Easter in time of Covid-19

Easter Sunday in time of Covid-19 lockdown. We gathered for worship online, each household with its own candle to welcome the light of Christ, and water with which to renew our baptismal vows. Professing the faith of the Church with ‘latency’, that lag between our speaking and hearing the voices, between the reality of our action and its manifestation.

While it is disconcerting—takes some becoming accustomed to—latency is a powerful symbol for Easter; for the gap between Jesus rising from the dead and his followers catching up; for the gap between the world being changed for ever and the visible impact in our lives. Now and not yet.

One of our congregation died yesterday. His wife of 61 years was in our midst this morning. Through the limits of technology, we could hear each other, and she could see us, but we couldn’t see her. Yet we were together, in a profound and comforting way, in continuity and discontinuity, Jesus and the Church. And all together in a sense that is already secured but yet to be made manifest.

This photograph is taken through the glass of my front door. A garden, as blurred as one seen through Mary’s tears, yet as real, as solid, as the one in which Jesus, real and solid, spoke to her. Another way of thinking about Easter, which invites us to know that the world is not as we see it, but as it is—spoken by the Alpha and Omega Word—and as we will therefore experience it.