COMMIT TO BEING AN AGENT OF CHANGE THIS EASTER
CHRISTIANS have throughout the centuries greeted each other on Easter Day with the acclamation: “The Lord is Risen!” And the response would be “He is Risen Indeed!” This acclamation begs the “so what?” question in every age.
Easter Day is the day on which these acclamations reverberate across the world in the celebration of this, the most ancient of Christian festivals – literally as old as the resurrection faith itself, the very foundation of the Christian faith.
Christians believe that Jesus was sentenced to death and executed by crucifixion on Mount Golgotha for the salvation of humanity and all creation, on the day we commemorate as Good Friday.
Good Friday is the moment when Christ in his pain, identifies with the pains of the people, and atones for our sins. Believers surrender their sinfulness and load their miseries, pains and woundedness onto his outstretched arms.
In the words of St Augustine, that great African teacher of the faith: “For Christ is our Salvation. For He is our Salvation. Who was wounded for us, and fastened with nails to the Wood, and taken down from the Wood, and laid in the grave.
“But He rose from the grave; and though His wounds were healed, the scars remained. For He deemed it expedient, for His disciples, that He should keep His scars to heal the wounds of their soul.”
In this, Augustine speaks to the Christian belief that this Jesus who died on Good Friday, rose again from the dead on Easter Day, the first day of the week, and won victory over sin and death.
Consequently, the “First Day of the Week”, the day of celebrating the resurrection, became more than just a phrase, but a statement of faith in the Lord’s Day, the Day of the Risen Christ.
From this grew the weekly celebration of The Lord’s Day, involving breaking bread together as Jesus had instructed on the eve of his crucifixion, and listening to the teachings of the apostles and the study of their memoirs over time, as these became part of the set scriptures, now known as the New Testament. By the end of the first century the annual festival had begun.
This practice is an acknowledgement of the reality of the human condition – that we live a seesaw life that is always beset with backsliding from the best of our principles.
Against that backdrop we might ask: How then must this Easter faith translate to the South African everyday reality as we mark Easter 2018?
Does our recognition and celebration of these spiritually gigantic solemnities make a difference to how we relate to our everyday personal, family and national challenges, to generate and sustain the spirit of the resurrection hope in the context of our lives, and those least fortunate?
The model patterned after the gloom of Golgotha to the uplifting spirit of hope at Easter is a significant metaphor for the CEREMONY: Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, in the Washing of the Feet ceremony. present South African situation.
What are our pains; what is our woundedness? What is our sinfulness to acknowledge and own up to as a society?
How might we bring our resurrection faith to bear on the Golgotha experience of our lives?
These are the questions we must be asking ourselves in our self-diagnosis.
Twenty-four years ago, South Africans celebrated the end of the apartheid government, and the beginning of the end of the long season of national pain; and the generation of a new national resurrection hope and the promise of a future that all can truly celebrate.
We experienced the euphoria of the inaugural democratic government.
The irony is that with all the pains of the apartheid era, the “resurrection hope” that the nightmare would end, was always the driving force of our faith in our struggles for a just, reconciled, peaceful, equitable society.
But when the democratic dispensation grows its own metastasis of uncontrollable ills, hope is very easy to crush in the absence of the “Resurrection Hope” in the liberation prospect.
Poor people and their families, and the greatest numerical clientele of Easter celebrations in our country, live in a perpetual Golgotha experience of their own with little prospect of the resurrection moment when the cycle of poverty runs through the generations with no end in sight.
As a nation, we are called upon to acknowledge our sinful neglect, and commit to turnimg a new leaf and becoming agents of the resurrection hope to make the Easter dividend of hope a reality.
Conscience
The South African Council of Churches will, in the South Africa we pray for, be campaigning for us to find national consensus on values and standards that inform good living from the viewpoint of the weakest in our society, so that our social sinfulness and woundedness may be transformed into the victory of Easter; from Golgotha to the empty tomb of the resurrection, and the joy of the Easter dividend for shareholder citizens.
Let every Sunday that we remember the resurrection; and every Easter that we acclaim:
“The Lord is Risen!” bear on our consciences.
The Risen Christ is the one who said: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Mpumlwana is the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches.