Saturday: The Way into Silence

continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea


O Lord, send your cherubs in my last hour to bear my soul away to Abraham’s bosom; let it rest there untouched by any pain until the last day. Wake me then from death’s sleep, so that my joyful eyes may see you, the Son of God, my Saviour, grant me this and I will glorify you throughout eternity. Chorale, St John Passion, J S Bach 
We have passed Good Friday and tomorrow will be Easter Day. The visual identity of these two events is clear. Lent is generally stark: black crosses, a purple robe, crown of thorns, spear and sponge, money bag – all of which culminates with a single man, hanging on a cross, a victim of capital punishment. Easter Day, by contrast, as church flower ladies know only too well, is a rush of gold, whites and yellows, white plaster-of-Paris tombs, egg hunts and more flowers. Between the worlds of these two extremes stands Holy Saturday, its mood subdued, yet charged with anticipation.

For many people the problem with Holy Saturday is that there is nothing actually to see. The wondrous cross is not there to be surveyed, but it is not yet time to stare into the empty tomb. The time of vigil has come. We wait in silence and in darkness. In some ways this is just as well. The visual images of Good Friday – in paintings, films and television – are perhaps, over familiar, almost prosaic. All too often, Jesus looks quite solemn but resigned on his cross, passively accepting his fate. Pain, in one still portrait, is not easy to capture, and the very act of committing that event to canvas or to the screen is an act that looses something of the reality of Good Friday. Perhaps Mel Gibson’s controversial and excessively violent film The Passion of Christ (2004) which recalled the last 12 hours of Jesus life and starring James Caviezal might be considered an exception to that rule.

But instead of “seeing” suppose we shut our eyes and listen. There is a sense of waiting, of anticipation there is a stillness and quietness that is appropriate, because Jesus had been laid in the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea, the secret disciple, but now courageous and bold, had begged the body of Jesus from Pilate, tenderly annointed and wrapped it in linen and laid it in his own prepared tomb hewn in the rock. But in our waiting what is the sound we hear?

A few years ago a short play for radio told the creation story of Genesis through two lowly back-room angels whose task in God’s workshop was to dub the sound on to creation. As they talk about the sounds to be made by fish, birds, animals, seas and rivers, attention focuses on a box in the corner of the sound workshop. “That box,” says the senior to the junior angel, “is full of sounds you don’t want to hear .......a child crying, a mother dying, the sound of war........screams, the rattle of death.......once you open the box, you’ll release the noise of chaos................and you’ll never get them back in.”

Inevitably the young angel, in the absence of his mentor, prizes open the lid and lifts it slightly. He hears no scream, nor the sound of war – just the crunch of teeth into a crisp green apple.

Lent has been acknowledging that all these sounds have been let out long ago. We cannot control them. Good Friday and Easter Sunday are about hearing them contract and be redeemed in the events of the cross and resurrection. It is the sound of fury on Good Friday that cancels out the sound of the Fall, and brings the peace of Easter on a lush fresh Spring Day. Listening in silence and imagining becomes a moment that is sacred and ultimately safe. So today is a prelude to a mystery, one that defies sight.

But there is a sound – that of earth quaking and ground breaking. But they carry different messages. Tonight, all over the world, Christians will sit in silence in the darkness between these sounds. In the vigil they keep, they will hear the story of redemption, long, long ago. They will wait and watch for a spark, that first flame of Easter light. At its appearance, there will be a new noise – shouts of acclamation and the sound of celebration.

The silenced Word will speak once more.

Hush!" said the Cabby. They all listened.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar.

"Gawd!" said the Cabby. "Ain't it lovely?"

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out - single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

"Glory be!" said the Cabby. "I'd ha' been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this."

From Chapter 8: The Magicians Nephew, C S Lewis