WERE YOU THERE WHEN...?

By Philip Quirke

Spy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.  You could make a poem out of the titles given to these days celebrating the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, whom Christians call Christ and Lord.  They could be chanted as a mantra.  You could also make a rip-roaring novel about the events surrounding the last earthly days of that man from Nazareth. It deals with betrayal, abuse of the law to condemn an innocent person, the abandonment by friends through fear.  Hollywood made quite a few films about these days, from The Robe to The Passion of the Christ.  That the story doesn’t end with the death of Jesus is the core religious belief of Christians.  Christians believe in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and that he is alive among us to this day.  It is a profound mystery which I have to let be as a mystery, because it is beyond my comprehension.

I am always moved when the choir sings the hymn, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’.  It captures the deep sadness of the event.  The verses which follow ask if we were there ‘when they nailed him to the cross’, and then ‘when they laid him in the tomb’.  The song captures the pain and the loss, and the bleak reality that Jesus died, really died.  When it is sung at the Good Friday ceremony it brings the listeners not only in touch with the suffering of Jesus, but it can also link us to the world-wide sufferings which are inflicted by men of bad will on their fellow humans.  The Canon says that Jesus is crucified each day wherever pain and misery are inflicted on individuals and communities.   So the questions of the song shift to asking if we are there in solidarity with people who, at this moment, are being crucified, nailed and killed?  And I wonder if many who turn out on this day are there because they are in touch with their own sufferings and pains and feel that Jesus understands ?

The bare altar and the flowerless church, nothing on the sanctuary but a large plain cross with a grave shroud draped over it, captures the mood for me.  Christians through their faith know the Resurrection shifts everything to a new dimension, but this celebration must wait for a few more days.  Were you there when he rose up from the dead? could be another verse sung to the same tune.  The women who went to the tomb and others who reported He, the Risen One, had shown himself to them, were there to experience his presence.  I hope to get some sense of this myself this Easter, and I wish you all the blessings, including bunnies and eggs, of this season.