade since though our 2020 show was postponed two years because of the Pandemic.
By 2022, the performances stretched across the whole summer, and 2-3000 villagers took part, on the stage, in the orchestra, in the choir, backstage, front of house or in administration. It’s performed in German but the text is available in book-form in some other languages including English – here is the copy I had with me. It’s about five hours long, with a break for dinner in the middle. If you’re interested in going to the next one, you have a bit of time to make the deadline: it’s taking place in 2030.
On our night – Friday 26 August last year – the open-air stage in the village was lit after dark by lightning, and the cast spoke through deep rumbles of thunder – all real, not part of the sound effects. That extraordinary final week of Jesus’ earthly life was conveyed with imagination and conviction – with sheep, donkey, camels and horses as well as throngs of village children waving palm branches. The crucifixion was powerfully effective, and the empty cross remained on stage for the final scene, as you can see on the cover of the order of service.
Then Mary Magdalene came on to the stage from the back and discovered that the tomb was empty, encountered the angel, heard the news and proclaimed her faith, and the choir sang. But my abiding memory is of the face of the woman playing Mary Magdalene – Sophie Schuster, a villager from Oberammergau, a student when announced in the role, no professional actor, but whose face moved from sorrow to joy, a delicate and wonderful transformation as the truth of the resurrection was born in her, as the reality of hope took life in her. It was a beautiful, profound and moving experience to witness. The essence of Easter – perhaps of the Christian faith – found in the expression of a single human face, the opening of joy.
Christ lag in Todesbanden –
Christ lay in death’s bonds
but he has risen again
and brought us life;
therefore we should be joyful.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born about 50 years after the first performance of the Oberammergau Passion Play. This cantata (which is part of our worship today), one of his earliest, was probably written and first performed in 1707, three years after an Oberammergau performance, also in Germany, in 1704. The extraordinary music and pungent words, from a Lutheran hymn, still echoes in us today. Let us continue our joyful praise in his marvellous cantata, including these words for Easter Day:
So we celebrate the high festival
with joy of heart and delight.
Happy Easter!