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            A Quaker named Anne is riding in a train crossing the Punjab in India. She is jammed into a packed and teeming railway car, and a sense of panic is pressing in on her. She writes:

And sitting there in that crowded train, with all its heat and clamor, suddenly it was utterly self-evident that I did not exist in the way I thought I did. And this realization brought with it an experience which I can only describe as a kernel of popcorn popping. It was as though the inside came out on the outside and I looked with wonder and joy at everything. And the sense then was of unutterable relief, of  “I don’t need to do anything with the self, I don’t need to improve it or make it good or sacrifice it or crucify it – I don’t need to do anything because it isn’t even there.” There was an immense feeling of release, and with that release came at once, immediately, a feeling that it was release into action.

The Christian mystic, George MacDonald writes this verse:

The great deliverance is a greater thing
Than purest imagination can foregrasp;
A thing beyond all conscious hungering,
Beyond all hope that makes the poet sing.
It takes the clinging world, undoes its clasp,
Floats it afar upon a mighty sea,
And leaves us quiet with love and liberty and thee.

            Both writers are telling us that the meaning of resurrection is release, liberation from the deadening grasp of this clinging world, from the claustrophobic confines of life, into relief, love, and God. It is a liberation into the peace of God which passes all human understanding. When Jesus bids farewell to his disciples at the Last Supper, he says, “My Peace I give you. Not as the world gives.” And when the Risen Christ appears to them, he repeatedly greets them with the words, “Peace be unto you.” And, as Anne says, this immense feeling of release which came upon her, was a release into action.

            How do we encounter the resurrection? We must have the courage to go to the grave. Like the women we must to look into the face of grief, even step into the tomb to discover that Christ is risen. We have to acknowledge the clasp of the world, face the fear, look into the heart of darkness. We first must join Jesus in his crucifixion and death – which is the surrender of the self. Surrender to the form of the present painful moment – be it a desperately crowded train, a hospital bed, a life out of control, a world gone haywire, an unbearable loss. Good Friday is the letting go into the loss.

            What can come then? Easter fear and Easter joy. Not so much separate emotions, but feelings that are inextricably one. Listen to the words translators use to capture the original Greek of the gospels’ resurrection stories: amazement, terror, ecstasy, astonishment, trembling, alarm. Here is an elevation of Spirit that ultimately only poets and artists can evoke. Music critic Ted Libby, in describing the Resurrection Section of Bach’s B-Minor Mass writes:

While (the) deep lament (of the “Crucifixus” section) is the center of the mass, it is the “Et resurrexit” chorus immediately following – where the singers often sound as if they are laughing in ecstasy – that marks the spiritual apogee of the work, and of Bach’s entire life as a musician.

That’s it. That is what resurrection is: to be engulfed in a spiritual giddiness. The giddiness of relief in the knowledge that “all will be well,” a phrase referring not just to a time in the future, but that assurance that because all will be well then, in the deepest sense, all is well now.

            And in the very heart of this fear and joy, peace arises. We are released into a deep peace. But it is not the peace of an inert or languid tranquility. It is a peace that itself embodies action. We are released into action. Indeed the terms action and inaction as opposites cease to have meaning. It is the inaction of perfect obedience to the will of God, the inaction of pure trust. It is the action of going where God goes, saying what God says, doing what God does, being who God is.

            Fear – Joy – Peace. All three come together in faith, hope, and love.

            This Holy Week, we lost the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Jr., a prophet to our times and a mentor to a generation of Christian lay and clergy. He wrote this:

It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see, then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty…I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

Amen.

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