HAVELOCK NORTH
A EUCHARIST OF REMEMBRANCE
Everything that the Father
gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; 38 for I have come down from heaven, not to do my
own will, but the will of him who sent me. 39 And
this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he
has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 This is indeed the will of my Father, that all
who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them
up on the last day.’
When someone
that we know as John wrote down a whole lot of Jesus sayings and wove them into
the book we know as “John” or the “Fourth Gospel” he did so because he wanted
his listeners (for such they were) to encounter the awe and the mystery and the
hope and the joy that he had encountered in loving and serving one the Romans
felt was no more than a crucified crim, but who he and his companions though
had in some mysterious way overcome that most horrendous of deaths, not by not
dying, but by dying and rising again.
Of course in a
scientific rational world in which we love we know that dead friends don’t come
bopping back a few days later. We are human: we wish with all our heart that
they could or world, but the silent space they leave behind remains silent, the
empty chairs and empty tables remain empty, and the ache of a human heart goes
on. In our world we readily mock silly people who talk to their imaginary
friend and hope things will get better.
Actually they
did when John was writing, too. They didn’t really think that loved ones came
back and sat at the table where we last saw them, even then. They weren’t dumb.
Yet something had changed for them, and it was something so powerful that they
were prepared to die for it. They felt that in the experience of worshipping
and loving and serving the now unseen crucified, dead Jesus – and sceptics then
would refer to them too as silly people who had an imaginary friend – in loving
and serving and worshipping this person (that few if any of them had actually
ever seen) they found supremely powerful hope. They found hope for themselves.
They found hope for their friends – friends who they had shared life and love
with but who now were dead – and they found and felt hope for their world.
They remembered
Jesus talking about something called resurrection, and they felt his presence
so powerfully in their worship and in getting together to pray and eat and sing
that they began to understand what he had meant. They came to believe
passionately that sadness and loss and even death were not the end, though they
remain a passage through which they and we and those they loved and those we
love must pass. They came to believe, against all the cynicism around them that
even death was just a parenthesis, a break in transmission, a kind of brutal
loss but yet one which would not end the experiences of love and fellowship. People then talked about silly Christians and
their Imaginary Friend, but slowly the compassion and the love and the hope the
Christian community demonstrated began to attract others, too.
Sometimes in
our rational world it’s hard to believe all that stuff. And yet every now and
again I experience something so uncannily irrational, so utterly powerful in
its rumouring of a life beyond the merely here and now, that I cling as those
first Christians did to this weird thing called Christian belief. Through three
and a half decades now it’s seen me through some pretty interesting times, and
given me powerful experiences of love and hope and joy along the way. So I
guess I get what those first Christians were on about as they remembered their
loved ones, hoped for them in Christ, and dedicated their lives to believing in
Jesus.
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