Haec Dies
Easter 2010
“This is the day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it.” These familiar words are from psalm 118 and form a constant refrain throughout all of Eastertide. Many composers over the years have tried their hand at setting these words to music—the Haec Dies—as it is in Latin. As they are found in Psalm 118 they were recited in ancient days by Jewish folk celebrating Passover—the day of their deliverance from Egypt. That was the day that the Lord had made. Jesus and his disciples sang this Psalm together after the Last Supper before going out to the Garden of Gethsemane. But for us Christians, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, the Jewish Passover, fades into metaphor for the greatest deliverance of all: the day of Resurrection and our deliverance from sin and death. An old hymn puts it this way:
The glad earth shouts its triumphs high,
And groaning hell makes wild reply;
While he the king of glorious might,
Treads down death’s strength in death despite,
And trampling hell by victor’s right
Brings forth his sleeping saints to light.
Fast barred beneath the stone of late
In watch and ward where soldiers wait,
Now shining in triumphant state,
He rises victor from death’s gate.
Hell’s pains are loosed, and tears are fled;
Captivity is captive led;
The Angel, crowned with light, hath said,
The Lord is risen from the dead.
All the other mighty acts of God are crowned on this day—the Day of Resurrection. All of his saving deeds, recorded throughout Scripture, and even in fragmentary fashion in the hearts and religions of pagan peoples—all have tended toward and are finally interpreted in this: the Day of Resurrection. This is the Day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it. Or as John Donne put it:
May then sinnes sleep, and deaths soone from me passe,
That wak’t from both, I again risen may
Salute the last, and everlasting Day.
The last and everlasting day—this too is the day of resurrection, the day which the Lord hath made. And this gets to the heart of what I want to remind you of. In the ancient world of the Old Testament, God taught the Jews to tell time according to a scheme that would remind them of God’s creative, saving work for them. Thus, he taught them to think of creation as taking place in a week. On Friday, the sixth day, God made man and woman and finished his work. On the seventh day he rested. Likewise, on the sixth day man was to finish his labour and rest, in imitation of God, on the seventh. His rest-day was sacred, devoted to God. His six days of labour were sacred, too, for he also worked in imitation of God. Have you noted the fact that Jesus was crucified on the sixth day?—the day when God looked at his world and said, “It is good, it is finished.” Jesus also looked at his world from the cross and said, “It is enough, it is finished.” On the Day when God rested, when men left off work, the seventh day, Jesus rested too, in the tomb.
But some time before dawn on the first day of the week, eternity burst into time and translated Christ from the sleep of death into the everlasting day of the resurrection. With him went his human soul and body, still marked by its recent crucifixion, but now subject to death no more. What had happened? This had happened: it was no longer merely the first day of the week which had dawned, but the eighth day—the eighth day of creation. In six days God had made this old world; on the seventh he rested; but on the eighth day, the day of the resurrection, he laid the foundations of the New Heaven and the New Earth—the New Creation—out of the very substance of the old creation, the now glorified humanity of his only Son, our Lord Jesus. ]There is even a hint of this in our resurrection Gospel this morning where Mary mistakes the risen Lord for the gardener--the eighth day of creation as the planting of a new garden (of Eden?).] Christ is no more subject to temporality and change, to passion and death. The Everlasting Day has dawned, the eighth day of creation, and in him humanity has a new home—a home where the sorrows and agonies of our own mortality and sin can no longer reach. This is the day which the Lord hath made—the first day of the new age, the new world, the Kingdom of God, planted in our world but living the life of eternity. As Psalm 85 puts it: “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring up from the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” In other words, heaven and earth have been joined.
George Herbert offers this commentary:
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
In the world of our daily experience, however, time flows on. Even we Christians are bound to observe the day of resurrection on a Sunday, the first day of the week—in fact, the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox. The world may still go on according to its cycles of months and weeks, but for us the resurrection of our Lord has brought the last day, the eighth day, the last and everlasting day, right into the midst of our present experience. We have experienced the end of all things ahead of time. In the light of the dawning of this new day we can now understand what God has been up to all along: he has brought the world to its fruition by joining it to heaven. Earth was created to be in harmony with heaven; we humans were created for commerce with heaven while living on earth. The long journey into sin and evil and death is now over. The end has come; the Kingdom has arrived—Death and life have contended in that combat stupendous; the Prince of life, who died, reigns immortal.
If you think I am getting a little carried away, it is true—I confess that the implications of all of this are completely overwhelming and no language is too exalted, to extreme, to describe it. But, of course, I know that as we look around at the world we actually live in, the signs of the Kingdom and resurrection life are ambiguous at most. As convinced as we are that the very end of all things has occurred in the resurrection of our Lord, we also know that there is another end yet to come: when we shall see all that does not correspond to new life, to new creation, to righteousness and mercy and peace and truth—we shall see all opposition to the Kingdom of God swept away. In the meanwhile we live still in the midst of conflict, ambiguity, trials and difficulties. But there is a way for us to live as resurrection people while we long for the resolution of things in the final victory to take place.
There is a passage from St Paul that we sometimes hear on Easter Morning: “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” [Colossians 3:1-3] The resurrection is a fact that can be known and experienced by us, and as a result of our experience and as its proof, we have a new set of desires and activities. The old King James translation said, “set your affection” on things above and that gets us to the heart of it all. Perhaps you remember that before Lent started I called your attention to a collect our prayer book uses for Lent 5. Here is how it goes: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found. .
One of the effects of Easter, of resurrection life, is that we can fix our hearts on what endures—the Kingdom of God. The way we can do this is through the death we have died to our old unruly wills and affections and experiencing the life that is hidden with Christ in God. The world goes on in its cycles of weeks and months and years, in its fashions and fads. But our affections are set on things above, not on things on earth—and God gives us the grace to love what he commands and desire what he promises.
For a long time I did not understand that passage from Colossians correctly. I had in mind someone who was longing for heaven and did not live on earth very well and didn’t really want to be such a person myself. Besides, not having seen heaven, how could I set my affections on heaven, when the things of earth were so much more visible and understandable. Then I realized that Paul was using a figure of speech. Literal-mindedness can often get you in trouble. He did not mean that we should be fantasizing about heaven and trying to live with our heads in the clouds. He meant that the ways of heaven, seen so clearly in Jesus, and now authenticated in his resurrection, should fill our lives and imaginations and actions. God has commanded really only one thing: that the love with which he loves us and the world and manifested it to us in Jesus, should possess us and be our one rule of life. God has promised to us also really only one thing: the Kingdom—the renewed world of the resurrection to which we already belong in Christ and whose principle of life is the love of God.
So it is all terribly clear: we are to live in this world as people who belong to the world to come; we are to be Jesus’ apprentices here in Kingdom living. That we actually live like this is the proof to the world that Jesus has been raised from the dead. Jesus himself said it this way, praying for his disciples: “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” St Paul said that while everything is summarized for the Christian in the world love, we must understand what kind of love we are talking about. For example, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” The flesh, of course, is not our physical existence, but human nature out of control—out of God’s control—where it is under control, the Spirit is free to create God’s own kind of loving in it. On another occasion Paul amplified his understanding of love in this way: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
People who live in this kind of love, are living the life of heaven, the life of the Kingdom, the new Creation, in the midst of the present one. They show the reality of the resurrection in themselves by living a life in which their affections are set on things above. I hasten to add that they are not perfect yet—there is still room for repentance in their lives; their apprenticeship to Jesus has not necessarily resulted yet in their master’s certification. But their lives do not belong to this world alone, they have been recreated, transformed, by the power that brought Jesus to life again.
George Herbert again:
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!