April 21: The Resurrection of Christ
♫ Music:
WEEK EIGHT
THE BRIDE OF CHRIST: THE FULFILLMENT OF TRUE HUMANITY
BRIGHT WEEK
April 21 - April 27
Human marriage provides metaphoric language to describe Christ’s relationship to his bride. It echoes Christ’s divine union with his church that was set down at the beginning of time, not the other way around. Author Geoffrey Bromiley states, “As God made man in his own image, so he made earthly marriage in the image of his own eternal marriage with his people.” The Isaiah 53 passion of the suffering servant concludes with the powerful declaration in Isaiah 54, that the barren woman will give birth, a reference to Christ’s bride the church. As we have seen in an earlier devotional, it is being “buried with him by baptism into death,” that we like Christ are, “raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father.” 1 Corinthians 12:13 states that all those “by the one spirit have been baptized into the one body.” Furthermore, the Apostle Paul uses symbolic “birth” language to describe the growth of the church. In Galatians 4:19 he writes, “I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ be formed in you.” This bright and celebratory week following Easter is the perfect time to contemplate the beautiful relationship between Christ and his bride. It is this mystical union with Christ, beginning here on earth and culminating in the New Jerusalem, where those who make up his bride will be fashioned into the true, fully human beings they were originally created to be
EASTER SUNDAY
Sunday, April 21
The Resurrection of Christ
Scriptures: John 20:11-17, John 11:25-26
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Poetry:
Cut Lilies
by Noah Warren
More than a hundred dollars of them.
It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them
in.
Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner
of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my
dining table—
each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves
into the crush. Didn’t I watch
children shuffle strictly in line, cradle
candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,
chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla’s Easter? Wasn’t I sad?
Didn’t I use to
go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising
bursting violet spears? —Look, the afternoon dies
as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up
their fluted throats until it fills the room
and my lights have to be not switched on.
And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,
so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.
I know I’m not the only one whose life is a conditional clause
hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room
and the tremble of my phone.
I’m not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen
flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.
When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for
decades.
God, I am so transparent.
So light.
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
All four gospels describe the narrative of the women who arrived at the tomb early in the morning after Jesus’ death and burial, and all four gospels tell us of the women, including Mary Magdalene, who witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion. That excruciating day was full of the worst kind of grief. Rather than run from the grief, or let fear keep them from being associated with Jesus, the women went to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. They found the tomb empty. Can you imagine? John tells us that Mary’s tears flowed at this sight of this empty tomb. She stood outside the tomb weeping, wondering distraughtly where Jesus’ body had gone. Despite Jesus’ statements about the resurrection (John 11:25-26), it doesn’t seem that him being alive--raised from death--entered into her mind as a possibility in this moment.
Then she turns around, and sees “Jesus standing.” But did she really see? In his book The Remarkable Ordinary, Frederick Buechner writes, “It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there.” Mary saw what she expected, the gardener. Desperate in her grief, she could not see her Lord standing in front of her. Some speculate that her tears or his changed appearance prevented her from recognizing him. Perhaps. But perhaps so did her grief, or her assumptions about how death operated. How often I and others miss the true and risen Christ because of our faulty expectations, our fear, our grief, our frailty.
Jesus responds to her with perfect compassion and depth of relationship. He says her name. When I read this passage aloud, I feel as though I can hear the tenderness in his voice. He knows just days before she saw him on a cross and watched him suffer and die. This One who had healed her, who discipled her, and who she had followed to the cross. He says her name, and her eyes are opened! “Rabboni [Teacher]!” she exclaims, and the next statement from Jesus implies that she embraces, or at least attempts to embrace, him. “Do not cling to me,” Jesus says, because he is ascending, and he has a task for her.
Addison Hodges Hart reminds us that the next statement from Jesus in which he refers to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” is the first time he refers to the Father as not just “my Father” in John’s Gospel. “With this statement to Mary,” Hart writes, “he opens wide the door to a fully restored union with God...the expulsion from the garden of Eden in Genesis 3 is undone in the garden of the cross and tomb” (p. 88). Jesus there commissions Mary to be the first of his followers to share this good news of His resurrection and redemption. And she does. May it be so with all of us.
Prayer:
Our Father and our God,
We worship you on this day for restoring our union with you through your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. You have forgiven us much, as we have remembered through the necessary sacrifice of the crucifixion--and you have overcome sin and death through your resurrection! May we remain near you in grief as well as redemption, and may we share the good news of Jesus because we have met Him. Because He has discipled us, said our name, and revealed Himself to us.
Amen
Carrie Stockton
Dean of Student Success
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
The Empty Tomb, 2000 (3 images)
Stations of the Cross Series
Ghislaine Howard
Mixed Media
4′ x 8′ plus casing
The Empty Tomb is the culmination of artist Ghislaine Howard’s Stations of the Cross series made for the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in 2000. Howard worked with Liverpool Hope University College to produce, as their millennium project, an exhibition of paintings and drawings that focused the Stations of the Cross as their subject matter. The work has been touring British cathedrals since, returning to Liverpool every two years. The painting was inspired by the artist’s experience of walking the urban spaces between the Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, making studies of those places where the homeless had found temporary shelter – the blankets and cardboard boxes bearing the traces of their recent occupants. The Empty Tomb is housed in an impressive steel reliquary by sculptor Brian Fell and has a stark and resonant power that fuses the spiritual with the humanitarian.
About the Artist:
Ghislaine Howard (b.1953) is a British figurative artist whose work centers around universal experiences of the human condition. She first came to the attention of the wider art world in 1983 with an exhibition that looked at pregnancy and childbirth. Howard has shown her large cycle of paintings, The Stations of the Cross and The Captive Figure, at two Liverpool Cathedrals, Canterbury Cathedral, and other venues as part of an ongoing exhibition tour of cathedrals in UK. She has worked on commissioned projects with various diverse communities including cathedrals, theatres, prisons, the BBC, Women’s Refuges, and Amnesty International. In her series The Seven Acts of Mercy, she created a daily painting in response to newspaper images from the Guardian newspaper. She has been featured in various publications and television documentaries including Degas: An Old Man Mad about Art in 1996 and Degas and the Dance in 2004. Howard was also awarded the prestigious Peabody Award and is represented in many public and private collections including the Royal Collection. A major monograph of her work, entitled The Human Touch, was published in 2016.
About the Music:
“Sunrise from the Sunrise Mass” from the album Sunrise
Lyrics:
Gloria from the Mass
Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te,
benedicimus te,
adoramus te,
glorificamus te,
gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam,
Domine Deus, Rex coelestis,
Deus Pater omnípotens.
Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe,
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris,
qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis;
qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram.
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.
Quoniam tu solus Sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus,
Jesu Christe, cum Sancto Spiritu: in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.
Translation:
Glory to God in the highest.
And on earth peace to men of good will.
We praise You.
We bless You.
We adore you.
We glorify You.
We give You thanks for Your great glory.
O Lord God, heavenly King,
God the Father almighty.
O Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only-begotten Son.
O Lord God, Lamb of God,
Son of the Father: you
Who take away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us.
You Who take away the sins of the world,
receive our prayer.
You Who sit at the right hand of the Father,
have mercy on us.
For you alone are holy.
You alone are the Lord.
You alone, O Jesus Christ, are most high.
Together with the Holy Spirit in the
glory of God the Father.
Amen.
About the Composer:
Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978) is a Norwegian composer and pianist living in New York. He is one of the most frequently performed composers in the choral world. An accomplished pianist, he is known for his trademark collaborations of improvisations played over his own published choral pieces. Although Norwegian by birth, it is Ola’s adopted country of America that has influenced the composer’s distinctive sound the most, evolving a style that is both contemporary and familiar. His music, with its thick harmonies and rich textures, is often described as cinematic and evocative. Gjeilo has had a special collaborative relationship with the vocal ensemble VOCES8, and during the 2015/16 season was their Composer-in-Residence.
About the Performers:
The Majorstua Kammerkor is a chamber choir founded in 1999. Based in Oslo, today the choir consists of 34 experienced singers who come from a variety of professions and backgrounds, but share the same enthusiasm for creating music. The choir performs primarily in the classical music tradition, but also performs folk tunes or jazz from time to time. The Choir performs regular concerts and performances in the Oslo region, sometimes in collaboration with renowned musicians. To date the choir's concert tours include Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Scotland, and Germany. Tore Erik Mohn led the choir from 2005 to 2011.
Tore Erik Mohn (b. 1961) is a Norwegian organist and conductor. Mohn holds a major degree in choir leadership at the Norwegian Academy of Music. He is an associate professor in choir conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music and is a domorganist and conductor in Norway’s Fredrikstad Cathedral. Over the years, he has conducted a number of large choirs in Norway, including the Oslo Philharmonic Choir, and recently held a temporary position in the Nidaros Cathedral. He is also one of the initiators behind the Egil Hovland Festival. Mohn’s interpretations are characterized by a large degree of closeness to the text and a strong willingness to communicate with the audience.
About the Poet:
Noah Warren is an American poet, scholar, and essayist. Noah is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (2016), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he is currently a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley. His poems appear in The Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, Poetry, PEN America, The New England Review, Narrative, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, poets.org, and elsewhere.
About the Devotional Writer:
Carrie Stockton
Dean of Student Success
Biola University
Carrie Stockton, the Dean of Student Success at Biola University, supervises the departments of Academic Advising, Career Development, and Online & Graduate Student Success, as well as the First Year Seminar program. Stockton is also responsible for the University’s retention and career efforts, which include chairing the Council for Student Success and coordinating research related to student success, including graduation and career outcomes.