The Holy Week reports from parishes around the Diocese are coming in and they seem to have a theme in common: Large (sometimes record-breaking) attendance for Easter Day services. As for Good Friday, well, generally not so hot.

These reports sound familiar. I know that one of my frustrations as a parish rector was the generally poor turn-out for Holy Week services, especially Good Friday. The people in the pews on Good Friday were often folks I had never seen before. They seemed to be motivated to come, whereas the people I would expect to show up (like Vestry members!) did not. Sometimes I would get so depressed on Good Friday that I swore I was going to ask the hordes that crowded in on Easter morning, "Let's have a show of hands, who was here on Friday?" And then I would say, "Fine, you can stay, everyone else-out!" It was probably good for my job security that I never yielded to this temptation!

Theologically we should all know by now that the two events, the passion and the resurrection, cannot be fully understood without the other. Somehow this fact does not seem to be very well communicated or understood. When I asked folks why they don't go to Good Friday services, the answer I get is often something like, "It's too depressing-too much of a downer." I wonder, are we really so afraid of pain and suffering that we can't confront it even for an hour or two, especially when we do so in company with our Lord?

It is probably a truism by now to say that one can't really have resurrection without death, Easter without Good Friday. I think we as clergy and leaders will need to do a much better job of teaching that fact in our congregations if Easter is going to mean more than just a Spring Festival or a social gathering with lilies and new dresses.

Over the next year the clergy are going to be talking a lot about liturgy and how we can do a better job of making our worship meaningful and dramatic. Perhaps a good place to start would be to focus on the Great Three Days-the pivotal point of all that we do as the People of God.

+Kirk

A Final Thought

Archbishop Rowan Williams is not the easiest writer to understand. His prose is dense and has to be read over slowly a few times. A case is point is this passage from his book, Resurrection. But hang on tight, it is worth the ride!

+Kirk

When we read the Gospels it is hard to dismiss the consistent echo of disorientation and surprise concerning the resurrection. A chronicle of Easter Day would be a hopeless enterprise. Perhaps all we can recover across the centuries is the piercing note of shock; and that says a great deal.

Even if the Gospels, one thing is never described. There is a central silence, not broken until the second century, about the event of resurrection. Even Matthew, with his elaborate mythological scenery, leaves us with the strange impression that the stone is rolled away from a tomb that is empty. Jesus is not released by an angel (Like Luke's Peter in Acts), but raised by the Father. It is an event which is not describable, because it is precisely there that there occurs the transfiguring expansion of Jesus' humanity which is the heart of the resurrection encounters. It is an event on the frontier of any possible language, because it is the moment in which our speech is both left behind and opened to new possibilities. It is as indescribable as the process of imaginative fusion which produces any metaphor, and the evangelists withdraw, as well they might.

Jesus' life is historical, describable; the encounters with Jesus risen are historical and (after a fashion) describable, with whatever ambiguities and unclarities. But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus, the hinge between these two histories, the act which brings the later out of the former, does not and cannot belong to history; it is not an event, which a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday. God's act is uniting Jesus' life with his eludes us: we can speak of it only as the necessary condition for our living as we live. And as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way. It is, indeed, an "eternal" act: it is an aspect of the eternal will by which God determines how he shall be, his will to be the Father of the Son. These are abstract words, they describe nothing. They can only point to the truth that God's being and will are always and necessarily prior to ours. The event of resurrection, then cannot but be hidden in God's eternal act, his eternal being himself; however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us. Once again, he decisively evades our grasp, our definition and our projection.