Easter Saturday
The wood of the cross – that is the world. The wood is dead now, but look again and see this wood sprouting shoots and bursting into life again. That is what you see on the mosiac on the north transept side of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. There is Christ on the cross, but the cross is supported by him, as though strapped to his back like an easel. He is carrying this world on his back, and the dead wood of the cross has started to push out buds and become a tree.
The cross is all the antagonism and aggression we direct at one another. The cross is this world of cutting-off, letting-go and letting-die, in miniature. And it is the end, refusal and overcoming of this world of letting-go. Christ has taken all our cutting him-and- one-another-off, and absorbed it; he has refused to cut us off, or to let us go or in any way to reciprocate. He took what we gave, without limit, until we had for our part, cut him off entirely. We cut him off, but he did not cut us off. But what we gave him, he took, without giving back, and so he took it away from us. He took what we meted out, and held on, to us. We refused him our humanity, stripping him of every human relationship; all humanity stripped him and removed itself from him. But even our entire act of removing from him the sum of our ‘humanity’ did not result in any diminution of his divinity, that is, of the Father’s determination that this was his Son, and that this Son was us and is us. The sum of our humanity turned out not to conceal any divinity; divinity turned out not to be the sum of our humanity. When we lump all humanity together, all our history, achievement and civilisation, it turns out that divinity is entirely transcendent of it. Divinity is his, not ours, and so life is his to give, and not ours to withhold.
All our refusal of for him, and of one another, and all our effort in cutting him off, and in cutting one another off, proves unable to prevent his divinity from holding us and bringing us back to life. From him life seeps into us. The invincible unity and communion of the Holy Spirit that secures Christ from us and exalts him, will also raise us. Though we put him in a hole in the ground, and the earth closed over him, neither we nor the earth could hold him there. We are unable to prevent this divinity, the life of God, which to us is resurrection, from pulling him out of our grasp and exalting him. We cannot prevent God from exalting this human, and we cannot prevent God from deciding that in Christ all our humanity is safe and secure. For all our cutting ourselves off, from him, from one another, none of us is lost. We are not able to make our refusal stick or to carry our own destruction through. However I cut you off, Christ will raise you to me again, until at last I am ready for you. In him and from him the whole human race will sprout and grow again. The truth of this dead wood is its future as this tree. Joined to him we are this living tree, for on Christ’s back all humanity and all creation is bound to life, and I am bound for you and you are bound for me.
