By Canon Chris Palmer
I got me flowers to straw thy way:
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
and brought’st thy sweets along with thee.
– George Herbert
George Herbert’s words from his poem Easter have stuck with me ever since I encountered them at school. The resurrection of Jesus punctures a hole in our pretension that we can do God a favour. The risen Jesus doesn’t need serving, or acclaiming, or promoting – because he’s got there before us. And all we can do is rejoice.
It is he who serves us, he who raises us up, he who gives us life. And the beginning, middle, and end of the story is that we receive God’s goodness. We can abandon any presumption that we can somehow ‘benefit’ God, and rather bask in the life and love that God offers to us.
And this is liberating. My worth lies not in how useful I can be to God or others, not in how productive, not in how generous with my time and skills I am. We are valuable because God think us worth saving. This punctures our pride: we are loved not because of what we do, but because of who God is.
The point George Herbert is making is represented in the biblical story by the women who came to the tomb early on Easter Day. “When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.” Mark 16.1. But of course, Jesus didn’t need this act of service, even though it was filled with love and devotion. A corpse needs anointing, needs tending; the living saviour is beyond being ‘helped’ in this way – or any way.
I think a really large part of us recoils from the implications of this. We can so easily construct our identity around the contribution we make to the life of the world and our community. Indeed, in a way, this is a good thing: it encourages us to be dependable, resilient, and shoulder responsibility; it enables us to live in meaningful relationships. The problem comes when we try to cling to this in our relationship with God, or at times of our life when we no longer can be ‘useful’ to others. When we lack capacity, lose physical strength, or need to be cared for rather than care, the attitude that our identity is rooted in being useful leads us down the dangerous path of thinking our lives lack value.
The risen Jesus, though, loves us and calls us in our incapacity, in our need, in our unknowing. Even our faith doesn’t ‘serve’ God. This doesn’t at all mean that we give up the decision to help others or seek God’s will, but it does mean that the good we do comes from a deep sense of having been graced, of having received the life and goodness of God, of having been enfolded in a love we can never deserve.
That is the discovery of the first followers of Jesus in the days following the resurrection. The life of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit compel them to celebrate and speak and worship and play and live community in a way that arose from who they already are in God’s desire, rather than to try to become who they were not yet. They didn’t need to prove themselves; they were simply being themselves.
This, I think, is what it means to live the life of resurrection in the world today. The worship of Easter again exposes us to the transforming love of the risen Jesus, and in his life we find our true life.