Tuesday, 3 September, 2002

From Between Cross & Resurrection by Alan E. Lewis



We spoke...of Easter Saturday as a "no-man's-land," and later of the protection it offers to territory on either side. The image thus slowly taking shape can now be recognized: it is a boundary. A boundary, after all, is an invisible line, anonymous and ambiguous, easy to ignore and belonging nowhere. Yet it exists to create identity and to assign belonging. The division it marks - visibly with a wall, invisibly with a map line - actually creates entities on either side, by at once separating and relating them.



In the Church we use the language of being "born again" or having "life after death" etc. There are many ways that we speak of two different places within our faith life. I find it interesting to hear preachers whose main goal is to pull people from where they are (and they would call it sin) to the other side (they often call "being saved'). The move from one place to the next can happen with the repetition of a sentence or a word. Sometimes those words are as simple as getting someone to say, "I believe in Jesus as my personal savior." They are used almost like magical code words. Words that can move us from one life into another. Lewis attempts to make the point that what happens between the Friday of the Cross and the Sunday of the Resurrection is not something that can simply be ignored or belittled. The newness of life does not come with the wave of a wand. It comes through death. New life always does. And life before and after the experience and the abandonment of death makes up two worlds. I recall one writer talking about the land of forgiveness and how we are invited to step into that land and live a new life. But then...that step over the boundary into this new land is a radical shift in character. It involves a death that may seem so frightening and desolate that some will not dare to go there.



Connection: I want to be on one side of the boundary....because the experience of Easter Saturday - the time in the depths of death - can seem never-ending. And yet, there is the promise of new life. Today may be a part of the boundary between one place in your life and the next. We all need to let ourselves take in the experience of cross that boundary line.



Lord of New Life, take us along the pathway of your blessed reign that we may find in all of our days the power and encouragement to continue to face all that comes our way. Remind us of the journey of birthing and dying and living again. Amen.