The Mystery of Faith

THE Church is excellent at alleluias. We know learn how to fill a constructing with brightness, learn how to let the enjoyment of Easter ring out, learn how to mark the feast with all the sweetness it deserves. The resurrection is the center of the Christian faith, and there’s nothing excessive in rejoicing over it.

But Eastertide asks a harder query than Easter Day. It asks, “What happens after the nice declaration has been made?” What form of Church emerges once the feast moves into unusual time, once the flowers begin to fade, once the primary burst of joy settles into the slower work of discipleship?

This, it seems to me, is where Easter becomes most searching.

The Gospels don’t present resurrection as a single, overwhelming moment after which the whole lot becomes immediately clear. The disciples didn’t move straight from fear to settled confidence: they return, many times, to uncertainty, to waiting, to partial recognition. The risen Christ must keep meeting them where they’re. Easter is glorious, however it just isn’t easy. It just isn’t only a feast: it’s the start of a modified life.

That could also be why Eastertide matters a lot. It is the season during which the Church learns whether resurrection is merely a celebration or genuinely a way of inhabiting the world.

Mary Magdalene has to learn to recognise Christ in a garden, through tears; Thomas learns that doubt just isn’t the top of discipleship; and Peter learns that resurrection doesn’t erase his failure, but calls him beyond it. The disciples at Emmaus should learn that Christ is understood in scripture, fellowship, and bread broken together. None of that is decorative: it was — and is — formative. Perhaps that’s the point.

The Church can sometimes give the impression that the aim of a feast is to create a moment of uplift strong enough to hold us for some time; however the resurrection is more. It just isn’t simply an annual reminder that things are brighter than they appear: it’s the claim that the deepest truth of the world just isn’t death, but life; not despair, however the living Christ.

If that’s so, then the Church after the alleluia can’t be the exact same because the Church before it.

This doesn’t mean that she suddenly becomes flawless, or that practical concerns vanish. The Church still has the identical unusual responsibilities and the identical human limitations; the identical need for patience, repentance, and care. Easter should alter the tone during which she lives those responsibilities: she should sound less trapped by fear, less defined by crisis, and fewer desirous to preserve herself at the fee of witness.

As a “hopeful ordinand”, I find this each encouraging and difficult. It is simpler, perhaps, to like the liturgical drama of Easter than to ask what resurrection should do to the day by day lifetime of the Church, and yet that’s where Eastertide places the emphasis: not only on proclamation, but on formation; not only on joy, but on the form that joy takes once it enters unusual Christian life.

What does a risen Church sound like in meetings, in pastoral conversations, in parish life, in disagreement, in quiet acts of service? Not triumphant, surely, and never naïve, but perhaps steadier. Less defensive, more spacious; higher capable of tell the reality without panic. Better capable of endure uncertainty without behaving as if the whole lot depends upon her own anxious competence.

The disciples after Easter are usually not impressive in any worldly sense. They are still vulnerable, still in process, still learning; but they aren’t any longer enclosed by the old finality. Something has happened that they can not unsee, even in the event that they don’t yet understand it fully. That is what the Church is supposed to hold forward, as well.

The challenge of Eastertide just isn’t to maintain reproducing Easter Day: it’s to permit Easter Day to shape what follows. The alleluia returns for a reason, not merely to brighten the liturgy. It is there to remind the Church that she now lives in a world where the tomb is empty.

The Church after the alleluia must be gentler, braver, less self-absorbed, and more alive to grace — not because she has mastered resurrection, but because resurrection has begun, slowly, to master her.

The Hopeful Ordinand blogs at theemberpost.substack.com