Will the Son pull off resurrection again this year?

So, the cycle of liturgical time leads us back through Lent, to cultivate in ourselves again the difficult anticipation of the death, and - dare we hope it? - the resurrection of the Son.

We know the Easter story, of course. But faith is not just knowing the story of what has been done. It's entering into the story at our own risk, on our own account. It's knowing that we, too, must walk the way of Jesus. And who knows where that might all end?

Lenten discipline heightens our consciousness of this tension, between knowing what Jesus did for us, and knowing how unready we are to do it on his behalf.

On the one hand, in Lenten worship we retell the stories of Jesus' victories over the powers of this world. On the other hand, we ask ourselves, or should be asking ourselves: D'you think he'll manage to pull it off again this year?

For it's in us the Son must die and rise again.

Are we up to the job?

***

In John's account of the empty tomb, the angels accost Mary Magdalene: "Woman, why are you weeping?"

Can that be a serious question? Are they really that clueless?

Well, maybe. The angels, living in the cyclical time of the liturgy, see the Easter story all from the perspective of eternity. For them, there never is any doubt how it ends. They know it front to back, back to front.

Mary, however, lived (as we now live) in the linear time of ordinary human existence.

Although touched by the eternal in Jesus' presence in her life, at the empty tomb Mary knows not what lies ahead of her, nor any longer understands what has gone before, and the one present solidity, the body of her beloved, in need of her care, is vanished.

Mary weeps, then, not because she misunderstands the Easter story (as the angels' question seems to imply: "Woman, don't you get it?").

Mary weeps because there is no story, not now. The presence of eternity is gone; her times are shattered.

Every Good Friday is like this. The circle of sacred time breaks on the line of our lives.

No story. Just fragments. Mere lives (Jesus'? Mary's? One's own?). No point.

***

Easter presents us with a choice: Will we identify with the angels, who live in the sacred time of myth and ritual, or will we identify with Mary and all the other disciples?

Identifying with the angels means, more or less, disavowing who we are. Admittedly, we are a little like the angels: we've celebrated the liturgy often enough to imagine we know how the Easter story goes.

But, crucially, for us the liturgy is not the whole story, as it is for the holy angels. To pretend it's all we need is to counterfeit eternity.

Rather, we have to make the story of Easter our own, out of the resources of our own, fragmentary lives.

Of course, we can pretend to share the angels' perspective. But then we turn ourselves into spectators of, rather than faithful participants in, the miracle of Easter morning.

***

Will the Son pull off resurrection again this year? Are we up to the job?
Being up to the job requires us to be right there like Mary: not a spectator, but a participant.

Being up to the job means being present and faithful even as things fall apart -- and thus ready for the joy of Easter morning. Even though we can't already know it, the Son will rise in us again.

Charles Wesley put it well: "Made like him, like him we rise: ours the cross, the grave, the skies."

Andrew Irvine