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THE DARKNESS LIGHTENS

Charles Mitchell-Innes - Vicar of The Close (Wednesday 1st April 2009)

As we journey through Lent and approach Holy Week, the sombre tone intensifies in our communal worship, and possibly in our private devotion. “What gloomy people these Christians are!” observes the critic. And if that means that we do not skim along the surface of life but recognise and acknowledge the existence of evil and suffering - our own and others’ - well then, the critic is right; or, rather, would be right if that were the end of the story. We would simply be a community of morbid killjoys, passionate only for gloom.

Yet that does not appear to be the case. Christian worship is characterised as much by its robust sense of wonder and its radiant outbursts of joy as by the depth of its spirituality and its awareness of sin and mortality. Remember, O thou man, / Thy time is spent...therefore repent is balanced in the carol by what follows: The angels all did sing / Praise to our heavenly King, / And peace to men living / With right good will.

The truth is that without an awareness of the wilderness experience, of which our Lenten discipline and self-searching provide a flavour, we shall be largely unmoved by the explosive revelation of Easter.

So our services this month lead us from the subdued colours of Lent through the high drama of Palm Sunday, with its crowds and acclamations, to the deepening shadows of Holy Week, as liturgy, furnishings and vestments become ever more muted and spare. We share in the events of the Last Supper, and play a reflective role in the seeming tragedy of Good Friday. And then, at dawn on Easter morning, we light the Paschal fire and greet the risen Christ uproariously with the bold, astonishing assertion: “The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed, Alleluia!”

And though the last lights off the black west went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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