Weekly Reflection – Jesus: Just the Beginning

When exercising ministry at our cathedral, I often seem to offer the 10.30am Prayer Book communion on a Wednesday. I am a great fan of the Prayer Book, and celebrating this service is something to which I look forward. The Prayer Book is noted for its consistency, in a way in which modern liturgy is not – Common Worship runs to many volumes, and gives a plethora of options, for instance – but this means that when the Prayer Book does offer a variation, then our ears should prick up, because clearly something important is taking place. Turn to Easter Day, then, and the rubric says ‘At Morning Prayer, instead of the Psalm: O come, let us, &c. these Anthems shall be sung or said’. Out goes the daily offering of the Venite, and in comes these magisterial texts from the New Testament proclaiming Christ’s resurrection. Thus, having kept company with the Apostles on Maundy Thursday at the table, and on Good Friday by standing at the foot of the Cross with them gazing upon the dying Body of our Lord, the first words on our lips on Easter morning are to be the very words the Apostles used to convey the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection to the people whom they were evangelizing. Hence we read, for instance, that ‘Christ, having been raised from the dead, dieth no more’, and that ‘death hath no more dominion over him’.

Yet these sentences, if you read them through, are not just about Our Lord’s past, but about our present and our future, for no sooner have we reflected on Christ’s resurrection, than we are told to ‘reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin: but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ And in the next sentence, the words ‘Christ is risen from the dead’ are immediately followed by the statement ‘and become the first-fruits of them that slept’. In other words, Jesus is just the beginning! The resurrection which he undergoes is a precursor to our own. For as he was raised in his Body, so will we be raised in our bodies too.

The final sentence gives us the bigger context, which helps us to understand why: ‘For as in Adam all die: even so in Christ shall all be made alive’. Scripture tells us that death came through one man, Adam, and through that one man’s sin, all have lost the life which God desires for his children. But God did not abandon us in the mire of our iniquities, but sent his only Son to live the life that the first Adam did not live – a life without sin, a life of total obedience and self-sacrifice to the Father, culminating in his freely-offered death on the Cross – so that he might merit for those who believe, eternal life. By his death, we are made alive.

We experience this new life first in our baptisms, when God washes us of those sins which have separated us from him and restores us to his friendship, and we are sustained in this new life through God’s grace given in the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. But of course we shall go on experiencing this life through our own deaths, beyond our judgements, into the new heaven and the new earth, where death itself is no more. Our life in Christ begins in the font, but it lasts for eternity.

This week, on Easter Monday, Pope Francis died. He is not the first Pope to die in the Easter Octave (the eight days from Easter Sunday to the Second Sunday of Easter), but in doing so, perhaps he offers to the world a particular message, that for the Christian, death is but our entry into that Paschal joy which we celebrate, yes, in this Easter season, but in reality goes on for ever and knows no end. I hope you have had a very happy Easter celebration, and will go on to live that Easter joy in your own life, even when this week and season ends.

Father Christopher