THE MYSTERIES OF APRIL

HOSE WHO ARE familiar with John Saward's book, The Mysteries of March, will guess that the title of my letter this month is not quite original. Everyone knows that Holy Week and Easter can happen in March as well as in April and everyone who has wrestled with church calendars knows that the Annunciation - Lady Day - which falls on 25th March, sometimes has to be postponed because of the date of Easter Day and its privileged octave. That happened last year and it will happen again in 2008.

What John Saward helped us to see - and this is not 'anorak' stuff about dates - is that the central mysteries of our religion - the Incarnation (marked by the Message of Gabriel to Our Lady that she would bear God's Son), the Passion and Death of Jesus and his Resurrection - come together. Not just 'womb and tomb' but 'birth and rebirth'. More than that, co-inciding with the Christian Passover, Easter, is the Jewish Passover which, the ancient rabbis believed, came at the same time of year as the Creation of the world, by which God first revealed his love towards us.

There is a fragment of this theological perspective left in our modern calendar: 25th March, Lady Day, was always regarded as the beginning of the new year; and, when England finally adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752, the beginning of the financial year had to be moved to 5th April to allow for the necessary adjustment to be made. Nowadays the old Julian Calendar (still followed by the Orthodox) is even further behind the Gregorian - thirteen days rather than eleven, and the Passover moon, by which Easter is calculated, can be judged to happen a whole month later than the Western Passover moon.

Does any of this matter, now that we think the world is older than six thousand years? The importance is surely not in the dates but in the holding together of the mysteries. God creates us in love. He redeems his people from bondage. Christ takes our flesh and lives in our midst. He suffers death and is raised triumphant. We, through baptism and eucharist, become part of his Body and are sustained by his Body, in which and by which we shall live for ever with God. If all of this is held together in our understanding as we celebrate the mysteries of Annunciation and Easter, we have a real opportunity for spiritual growth.

May God bless you as you celebrate the good news of the Incarnation, announced by the Angel Gabriel to Mary, as you walk in the Way of the Cross, and celebrate the splendour of the Resurrection.

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet



This pastoral letter may be downloaded as a PDF file for display purposes by clicking here,

or as an RTF file for easy copy-and-pasting into pew sheets and parish magazines by clicking here.
 

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet
Bishop's House, Dry Sandford, Abingdon, OXON OX13 6JP
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 390746

All text and images on the web site of the See of Ebbsfleet are
© The Bishop of Ebbsfleet unless otherwise acknowledged.

The menu system is the intellectual property of www.milonic.com