‘Resurrection is new ground’

The Rev Roddy Hamilton highlights the new landscapes of resurrection.

IF ever there was a season for honest worship, perhaps it is Holy Week and Easter.

The rise and fall and rise again of emotions and trauma and light and dark and truth and lies is the rollercoaster that is the dynamic between heaven and earth throughout this season, perhaps every season. And our worship moves in the interplay between Saviour and Religion.

How often we jump ahead, however, reaching the good news before it happens. We can’t help ourselves speak of resurrection before we experience the raw darkness and loneliness of a love that has broken and died. That is where the greatest theology is and we seem to avoid it, quickly passing over it with a God who will ride in for the rescue.

But the story we tell tells us otherwise. Stop! Wait. There is a day when that love doesn’t make it. Love dies. No rescue in the darkness moment.

That is a very real feeling for many people. It is where God needs to be, in that darkness, and it isn’t bettered by the soft peddling of an easy story of resurrection. For some it takes more than three days for that resurrection to appear, if ever.

We cannot speak in holy week worship of resurrection as if that makes everything else okay; we can put up with anything knowing it will all be fine in the end. Will it? That’s not helpful to someone who knows Holy Week in all the rawness of loss and hurt and abuse and depression they experience in life. For once there is a story for us and a saviour who accompanies us there.

So despite the focus always being Easter our worship is invited to reflect the longer story of Holy Week bullying and abuse. Finding the words for such a time is the real art of worship in this season without having to pre-empt resurrection to justify the darkness. For many the darkness is fact and we lessen the truth and reality of God by offering easy words that take us too quickly to resurrection.

Yet, resurrection is there in the story. For some. Others simply run from an empty tomb frightened. The story is strange: the one you ought to recognise, you don’t; he’s there for a moment and gone the next. Resurrection is a curious thing. It certainly isn’t a return to business as usual.

Yet Easter is often a big service, good hymns, an assurance of God and then we return to the way things were before.

But resurrection is new ground each and every time we tell the story. It is not about confidence but rather hesitation: this is a new landscape, how should we travel and what shall we take with us when everything you thought before is now called into question? How might our worship find that kind of space, post-Easter, in the language we use that makes it more adventurous, more willing to explore and not take things for granted? Perhaps constantly offering that adventurous spirit will help guide us into our own resurrected future, not based on a return to the familiar. Regularly we cry ‘the church needs to change’. That’s been a given since day one. Resurrection is a way of living into that future and our worship paves the way.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.