Preview: "Keeping Fast and Festival" in the Easter Season

Or: weeping and laughing; mourning and dancing when the times are right! (Ecclesiastes 3:4)

On Monday, April 27, Matt Swaim, co-host of the Son Rise Morning Show, and I will discuss another Parochial and Plain Sermon by St. John Henry Newman for the Easter Season. It's another sermon he gave on an Easter Sunday, April 15, 1838, "Keeping Fast and Festival", published in Volume IV of his collected Anglican sermons.

Newman had been the Vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford since 1828 and a leader of the Oxford Movement since 1833. In 1838 he became the editor of The British Critic, the High Church conservative journal that became, during his control, a vehicle for Tractarian Movement ideas. His influence was rising in the Church of England, but in a year he would begin to have doubts about the Via Media he had been trying to foster.

But on this Easter Sunday in 1838, Newman was rejoicing in the Resurrection of Christ and describing the special manner of that celebration to his congregation--comparing it, for instance, to how we celebrate Christmas:

AT Christmas we joy with the natural, unmixed joy of children, but at Easter our joy is highly wrought and refined in its character. It is not the spontaneous and inartificial outbreak which the news of Redemption might occasion, but it is thoughtful; it has a long history before it, and has run through a long course of feelings before it becomes what it is. It is a last feeling and not a first. St. Paul describes its nature and its formation, when he says, "Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." [Rom. v. 3-5.] And the prophet Isaiah, when he says, "They joy before Thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil." [Isa. ix. 3.] Or as it was fulfilled in the case of our Lord Himself, who, as being the Captain of our salvation, was made perfect through sufferings. Accordingly, Christmas Day is ushered in with a time of awful expectation only, but Easter Day with the long fast of Lent, and the rigours of the Holy Week just past: and it springs out and (as it were) is born of Good Friday.

On such a day, then, from the very intensity of joy which Christians ought to feel, and the trial which they have gone through, they will often be disposed to say little. Rather, like sick people convalescent, when the crisis is past, the illness over, but strength not yet come, they will go forth to the light of day and the freshness of the air, and silently sit down with great delight under the shadow of that Tree, whose fruit is sweet to their taste. They are disposed rather to muse and be at peace, than to use many words; for their joy has been so much the child of sorrow, is of so transmuted and complex a nature, so bound up with painful memories and sad associations, that though it is a joy only the greater from the contrast, it is not, cannot be, as if it had never been sorrow.

Having prepared with fasting, almsgiving, and prayer in Lent and having remembered Christ's Passion in Holy Week at least the Christian is ready to celebrate Easter, in contrast to the unbelieving world and even some nominal Christians:

And yet, though the long season of sorrow which ushers in this Blessed Day, in some sense sobers and quells the keenness of our enjoyment, yet without such preparatory season, let us be sure we shall not rejoice at all. None rejoice in Easter-tide less than those who have not grieved in Lent. This is what is seen in the world at large. To them, one season is the same as another, and they take no account of any. Feast-day and fast-day, holy tide and other tide, are one and the same to them. Hence they do not realize the next world at all. To them the Gospels are but like another history; a course of events which took place eighteen hundred years since. They do not make our Saviour's life and death present to them: they do not transport themselves back to the time of His sojourn on earth. They do not act over again, and celebrate His history, in their own observance; and the consequence is, that they feel no interest in it. They have neither faith nor love towards it; it has no hold on them. They do not form their estimate of things upon it; they do not hold it as a sort of practical principle in their heart. This is the case not only with the world at large, but too often with men who have the Name of Christ in their mouths. They think they believe in Him, yet when trial comes, or in the daily conduct of life, they are unable to act upon the principles which they profess: and why? because they have thought to dispense with the religious Ordinances, the course of Service, and the round of Sacred Seasons of the Church, and have considered it a simpler and more spiritual religion, not to act religiously except when called to it by extraordinary trial or temptation; because they have thought that, since it is the Christian's duty to rejoice evermore, they would rejoice better if they never sorrowed and never travailed with righteousness. On the contrary, let us be sure that, as previous humiliation sobers our joy, it alone secures it to us. Our Saviour says, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall he comforted;" and what is true hereafter, is true here. Unless we have mourned, in the weeks that are gone, we shall not rejoice in the season now commencing. It is often said, and truly, that providential affliction brings a man nearer to God. What is the observance of Holy Seasons but such a means of grace?

"Hence they do not realize the next world at all."--that's a line to meditate on. If we don't remember the events of our salvation, events that took place in time here on earth, we won't be fully aware of the life to come and want to gain it (both are meanings of the verb "to realize"). 

When people just treat the events of Christ's Passion, Death, and Resurrection as historical events--gone and past--they cannot enter into their liturgical meaning and celebration, their anamnesis, being present with us today.

Newman says what many of us observe in the world: we have it backwards most of the time:

In the world feasting comes first and fasting afterwards; men first glut themselves, and then loathe their excesses; they take their fill of good, and then suffer; they are rich that they may be poor; they laugh that they may weep; they rise that they may fall.

The Church, he reminds us, shows the right way to observe the times of fasting and feasting:

But in the Church of God it is reversed; the poor shall be rich, the lowly shall be exalted, those that sow in tears shall reap in joy, those that mourn shall be comforted, those that suffer with Christ shall reign with Him; even as Christ (in our Church's words) "went not up to joy, but first He suffered pain. He entered not into His glory before He was crucified. So truly our way to eternal joy is to suffer here with Christ, and our door to enter into eternal life is gladly to die with Christ, that we may rise again from death, and dwell with him in everlasting life." [quoting from prayers for the "Visitation of the Sick" in the Book of Common Prayer] And what is true of the general course of our redemption is, I say, fulfilled also in the yearly and other commemorations of it. Our Festivals are preceded by humiliation, that we may keep them duly; not boisterously or fanatically, but in a refined, subdued, chastised spirit, which is the true rejoicing in the Lord.

Looking to the Gospel passages that describe the Resurrection and the reaction of the women at the Tomb and the Apostles when Jesus appears to them, Newman sees a model for our own rejoicing:

In such a spirit let us endeavour to celebrate this most holy of all Festivals, this continued festal Season, which lasts for fifty days, whereas Lent is forty, as if to show that where sin abounded, there much more has grace abounded. Such indeed seems the tone of mind which took possession of the Apostles when certified of the Resurrection; and while they waited for, or when they had the sight of their risen Lord. If we consider, we shall find the accounts of that season in the Gospels, marked with much of pensiveness and tender and joyful melancholy; the sweet and pleasant frame of those who have gone through pain, and out of pain receive pleasure. . . . 

And he makes reference to other mysteries during the forty days between Resurrection and Ascension:

And here perhaps we learn a lesson from the deep silence which Scripture observes concerning the Blessed Virgin [Note 3] after the Resurrection; as if she, who was too pure and holy a flower to be more than seen here on earth, even during the season of her Son's humiliation, was altogether drawn by the Angels within the veil on His Resurrection, and had her joy in Paradise with Gabriel who had been the first to honour her, and with those elder Saints who arose after the Resurrection, appeared in the Holy City, and then vanished away.

Note 3 refers to John Keble's poem for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday) in The Christian Year, I presume this stanza:

As when the holy Maid beheld
Her risen Son and Lord:
Thought has not colours half so fair
That she to paint that hour may dare,
In silence best adored.

We can see that Newman--and Keble--wanted to realize the world to come.

Image Credit: Guercino, Apparition of Christ to the Virgin, 1628-1630