It was a wonderful meal that had been cooked, for me. Colour, taste, variety and I was hungry too. Radio 3 was playing in the background. It was a Saturday night so highly likely that we would get a touch of opera. Only this time it was Herr Wagner and his cosmic drama, the Ring of the Nibelung. We had, unbeknown to us, reached Act 3 of the second part and the ride of the Valkyries. The music was electrifying. Wagner had marshalled all of his musicality into this intense moment, and he sustains it for far longer than other composers, perhaps until he has engaged our full attention.

We are drawn into this ride. To explain the story would take an hour of your time and patience. It is just enough to say that the old order of things is breaking down. Those in authority were double-dealing and life was treacherous. The ride is about safeguarding the future and bringing in a new order of peace. A seed of hope was being carried, unbeknown to most.

We too in Holy Week and Easter have been caught up in a cosmic drama, only this one is not the fruit of an artist’s imagination, but the fruit of the work of God himself. It is a living reality, although few recognize it as such, and those who do recognize it need a lifetime to understand its

 proportions and ambition. The world feeds us a meal of colourful proportions, wonderful to taste and behold as on that Saturday evening, but the story of death and resurrection is electrifying too, life-changing and demands our attention. But you have to enter this story for yourself and the danger is that we enter it knowing the outcome. The secret of Christ’s passion is to take each moment as it comes – to be there as it unfolds. You need the four days of Thursday to Sunday to touch upon what happens, to see a little of what Christ achieved, and how.

Have I lost you? Let’s go back to Maundy Thursday and the tension of the last supper. Here was Jesus urging his disciples to be one together. 'A new commandment I give unto you', he says 'that you love one another as I have loved you'. Even at the very moment when love was breaking down. Hours later Judas was dead, Peter had broken faith and the others had fled. Those who had been fed goodness and love for three years had failed to grasp its importance. There is no more poignant moment than when the church and its present-day disciples appreciate the gulf between the call of Christ and our own failures to get even close to his most earnest desire. Sometimes we have even made things worse. It takes then an act of will, after the Maundy Day service, to go and watch the altar being laid bare, and the vigil beginning as the light is fading fast. An act of will to let Christ do his redemptive work, to give him space, not as a memorial of what he did once and for all, but to give him space to do what he needs to do, here and now, among His people.

Good Friday is for some too hard to bear – a day of restlessness and unease and the temptation to fill it with activity. The service of Evensong of the burial of Christ at the Cathedral was profoundly peaceful. The drama of the day was past. Death was final. It was the end of ministry. All the claims and exhortations of this Christ had now been buried with him in the tomb and we had sealed the tomb, and with it, his teachings, life and ministry. The darkest moment had been his cross; the gravest temptation now was to ‘get back to normal’ as if our normality defines who we are.

The Vigil on Easter Saturday was electrifying. It wasn’t so much the light, the moving in and around the Cathedral but that desire within us to want Christ to return. We willed him back to life, not by our power or might, nor even by our liturgy, but by our love for Him. This is at the heart of our faith, and here our understanding surely is closest to knowing the heart of God himself. It is never primarily what Christ could do for us and for our world, but rather who He is for us, and was, and forever will be. This then is our part in the cosmic drama, and we are caught up in it, through the will and love of God. The old requiem mass uses the words ‘mors stupebit et natura’. Both death and nature are stupefied by the resurrection. It was so unexpected, yet we are called by it and caught up in it.

What is humbling then is that Christ wills us back to life, just as we were accepting the inevitability of death and decline. Go then in peace and love, to serve this risen Christ.

Ian Kemp