Theology In Wax

Ephesians 2:1-10  2 Cor 12:8-9

There’s no getting away from it. I love candles!

Not just for the glow they give or the sense of a light which is alive with the presence of God.

I also love candles for the shapes they make themselves into as they burn.

On Easter morning I have the privilege of seizing hold of the paschal candle.

At Christmas we proclaim a light coming into the world and shining in the darkness.

At Easter we proclaim that we have come to know that nothing, not even death itself, can quench this flame.

So at the back of the church on Easter morning – I kindle a resurrection light and it is passed from one person to another – so that it becomes a gift for us all to share and shine with.

But before I light the candle – I pierce it with holes.

I cut deep into the wax making the marks that Christ bore on the cross for us.

I utter words which become each year for me a theology set in wax:

“By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us”

Only when the candle has been defaced like this, stabbed and cut about – and these words said over it – is it fit for lighting and for that light to be shared.

Because of all that Jesus has been through – his wounding, his failure, his disgrace – and death itself – his passion is not just a tragedy that we want to move away from as quickly as possible, no, these marks of pain have a hidden potential for revealing our deepest grounding in God.

There is a danger in us that we come to loathe our own brokenness and that it is this loathing of ourselves that brings us to this service with a fervent prayer that this might be taken away.

God meets the human condition where it stands most in need, in its poverty and brokenness, but the paschal candle shows what he might then accomplish in that meeting.

The paschal candle bears the light of Christ full of holes.

Over the year it can become battle scarred.

There used to be a paschal candle kept in Church House in the Diocese of Chichester.

They didn’t get a new candle each year – they continued with the old one – taking the nails out each Good Friday and plunging them in a fresh every Easter morning.

What a state that candle looked – and yet, there it was, as if dragged through a hedge backwards and yet shining with the light of Christ.

I would look at that candle and think – yes, that’s Him. That’s Christ.

And I would dare to think – yes and it’s me too – I recognise myself in that wax.

Thus St Paul was on to something important when he wrote of the thorn in his flesh and how he had prayed three times for its removal and was told “My grace is enough for you – and then with a translation I love – for my power is at full stretch in your weakness.

The marks I make in the paschal candle are not made with just any sharp pin – the nails have grains of incence in them – to remind us that there is a fragrance and a sweetness about what we do – through this wounding which He and I share – poverty becomes rich and brokenness is whole.

I think it is only attention to prayer that can teach us to accept this.

Prayer, when it stops being a list of things we want God to put right, and just becomes a silent waiting and an acknowledgment of what happens to be the case in my life.

Prayer teaches me how to be in this wound, how to bear the light of Christ even though I’m aching.

In prayer I learn that my imperfection is no longer the thing by which I am judged in the sight of God and found wanting – rather it is that by which I take Him closer to myself that I had thought possible. He cannot dwell within me without his wounded self and my wounded self embracing.

That would be like having a paschal candle in which no marks were ever made and from which no wax was ever permitted to drip.

We have to be at full stretch with each other.

How does this wounding take shape in our lives? I guess there are many forms – but the twin piercing of temptation and failure – hit pretty near the mark as far as I’m concerned.

Temptation – that if I had something else – if I had what you had – if I became like you – I would be free from all this.

“If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” – that was how he was tempted as the piercing began.

Failure – that because I am who I am – I can’t possibly be loved by God or acknowledged as being any good by my fellows – the way my failures dog me – show up the extent of my pride and self centredness.

“My God, why have you forsaken me” at the heart of his passion came this cry of failure. This is not how the Son of God should end up.

It’s not how I should end up!

In these situations there is a crying out for God which I can barely acknowledge.

In these situations there is a painstaking coming together of my life story and his, which does not mean the wounds close up – for just as he bore them in his resurrection life, then so must we.

Yet as soon as, in my prayer, I let Him into these dark places within me, allow him to be for me the light he says he is – then my wounds don’t have the power over me they once had. They have a different sort of power in that they teach me compassion.

I think of Mary Magdalene as being the prime example of what I mean.

She knew the reality of wounding and the stranglehold that can have on your life when God is not acknowledged.

She knew the reality of healing at the Lord’s hand whereby those things no longer had the power over her – yet her wounding continued to shape the compassionate, committed witness she would become.

Her breakdown on Easter Day indicative of a bright light shining from that which remained full of holes. Of a love at full stretch.

So there becomes a measure of grace to pray for in a healing service and it has much to do with the bearing of our wounds under the light of Christ. Divesting them of the power they once had to drive us into the ground and opening them up to be the place where God is found in us and where we can touch the lives of others.

Was Paul mad when he wrote

“It is then about my weaknesses that I am happiest of all to boast, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me, and that is why I am glad of weakness, for it is when I am weak that I am strong”

Or was he beginning to understand the way the light shines in the darkness for the transformation of the likes of you and me.

RH 11.01.09