recalled to life

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/images/0404.jpg

Saturday in Easter Week

We thank you, heavenly Father, that you have delivered us
from the dominion of sin and death and brought us into the
kingdom of your Son; and we pray that, as by his death he
has recalled us to life, so by his love he may raise us to eternal
joys; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

"RECALLED TO LIFE" is the title of the first section in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A prisoner of the Revolution, a doctor, immured in the Bastille, receives an unexpected visitor, a benevolent stranger (at first) who rescues him, at last, from his confinement, and the almost certain encounter with Mme Guillotine.... The courage and kindness of one man, the devotion of a daughter, and the unexpected courage and kenosis (self-emptying) of another man, recall the prisoner to life

It is a kind of resurrection. What we experience, as in the collect for this evening, is another kind of new life. It is the one that follows death to folly, or if you prefer, sin, and so often we take this to be personal. The prisoner in the Bastille, rescued and recalled to life, recalls a type of old-fashioned goodness in society, not simply the individual, which was nearly destroyed, by the dominion of sin and death that was The Terror. Not that the kingdom of the Son is the quiet life of a middle-class Englishman. But I forget: the strange virtue of the quiet unassuming business man, the quiet courage he does not exhibit but simply employs with out fanfare, is key to the liberation of the Doctor. 

What we praise God for this week is much more universal: the liberation of the universe, the whole human family at least, from the bondage that is broken when God raising Christ from the dead proves that love is strong as death.

Love is strong as death. And yet it does not overcome it without first he suffered ... 

A Collect for Fridays

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but
first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he
was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way
of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and
peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Perhaps it is best said in the prayer we have prayed all week, the 8th Canticle,
The Song of Moses, Cantemus Domino (Exodus 15:1-6, 11-13, 17-18):

I will sing to the Lord, for he is lofty and uplifted; *
    the horse and its rider has he hurled into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my refuge; *
    the Lord has become my Savior.
...

With your constant love you led the people you redeemed; *
    with your might you brought them in safety to
                             your holy dwelling.
...

This canticle, drawn from the 15th chapter of the book of Exodus, contains some of the oldest writing in the Bible, in that first verse, "...the horse and its rider has he hurled into the sea."

God delivers from peril, from death, from the kingdom of sin and death that Egypt had become for the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; from the oppressors of Left or Right in political terror times; in our personal lives from less externally visible but often seemingly inescapable forces that keep us down.

Yet God is there, life is triumphant, and love is strong, strong as death: death does not have the last word.