OH, THE RICHNESS!!!

If you blink, you could miss some of the treasure poured out into our laps at this time.

First, we are nearing the end of the Easter Season.

Like Christmas, it is all too short. Personally, I am just getting into re-examining the Resurrection of Jesus – it is ending too soon!

In recent years I have found myself concentrating on his passion and death, the central drama of human history, in which he fought and conquered evil. I have found such richness in the acclamation, “We proclaim his death”. I see my valiant and all-loving saviour routing, in his suffering heart, mind and body, the forces which entangle me and my world. What love! What courage! What hope!

But this year it is the resurrection which is stunning me. I have been thinking a lot about the aversion of our modern minds to the whole idea of miracles. Mathematics and science base themselves on strict and unchanging laws in nature. Many philosophers today say that what seems to us to be a miracle will eventually be explained by the discovery of natural forces that we are presently unaware of. They say, if there is a God, he is primarily the law-giver, and therefore he is incapable of changing the laws that he has made. Even among ‘Christians’, there are some who say that one day we will discover the bones of Jesus somewhere in Palestine. 

But God is not primarily the law-giver. He is the Father who is the delight of his children. He can never be put into a box of human definition and will always surprise us. Through miraculous glimpses and disciplined formation he is re-forming us into his own likeness. On Easter morning, his Son really revived his own body as it slept in death. He not only came back to life he pulsated with the glorious new life of the new creation. I can’t get to the bottom of that – I need more time!

Second, Pentecost comes quickly.

There was such a supernatural commotion in Jerusalem that thousands of people flocked to the scene. What they saw was some deliriously joyful men celebrating with a big 'C'. The Holy Spirit of God, released into the world at Easter was bringing the Church to life. The Apostles are inspired, there was the miracle of everyone understanding them in their own language, and 3000 were baptised that day.

I feel like spending more time here to think about God’s Spirit forming mankind into Church, bringing about the new creation here and now. I feel we only get time to remember what happened at the first Pentecost, and then are moved quickly on by the liturgy. But isn’t that desire to enter more into Pentecost as it is happening here and now precisely the work of ‘Ordinary Time’? Oh, I hope so.

Third, we move onto Trinity

The diet of the Liturgy seems too rich. God needed 2000 years to reveal to Israel the Mystery of the amazing love life of the three persons who are united as one God. There is no truth more deep or important. How can we just give it a day in the Liturgy?

But that very deepest reality, Trinity, is what every single day is about not just Trinity Sunday. It is where we have come from, where we are now and where we are going. It is the reality in which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28). Every day is meant to be a new stage in our exploration into the reality of our God-filled existence.

A large part of the Liturgy, the big feasts, is revisiting the events of salvation, and reliving them to receive their message and know afresh the power of God. But an equally large part is just being in God and learning reality under his mighty hand. We do that by letting the Holy Spirit give us encounters with Jesus, who gradually incorporates us into himself and takes us to our Father. That is Trinity life here and now.

Suddenly it’s Corpus Christi

In the last paragraph I said that Jesus ‘incorporates’ us into himself in order to take us to our Father. What a surpassing mystery that he should actually do this physically when we eat his body and drink his blood!

The Eucharist is the daily bread of Christians, the food for the journey. We call our last reception ‘Holy Viaticum’, the Latin for ‘food for the journey’. In that case the journey is from this world to the fully real world of the Trinity, where there will be no more days, only the eternal now, which we cannot even imagine. We only know it is eternal bliss and beautiful complete communion.

The Mass is that point when millions of Christians throughout the world gather as one with all the saints of heaven and are given a foretaste of that glory which is to come. In its strength, we go out to fulfil the next stage of our task of drawing all creation into Jesus’ new life.

Through repetition we learn.

The great feasts we celebrate so closely together at this time, are like the headlines in a newspaper, which we scan, and later return to in order to familiarise ourselves with the details. They highlight in dazzling dramas, the everyday drama of ordinary life in Christ. It says a lot for God’s understanding of us that we spend year after year relearning so that day by day we can live more fully.