Having reflected on some Lenten hymnody, it now seems apt to bookend the season with an Easter hymn. There are many excellent and rousing Easter hymns of course but Now the green blade riseth is perhaps one of the most understated and yet evocative:
‘Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green’

For me it brings to mind images of Christ gently stretching in the first morning light on Easter Day or walking in the quiet of the garden ready for Mary’s arrival (taking us back to the Garden of Eden where God walked with Adam and Eve freely before the Fall). I find it a rather more gentle image to have of the Resurrection than the triumphal ‘bursting from the tomb’ we find in Thine be the Glory; as fabulous as that also is.

St Paul speaks about the resurrection of the body as like a seed being sown in the earth; an idea which the children who visited our ‘Explore Easter’ event played with by planting sunflower seeds which (if well-watered and on a sunny window sill) should just about be beginning to show some early shoots. Paul notes that we are sown a physical, perishable body but we are raised a spiritual, imperishable body – not ghost-like and floating about, but a new and unlimited physicality, consistent with the Resurrection encounters which the disciples had where Jesus was able to appear in rooms without using the door yet still eat fish on the beach and walk with friends on the road. His was a body recognised not by its close resemblance to the person they saw before his death, but by its distinctive marks of his love and the way he broke bread. 

It is this Love which springs up afresh for us each morning, not only on Easter Day. Every day is an opportunity to step into resurrection; to let the presence of Christ grow within us like a seed. Initially that growth may be unseen, but soon it pushes through and we witness the first tentative shoots of faith. If we nurture that faith, water it well and keep it facing towards the Son – perhaps we too will come to know what resurrection feels like.

‘Love is come again like wheat that springeth green’.