By Anon

The Easter Season once again brings no good news for the victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England, and for those who have been harmed by its continuing betrayals, failures and dishonesty over safeguarding. In his Easter message for The Times (Credo, April 19), the Archbishop of York wrote of Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, and the despair of its victims.  He was unable to see that the horrors, injustices and abuses abroad in the wider world happen in the Church of England too. Yet he offered no Easter hope for those caught up in never-ending cycles of abuse and cover-ups inside his own institution. The Archbishop’s Easter message was addressed to the world, ignoring all those still captive to the abuses perpetrated within his church. So we have rewritten his Credo homily (barely changing a word), but merely altering the subject.

“As John tells it in his Gospel, Jesus’s resurrection was met first with darkness and weeping. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, this detail frees us to see that lament and hope are not, after all, mutually exclusive.

When Easter arrives in John’s Gospel, it arrives amid darkness. Jesus’s body is gone from the grave. The moment is quiet, utterly unprecedented, and completely bewildering. And it brings the first witness to tears.

These tears are those of Jesus’s friend Mary Magdalene, shed as she desperately seeks him. Finding the tomb empty, she comes to the only reasonable conclusion: someone has stolen his body. Mary sobs. And yet soon she will come to recognise a seeming stranger to be Jesus himself.

That recognition dawns with Jesus’s soft speaking of her name, “Mary”. This gentle and intimate moment distils the wonder of Easter: tears first shed in sorrow are transformed to tears of joy before they’ve even finished trickling down the contours of Mary’s face. The same tears, transformed from sorrow to joy, are offered for the same Jesus, risen from death to life.

Mary’s tears, shed in anxiety and desolation, mourning, perhaps even in shame or regret, are familiar to many victims of injustice, betrayal, abuse and evil. But she shows us that those who shed tears of lament can do so while persevering in hope, even when tears of joy seem impossibly far off.

By the usual standards, Mary should have given up on Jesus as a catastrophically lost cause: he had been rejected, humiliated, executed, and placed in a tomb. Yet still she turns up in darkness, laments — and finally, wonderfully, finds stubborn hope fulfilled beyond her imagining.

Here, many victims of abuse can identify with both the tortured dead, Jesus, and the mourner who has had all hope and trust removed by a regime hell-bent on easy expediency and perpetrating injustice.

John’s account also emphasises that the risen Christ does not first reveal himself to people of power: not to the Roman governor, nor the chief priest, not even to the senior disciples, but rather to this weeping Mary. She is a victim, as Jesus was.

Jesus stands before her, not robed in finery, but wearing the scars of his torture and death on the Cross. The risen Jesus is greeted by no fanfare, no flourish, no powerful VIP visitors. Instead, he is greeted by Mary Magdalene sobbing amid darkness.

In the battle zones of the Church of England’s safeguarding debacles, and in the barren fields of moral famine we find in episcopacy, the rubble of lives left by the Church of England’s abuses and cover-ups (they never end), tears and darkness are among the very few things not in short supply. The suffering for the victims is beyond comprehension, and yet many people there will greet the dawn of Easter Day with Mary Magdalene’s mixture of lament for their situation and stubborn hope.

Increasingly, however, it seems that those of us who look on the Church of England from afar do so without hope. The temptation is to view these situations as simply intractable, unfixable. Easter dawn reminds us to both lament and hope stubbornly amid this great darkness.

I know that we must not abandon attempts to seek justice in the Church of England. Nor “move on” from our concern for the gross failures in our safeguarding policies and practices. We ought not to tolerate the destruction of victims of abuse as an uncomfortable side-effect of our ministry. Nor should we give up on striving to honour truth in our political and public conversation. But perhaps we should start such conversations inside the Church of England first? Because it’s getting difficult to talk about all the evil in the world when we won’t clean up our own backyard.

The unimaginable triumph of Easter dawned while it was still dark, and it was met with weeping. By lamenting and remaining stubbornly hopeful, Mary Magdalene refused to abandon the cause of good and right even amid confusion and darkness.

Whether or not you celebrate Easter, Mary’s example can help us address the uncertainties and darkness that we face with some stubborn hope. But please remember I am only talking about the wider world here, and not about the Church of England. We prefer to change the subject and look away from our sins and failings inside the church, maintain silence, and keep our deeds covered in the darkness.

At Easter, the last thing we want is the tombs disturbed with piercing truth and light, and the disruption of new life. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that. We like to keep our failures, abuses and sins buried where the public can’t see them.

Commenting later for The Times, Andrew Graystone, an advocate for abuse survivors, said that “trauma doesn’t take holidays”, noting that Easter could be a painful time for those who have been abused and ignored in the church. “The message of Easter is that the route to new life runs through betrayal, pain and death,” he said. “A church that tries to skirt around the harm it has done, or put it aside for a few days to focus on something else, will miss what the Easter story is about. Easter is an opportunity for the church to look evil in the eye, including its own evil.”