Sermon: Lachrymosa

Someone once said that the most beautiful symphonies are the unfinished ones.  He was thinking of people whose lives are prematurely cut off, with so much yet to do and to be.  I think today of a gifted young priest who found her vocation in the parish where I served and who knew last All Souls’ Day that she was dying of a lymphoma.  She spent her last hours of consciousness listening to The Dream of Gerontius. We all have our own memories of unfinished lives to bring to this Requiem.  And with them, so many who to us are without name, who have died in the tragedies of this past year: the Asian tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake, the hurricanes, the unending bloodshed in Iraq, the bombs in Delhi and London. 

Mozart’s was one such unfinished life.  What would he have become if he had not died at the age of 35? How would the symphony, the piano concerto, the opera have developed under his amazing genius?  We can only speculate.  The Requiem is his swan-song.  Legend tells of the mysterious night-time messenger who brought him the commission, a grey-cloaked visitant who seemed to the dying composer a spectre of death, as if the Requiem was to be his own.  Yet there is no mystery about Count Walsegg-Stuppach, a recently widowed amateur musician who wanted to commemorate his wife by commissioning a Requiem he could pass off as his own.  Mozart worked away feverishly, but could not keep sickness at bay.  He got as far as the Lachrymosa.  One December night in 1791, he and some friends sang it through.  Two hours later he was dead.  The Requiem was completed by the young Süssmayr, drawing where he could on his master’s ideas and sketches.  It is well done.  But might it have been more poignant to have left it as it was.

And tonight’s gospel from St Mark – this too, some say, is unfinished.  What sort of a resurrection story is it that breaks off suddenly with the words ephobounto gar, ‘for they were afraid’?  Here, there is no joyful meeting with the risen Lord, no celebratory meal, no reassurance of sins forgiven, only the half-light of early morning, and an empty tomb, and two frightened women.  The bleak story has not moved very far, it seems, from the lachrymosas of Good Friday and Easter Eve.  Perhaps like Mozart, Mark died before he could finish his masterpiece; perhaps the end of the manuscript was lost.  We do know that a generation or two later others tried to tidy it up, provide a proper ending.  But could it be that Mark’s story isn’t unfinished at all, that he deliberately ended where he did in order to convey a powerful insight about the resurrection?  What the canon of scripture has bequeathed us is a short, terse, understated ending that is entirely in the spirit of the rest of the gospel.  It affirms the central truth, that the tomb is empty.  It records how those who first came to the tomb were filled with terror.  It offers the promise that the risen Christ will go ahead of them, and meet them at the place where he first met his disciples – in Galilee. 

In other words, Mark tells a story we all recognise: how our lives as people of faith are lived between the cross and the empty tomb behind us, and the promise of a future with the risen Lord ahead.  We are like the women: we have looked into the face of death and its aftermath, and confronted with its mystery, we are filled with fear.  Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla – underneath the imagery of that great sequence, we recognise the dread we all feel at our own mortality and what lies beyond.  Perhaps it is better to think that we shall lie in the dust forever than that this earth may one day dissolve in ashes and humanity have a future we cannot glimpse or comprehend.  Yet what Mark’s story holds out to us is hope: the promise that what bewilders and frightens us will one day dissolve in delight.  One day.  Not now, not yet.  It lies in the future.  For now, we still live in the shadow of death.  But not always.  We shall meet him, and greet him and bless him; and then we shall understand.

Like Mozart, Mark laid down his pen to the sombre tones of his own lachrymosa.  But this is not any lack of faith on his part.  For the Easter story is always unfinished, always open-ended; resurrection is the beginning not the end, the dawn of a new day whose course is beyond our imagining, though not our hoping.  Our lives now are suspended between grave and Galilee, between tearful farewells and joyous reunions, between the emptiness of death and the fullness of life and peace.  We come here afraid yet hopeful, discomfited yet believing.  ‘He goes before you: there you will see him.’  The Lachrymosa, in the key of d minor, ends on a major chord – Mozart’s last.  Out of the agonised depths of lachrymosa comes the text of peace: ‘Sweet Lord Jesus, grant them rest. Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem’.  It isn’t yet the happy ending where death is swallowed up in victory.  But it foreshadows it.  And because of it, we pray for all whom we remember tonight, and know that we are heard.