Day Forty Seven - Easter Day: Disorientating Joy

Read Matthew 28: 1-8

There has been a growth in our understanding of happiness and well-being. There were a lot of tips during lockdown of what to do to reduce our anxiety. Overall, this is a big help and at last we are realising that the state of our emotions is as important as the state of our bank balance. However, I wonder if ‘happiness’ can just be another societal pressure. I used to read a book to Isaac called the ‘The Saddest King’, about a King who commanded that everyone should be happy on pain of death with the result that people hid their true feelings and even the King lived behind a smiling mask. There was a Dr Who episode called ‘The Happiness Patrol’ set on a planet where unhappiness was a crime and blues singers were driven underground. I had lots of rainy trips to the seaside as a child and my family would eat our cheese and pickle sandwiches in our blue Ford Maxi and my dad would say in jest “We know how to have fun!”

It is Easter Sunday, and we should be happy, right? We are hopefully emerging from this pandemic and we should be happy, right? What we have in the gospel stories of the resurrection is not happiness but disorientation. Particularly in Matthew where everything is shaken up. I especially like the detail of the guards ‘trembling and becoming like dead men’ as the one who was dead is raised to life. Joy, as opposed to a prescription of happiness, can be disorienting. The women are ‘afraid and yet filled with joy’. I have been trying to think of times in my life when I have felt like that same heady mixture; the first day at a job that I had longed for, giving birth, going to a restaurant for the first time after the Spring lockdown. Nothing on the scale of the resurrection though. It is that feeling of an unknown world opening up; fantastic but also more than a bit terrifying.

Rowan Williams writes; ‘The world is more dangerous and strange than before, the future is now quite unimaginable; but there is nothing that can alter the sheer effect of that presence’ (Williams, R, Choose Life, 2013, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, page 194). This Easter joy doesn’t negate the reality of hardship and suffering but can emerge from within it. Its hope is precisely the fact that we cannot predetermine it. It shakes us up, breaks us open for what God can do in our lives.

Does that mean that we cannot offer a helpful website for Easter joy? Perhaps we should expect joy to disorientate us as much as crisis and that is OK. Perhaps we can clear some paths to joy by letting go of worries and jealousies and hurt pride, leaving them at the tomb like unused ointment jars so that we can run into a world ‘more dangerous and strange’ but also more wonder-full.

Crack open an egg (chocolate or otherwise today) and think of how Easter breaks open the new.

Prayer by Donald Hilton

A familiar figure on a distant shore,

A familiar action at a kitchen table,

O Risen Christ,

You come to surprise us and delight us,

You open wide the door to joy.

Hopeful we adore you.

Hesitant we adore. Amen.

Suzanne Nockels