Growing up in a Baptist Church and then evangelical Anglican churches, I got used to spending Good Friday singing ‘songs of victory’ that conflated crucifixion with resurrection. It wasn’t until mid-adulthood that I realised what a mistake this was and how indicative it was of dodgy theology, a dodgy reading of the Bible and a basic inability to wait.
The Christian community is supposed to ‘live’ Good Friday, leaving a service with the tragedy of emptiness, hopelessness and death. The world has fallen apart – and so has our worldview, shaped by Jesus of Nazareth and then left bleeding in the dust, a mockery of all Jesus promised. We are then supposed to live through the sheer emptiness of Saturday, not knowing that resurrection is coming, simply living with the shattered emptiness and fear of loss.
On Easter Day it is traditional for the service to begin with the vicar proclaiming: ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen!’ The congregation responds: ‘He is risen indeed. Alleluia!’ I think this might be a bit wrong. If we are faithful to the Gospels, the congregation should really respond to the proclamation of resurrection: ‘ What?! Don’t be so ridiculous!’ Why? Because the disciples of Jesus did not respond to his resurrection with unbridled joy, but rather with bewilderment and suspicion and doubt.
Maybe we ought to re-live that before we draw our conclusions and begin to walk the road to Emmaus – talking through our confusions and laying the ground for having the ‘story’ re-configured/re-told by the Jesus who comes up to us from behind, walks alongside us and ask us questions (rather than starting with the answers).
Trinity, Wall Street, New York, is twittering the Passion Play. The full script is worth a look – it brings a fresh perspective whether you like the outcome or not.
April 10, 2009 at 10:30 pm
I come from a similar Baptist – Evangelical (Ichthus) – Anglican route (via Church of Pakistan) and feel a similar frustration at the deisre always to get through the suffering straight into the victory. I have found the Orthodox emphasis on Easter Saturday plus the image of Harrowing of Hell very helpful. Sheilah Cassify spoke of being Good Friday people. Maybe as we live between the reality of GF and teh ressurection, we are more Easter Saturday people.
April 11, 2009 at 6:58 am
I recognise the issue – but (as an anti-ritualist)I still instinctively bridle at being told what to think at a particular time of the year, as if we are in some Groundhog Day religion and we can never move on to just living it all out and getting on with the gospel. Its probably why so many evanglicals go on holiday at Easter!(If pressed I am a ‘walking-along-the-Emmaus Road-wondering-who-I’m-talking-to’ person/people.)
April 11, 2009 at 8:40 am
I don’t think the problem you avert to is unique among soi-disant evangelical churches – liberal churches have a big problem with the Cross as well, considering it something to be overcome (just how, one is never quite sure in demythologized liberalism, but it’s probably to do with changing one’s mental attitude; and ‘we can forget about penal substitution while we’re at it!’). But if evangelicals will return to their roots, to Luther’s ‘theologia crucis’ rather than the ‘theologia gloriae’, they will find themselves in the heart of the Gospel: God’s self-substitution for our sins. If the Cross was not necessary, then I would have to agree with Muslims in their desire to ban it from the world (and the useful idiots in the west are helping this along). Plenty of pepole have suffered more physical pain and for longer than Jesus did – but the pain and the game of identification isn’t the object (however much we play this up for our own little political projects – British soldiers in WWI; IRA bombers shot in Gibraltar; Gazans). The Cross is GOD Incarnate dealing with sin and eternal death, and that’s why it matters, and we cannot hurry too quickly on to Resurrection. The English rector John Richardson in his blog ‘The Ugley Vicar’ has written very perceptively about Luther and the cross, and the contrasting theologies we face. Somewhere Luther says something like this, on the centurion’s words ‘Truly this was the Son of God’: ‘The other gods were strong in their lives; but Jesus is strong in his death.’
April 11, 2009 at 9:04 am
‘Useful idiots’? I remember you chastising me for using strong words about unidentified people! But, underlying the point you are making is the fact that the life, death and resurrection (and ascension) of Jesus need to be held together for any theology to make sense. Picking one element of it and making it stand alone is surely dangerous.
April 11, 2009 at 9:07 am
John, there is no such thing as an ‘anti-ritualist’. We all have our rituals – it is just that some people don’t admit it. It is the same with ‘non-liturgical’ churches. Surely we fail to ‘live it out’ unless we first – and repeatedly – do the Jewish thing (that lies at the heart of the Passover anyway) which is to re-member the story by re-living it as if we were there? This isn’t about being told what to think, but being put in a space where one’s own thinking (within the context of a community) can be lived with and explored.
April 11, 2009 at 10:02 am
I’ve found it very helpful this year to track through this end of Holy Week imaginging “What if I didn’t know how it all worked out?” or “What if it is still being worked out in us?” (“Carrying about bodily the death of the Lord Jesus…”) This confronts the English Pelagian thing head on.
April 11, 2009 at 10:05 am
Nick: yes, I should name names, but there are quite a lot of them, and most of them unknown to me (and you). But I’m sure you get the Stalinist reference. I am referring to all those who have marginalized and privatized Christian faith in the west in the past generation, while never or rarely challenging the growing salience of Islam in Europe. Changes in the laws regarding abortion, marriage, pornography, blasphemy etc have all being pioneered under this banner – and as Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali noted in a newspaper piece recently about his resignation (Telegraph, April 5, quoting from the web), these changes “have all occurred while the Church has either looked on impotently or, sometimes, been complicit in bringing about the change it has subsequently regretted.” (He refers specifically to a 1965 Church report on abortion, but many others could be cited. Remember John Robinson?) Most liberal-left politicians fall into this bracket, and a good few from the libertarian right. I recall reading that most English bishops (at least c. 1998-99) considered then-Anglican Tony Blair their ideal of ‘a Christian politician’. Yet he resisted every attempt to roll back your laws on abortion, and he succeeded in closing your Catholic adoption agencies over ‘gay rights’ – before swimming the Tiber, where he is now lecturing the Pope on the true meaning of Catholicism. Maybe ‘useful idiots’ is too kind – because ‘idiots’ (to lapse into non-pc, but it’s excellent Greek!) are usually relieved of moral responsibilty for their actions.
I note what you say about trying to keep life-death-resurrection-ascension together(and agree in principle), but I (like most others, I suspect) am naturally a semi-Pelagian ‘theology of glory’ type of guy – I love healings, praise, thinking of heaven etc, and I love to think that God might be pleased with my efforts (‘facit quod in se est’). Luther’s point, first articulated in the Heidelberg disputation in 1518, is much more profound in its analysis of how a truly evangelical theology should function: ‘crux probat omnia.’ This is why the cross, and not the crib or the empty tomb, is the focal point of Paul’s theology (1 Cor 1:18).
April 11, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Nick,
I would differentiate between liturgy and ritual. Liturgy, I agree, can be liberating, giving structure and security to enable us to worship freely. Ritual on the other hand takes us into dangerous realms of power, superiority, arcane knowledge for the chosen few, and dependence for the rest. Ritualising takes place in all spheres of life – but the established church seems to be more prone it it.
I haven’t been to Spring Harvest for some years, but unless its changed radically, I suspect most of those there this year remained Easter people throughout Holy Week.
April 11, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Oh– and I’m also anti-disease, but admit to a bit of a cold. Having it, even suffering from it, doesn’t mean I’m not anti it!
April 11, 2009 at 3:14 pm
John,
I think you have missed my point. Human beings are ritualists by very nature. Those churches that claim to be ritual-free simply don’t recognise the rituals they cultivate anyway. Ritual is based on repeated pattern. Ritual as an end rather than a means is obviously pointless, but ritual of itself does not necessarily mean that the end has been confused with the means.
Easter barely got a mention at Spring Harvest.
April 12, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Maybe this is a semantic argument. I don’t mean ritual in the broader sense of habits and routines.. I’m using it in the Dictionary sense: “n. system of religious or magical ceremonies; any word, act, etc, forming part of this; solemn customary act; book of prescribed ceremonies . ritualism- observance of ritual, esp if unusually elaborate; belief in the importance of ritual.”(Penguin English Dictionary). Not only do churches develop rituals quite contrary to the spirit of Christ, but they like to think their rituals are the right and proper ones. I was at an Anglican church in Leeds a few weeks ago to speak, and just as the procession was about to set off at the start of the first hymn, a robed lay minister whispered fiercely– “dont forget to keep ten feet behind”. Not fully understanding, I set off and suddenly realised everyone was spaced at 20 foot intervals except me. I quickly got into line, but never discovered the significance of this particular ritual. Of course the service was then full of further unexplained rituals that I’d not seen elsewhere – but the congregation obviously thought these were normal throughout Christendom! They were part of a little ritual system that had developed, partly I suspect to define the sheep from the goats, with a clear sense of caste, acceptability, authority, piety etc..
April 12, 2009 at 8:11 pm
John, I don’t think this is a semantic argument. My problem is less with the obvious catholic rituals and more with the evangelical ones that are not admitted to be such! I can probably out-do you in experiences of odd local rituals that are a mystery to me and seem to have become an end rather than a means to the end, but at least the catholics know what they are doing. Evangelicals (and non-conformists) deny ritual and yet develop rituals all the time: liturgically, in the language of ‘belonging’, even in dress codes. It doesn’t worry me too much simply because this is hwo we are as human beings in communities. I just think we should check them and unpack them from time to time. (Your last sentence describes much current evangelicalism perfectly…)
April 13, 2009 at 8:09 am
‘…but at least the catholics know what they are doing.’
Hmmm, sometimes. Carrying aloft on a platform a more-than-life size statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe (sometimes festooned with money – Latin American prosperity theology!) probably has multiple meanings for the throngs. A lot of ritual, I suspect, has its origin in utilitarian acts and aids (e.g. candles) that have been superseded and whose original purpose is now forgotten. So you have bishops wearing purple because that was the color of the Roman Empire civil service. Why do Anglican bishops wear miters? Originally because the medieval popes used to dispense them as a sign of their spiritual authority over the English church. What is it today – power dressing? (WWFS – What would Foucault say?)
We naturally take comfort in the familiar (and the thought of a ‘continuous revolution’ makes my aging flesh quake), so we end up investing old actions or objects with new significance. The free flow of imagination can be fun (at least for grade school kids), but it can lead to silliness or even superstition. This was one of the Reformers’ beefs with medieval catholicism, and the desire to repristinate it with worship that was simpler, purer, and based more squarely on the Word of God ‘in a tongue understanded of the people’. Ritualism has its strongest appeal in a pre-(or post-)literate society (hence all those medieval carvings and pictures).
As you say, human beings will always create rituals, and Pentecostalism is probably the richest at doing this today (‘wave offerings’, ‘clap offerings’, ‘slain in the Spirit’ etc). I would distinguish ‘ritual’, which is specifically to do with modes of worship, from social codes of belonging (or excluding), but the two can function together.
April 13, 2009 at 11:49 am
My last comment on this thread – I promise! I see now that English vicar John Richardson now takes Fr Frazer to task for his ‘theology of glory’ that seeks to leave the Cross behind, and asks (as I did in #7) why the cross (and not the empty tomb) is the symbol of the Christian faith:
http://ugleyvicar.blogspot.com/
April 13, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I agree with Nick about the role of liturgy and the difference between it and ritual. Two reasons. Firstly, whenever I put liturgy (even a spoken prayer together or the creed) in my 25 minute sequence of songs in our fairly charismatic NFI church, I get a huge response from the congregation afterwards (on the lines of “thanks for giving us the opportunity to respond”), which makes me think that the tradition of just singing 7-8 songs interspersed with “words from the Lord” is not meeting everyone’s needs.
Secondly, ritual does often go by unnoticed, and these rituals can contain less meaning than nearly all liturgy. We are a ritual-loving people (humans I mean, not just Christians) and it seems strange to be in a church environment where the rituals are all in place but carried out by folk for whom the idea of ritual is anathema.
Anyway, Nick will doubtless be encouraged to know that whilst at Spring Harvest, I bought a copy of the Common Worship Daily Prayer and we sat at home this morning and said the office for Prayer during the day for Easter Monday. Rich, satisfying and giving us both an opportunity to pray for people we had not thought about for a while. It took 25 minutes, mind, which is OK whilst I am on holiday, but may not do for my “rule of life”, about which I am still thinking…
April 14, 2009 at 6:35 pm
[...] play – Nick Baines’ blog http://nickbaines.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/passion-play/ Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless [...]
April 17, 2009 at 5:36 am
Mark B, you couldn’t be more wrong about Penal Substitution. It is flatly unBiblical and I show this in a debate I had with a Reformed apologist:
http://catholicdefense.googlepages.com/psdebate
April 17, 2009 at 5:36 am
I don’t know if my last post went through so Ill try again.
Mark is wrong about Penal Substitution, it is not Scriptural.
Here is my Penal Substitution debate:
http://catholicdefense.googlepages.com/psdebate
April 29, 2009 at 2:35 am
Fascinating to see the varying viewpoints.
May 20, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Just let me say that when all is said and done, there will always be those who have undying disbelief of anything related to rituals portraying some of the most important aspects of one’s religion. I believe in the events that unfolded and I too believe that people couldn’t believe that Christ really did rise after seeing him brutally tortured and literally hung out to die. I just think that the way people react to the fact that “he has risen” today is just an exclamation point to why we have Easter in the 1st place.
May 26, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Passion Plays can play a strong role in teaching religion. Its a more visual experience that the congregation can picture more than bible versus or homilies. Whether or not that is how it actually happened we will never know but tradition has an important religious role.
March 31, 2010 at 8:59 pm
[...] March 31, 2010 tags: Good Friday, Nick Baines by Dave Faulkner Last year, Nick Baines wrote a helpful and provocative post about embracing the desolation of Good Friday (and, indeed, Holy Saturday) without importing the [...]