By The Rev. Dr. Trevor Hart, Rector, Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church, St Andrews, Scotland 

For Christians, Easter is the day on which everything changes: the day on which the world and its history tips decisively from an otherwise fatal plunge into death, destruction, and non-being and begins, slowly but surely, to be opened up to share in “life in all its fullness” – that life for which it was created and which is, in the purposes and promise of God, its final destination. 

With the Father’s raising of Jesus from death’s clutches, the age of this new, resurrection life dawns. And our own humanity begins already, with him and in him, to participate fully in the life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the life of eternal love and devotion which is the very being of God. From now on, with and through the risen humanity of the Son, our own flesh and blood (and the wider creation in which it is embedded) are marked indelibly as the property of heaven – belonging properly, that is to say, in God’s immediate presence and as part of God’s own life. 

As Christians, therefore, our hope and expectations for the world’s future cannot be constrained any longer by what we take to be the possibilities and potentialities immanent in God’s creation as it stands and as we know it now. For in the history of human experience of it this world has always been closed in upon itself by sin, resistant rather than receptive to the continuing influxes of life and goodness and energy from God’s hand for which it was made and is intended. Instead, it has been in thrall to and in the grip of forces of death – the very forces, in fact, that supposed they had Jesus himself held securely in the tomb.

To have our imagining of the world constrained by such things, therefore, is to have become stuck. It is to have become stuck on Good Friday, trapped in a world of struggle and suffering, of disillusionment and despair, a world moving inexorably towards death and dissolution as both its and our only imaginable end. 

Mark’s Gospel, with its familiar “shorter ending,” leaves the women at the tomb facing a challenging and potentially dispiriting task. The command given them by the angel is to take the news of Jesus’ resurrection and to proclaim and act upon it in a world trapped securely in the “imaginary” of Good Friday – and to do so, for now, without the solace or encouragement of a flesh and blood encounter with the risen Lord himself.

The tension evoked and generated by Mark’s closing words, “for they were afraid,” reminds us even as we celebrate today that the women’s ambiguous situation is ours too. For them and for us, hope constrained only by the promise of the God who created the cosmos ex nihilo, kindled life in the virgin’s womb, and raised Jesus from death will, played out faithfully on the stage of an incredulous and often hostile Good Friday world, always be a performance unnerving and joyful in equal measure.

Dr. Trevor Hart was ordained in November 1988 in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney and, while lecturing in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, served as Associate Minister of St Devenick's Bieldside until July 1995 when he moved to St Andrews to take up the post of Professor of Divinity in the University there. He was a member of the Clergy Team of Saint Andrew's, St Andrews between 1995 and September 2013 when he assumed the office of Rector, moving from a long and distinguished academic career into full-time pastoral ministry. He remains an Honorary Professor in the University of St Andrews and continues to indulge in scholarship, lecturing and publishing as time permits. Trevor is married to Rachel, and they have three adult children (Jonathan, Naomi and Deborah), and a Border Terrier (Grizzle). 

The preceding reflection was originally printed for Nashotah Houes’s Lenten Reflections 2021. Dr. Hart will be teaching the Summer Course, Taking Flesh: Incarnation, Embodiment & Artistry at Nashotah House this Summer 2021. Visiting students and auditors welcome. To learn more about this class and Nashotah House’s other Summer Courses, please click here or on the image above.