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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 8, 2007
Run, run!
I am happy today. Well, I am fairly confident that I will be happy, since it is not quite today, yet, as I write. Nevertheless, I am happy now, on Holy Wednesday, filing early for the paper's Easter schedule. Or as I like to call it, "Right-to-choose Wednesday," since, in the liturgy, we commemorate the day Judas Iscariot earned his thirty pieces of silver. I think of HolyWednesday, therefore, as the day we exercise our right to choose, between Judas and Jesus. Easter Sunday being the day we find out who won.And what were we putting up with, as Easter approached? The betting on Judas was, as usual in recent years, fairly heavy. The Lenten season was itself kicked off with The Lost Tomb of Jesus, about which I wrote at the time: a truly miserable attack on the Christian faithful, by filmmakers out to maket their thirty bags of cash. We've had the full frontal chocolate Jesus from the art world; and Barack Obama dressed as Jesus in another statue. We've had the usual Church of England gay cleric, the Rev. Jeffrey John, announcing that the Resurrection did not happen, and implying that if the Crucifixion did, God must have psychopathic tendencies. We've had Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and a few more "media atheists" take their best seasonal shots. I get all this from the papers. In passing, a point others have made, but I will repeat. Let us challenge every media outlet that has brought these little snippets of attempted blasphemy into our living rooms to try it on the Muslims for Ramadan. Alternatively, let them admit that they are cowardly abject self-serving hypocrites, and go wash. But we get that every Easter -- the hypocrisy, the gratuitous insults. Christ himself got it on His approach to Easter. Those who bet with Judas are playing their own role in the Easter pageant, and Christ said let them be. Sincerely religious people of all callings -- Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, all -- must take this kind of abuse in their stride. The calling of the cynical is to torment the sincere. Walk out under the stars. Compare the large with the small. Why should I be so happy, today? Year after year, unfailing, I hear the echo of the words of Mary Magdalene, I hear her footfall as she runs. And she does not know yet, what has happened. She runs to fetch Peter, and finds him with John. In alarm, she tells them the sepulchre is open, that held the body of Jesus. There is Bach's Easter Oratorio, for which I have been waiting through Lent. I am thinking of the explosive sinfonia that begins this Oratorio, which is rejoined by the chorus in the third movement: "Kommt, eilet und laufet!" "Come! Quickly, come running! Run, fast as you can!" In my mind I see John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who alone remained at the foot of the cross, on Calvary, with Jesus' Mother and the pious women. I see Peter, and John, running and shouting; and John outrunning Peter, coming first to the tomb. Then pausing, breathless. I see the look on John's face; his wild surmise. And then Peter arriving, breathless, but he immediately looks inside. He is in confusion. And John, now following him, remaining unearthly calm. (Inside, the linen cloth lay limply where the body had been.) They go off, at a loss. Mary Magdalene remains. She is weeping. She rubs her eyes, she looks again into the darkness of the sepulchre, squinting, through tears. And she discerns two figures, not knowing they are angels. "Woman, why are you weeping?" "They have taken away my Lord, and I don't know where they have laid him!" And she turns, and sees another man, in the shadows. She thinks it is the gardener. And he asks, too, "Why are you weeping?" "If you've taken him away, oh please, tell me where you have taken him!" And the light resolves itself. And the man says, "Mary." And the lady sees that it is Jesus the Christ. Happy is perhaps not the mot juste. For in this moment, the tragedy of our world is resolved in exaltation. And we are saved. Do you know how beautiful it is to run? You old, you lame, you fools, run! And tell it to the ends of the earth: He is risen! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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