The Pillar of Fire
Easter Eve, 14th April, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
This is the night, in which the pillar of fire overcame the
darkness of sin . . .
(The Exultet/ Paschal Praeconium)
What is the pillar of light, but Christ the Lord, who has scattered
the darkness of paganism and has spread the light of truth and of spiritual
grace in the heart of people . . .
(St Ambrose, De Sacramentis, 1, 22)
The experience of the people of Israel, moving from oppression under the
Egyptians to freedom in a promised land stirred and still stirs, the
imagination of generations of Jewish people. It remains the core of the
Passover celebration which takes place at this time. The passing through the
Red Sea, the leadership of Moses, the pillar of fire by night and the cloud
by day - these are all familiar not only in the story as told in Exodus, but
in Jewish liturgy, and in Christian liturgy as well. In the New Testament, St
Paul drew a parallel between the passing through the Red Sea and baptism; 'our
fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were
baptised in Moses, in the cloud and in the sea' (1 Corinthians 10: 2-6). And
this cycle of events, key figures and symbols appears again and again in many
early Christian texts from quite different early Christian communities, from
the third century onwards (see Tertullian, Melito of Sardis, Didymus the
Blind, Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, John
Chrysostom, Zeno of Verona, Theodore of Mopsuestia). To them, the Exodus was
a story anticipating a later situation, Christ's death, Resurrection and the
creation of the church, in which God would free oppressed people and lead them
home to a promised land.
Indeed, this whole cycle of events in Exodus has become in many ways a
universal story, one that is shared in communities far from the one in which
it originated. It permeates the images of the writer of the hymn Guide me O
thou Great Redeemer, who lived in a climate radically different from the
desert of the Middle East through which the fiery pillar and the cloud led the
people of Israel. For him, these were symbols of the presence of God leading
people everywhere, even in the green valleys of England and Wales. And in the
United States, in their oppression and slavery, its African people created a
musical repertory from which to draw strength in their struggle, a repertory
that drew strongly on that same experience. Distant though it was from them in
time and space, as they sang texts such as Go down Moses or Let my
people go, their story became one with that earlier one. And that body of
song, wrought out of their suffering and giving strength, hope and power to
resist and overcome, has also become something of a universal heritage.
One part of the narrative is the pillar of fire by night, leading the
people, a symbol of God Himself. And at many different points in time, that
pillar has been reinterpreted as a person. Philo, the great Jewish teacher in
pre-Christian Alexandria, identified the pillar of fire with the logos,
God revealing Himself in the transitory world order. When John records Jesus
as saying 'He who follows me does not walk in darkness. I am the light of the
world' (John 8:12) he appears to be equating Jesus with that pillar. Much more
recently, it has been used of other figures. An American historian who
carefully recorded the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Taylor Branch,
used Pillar of Fire as the main title to his published study. The
title was highly appropriate, because key leaders of the movement (such as
Martin Luther King) were motivated by a specifically Christian
understanding of God and Christ as leading humanity from oppression and
injustice to a new and different way.
I might appear to be reflecting solely on issues of justice and human
rights if I were to comment a little more on this particular kind of situation,
but I do so to introduce a particular theological point. Whether it is Moses,
or the leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement, those who were led by the
pillar of fire, or who appeared to be the pillars of fire in their time, were
pressing for freedom from abuse and oppression, offering a resistance to
institutionalised and widespread evils. It could easily be said, for example,
that in North America, the fear of repercussion from more powerful figures
encouraged many so-called 'little people' to acquiesce in various kinds of
inequity and denial of rights - a matter of human frailty. But crimes of
violence perpetrated frequently against black Americans can hardly be
sweetened or excused as mere acts of frailty: they were, and remain, evil. It
was matters of this order of magnitude that were oppressing, and from which
liberation was essential. And as they celebrate Passover on this side of the
Holocaust, our Jewish brothers and sisters, have every good reason to see the
end of World War II not as freedom from a compounding of minor frailties, but
a release from the oppression of a major and institutionalised evil.
If this is true of these individual figures who feature in specific
historical situations, it is true, truest of Jesus, our fiery pillar and
cloud. We have many positive words for that which we understand Jesus, the fiery
pillar and the cloud, is leading us to. But what are we are we led out of,
away from, through passion and death? Nothing less than powerfully destructive
evil, in which all kinds of people, including ourselves, can become implicated
and involved, or outright active participants.
All comments on the meaning of what happens here have to try to include an
almost impossible range of elements. Some of us have been reminded of this by an
article in last week's Bulletin by the present Primate. He rightly recognises
that attempts to explain the meaning of this cycle of events 'probe mystery that ultimately passes beyond human understanding'. All explanations are to some extent 'halting and feeble, historically conditioned'. His own reflection reads
well when it is recalled that it is addressed to readers many of whom have
little or no formal connection with a church, and with minimal exposure to
theological reflection. It seems to me to be at its weakest when it expresses
dissatisfaction at some classical reflections on Jesus' death, understood as
atoning for the sinfulness of humanity. It treats a number of such explanations
- particularly those that attempt to connect Jesus' death with the apparently
opposite concepts of God as both one who seeks justice and is merciful - as
facile rationalisations that treat concepts in the crudest and most literal
way so as to distort them. The weakness of the article at this point lies
firstly in the absence of an acknowledgement that a number of Christian
thinkers - like St Anselm, who linked these concepts - were intellectually
sophisticated and well aware of some of the complexities of language. They
were not all crude literalisers. Secondly, the article itself is at its weakest
in creating firm connections between Jesus' death, God's own nature and
ultimate intention for us, and our radically flawed state, whether as
individuals, or in a collective sense. The shortcomings that the writer sees in
the statements of others may also be true of his own reflection and commentary.
We certainly do well, as the Primate reminds us, to rejoice at the great
mystery we celebrate today. But we also need to beware lest we rationalise, or
fail to offer an account of, other elements in this drama, particularly the
power of all kinds of sin to separate us and alienate us from God. The power
we celebrate tonight, the capacity of the New Life to change people and offer
new ways forward, is to be celebrated precisely because it transforms
situations involving another great mystery, the mystery of evil whose
corrupting power is both real, and also beyond our attempts to rationalise.
And we rationalise or underestimate such things, at our peril.
And as Low Sunday's gospel will remind us, the Jesus of the Resurrection
and New Life also bears the marks of the wounds, the effect of human sin and
evil. It is, nonetheless, a resurrection Jesus with this kind of mark that we
need. He stands as both reconciler and atoner, a bridge between a world in
which we continue to live - which can easily revert to the kind of disorder
of which the wounds are the sign - and the world in which He now lives, and
from which He beckons us to join Him.
And now may the God of peace, who brought from the dead our Lord
Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting
covenant make us perfect in every good work, working in us that which is
well-pleasing in His sight, to whom be all glory and honour, now and forever,
Amen.
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