Andras Visky’s Disciples: Lingering at the Tomb
On Friday night several CICW staff members attended a Calvin Theatre Company performance of Disciples by András Visky, a Hungarian Reformed Christian playwright.
This play will be performed during Symposium on Worship 2006, when the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship will welcome Visky back to Calvin’s campus. CICW hosted the playwright at Symposium on Worship 2004 for a production of the play Divine Reverberations.
Disciples portrays the palpable state of fear, confusion, and dissension in which the disciples found themselves between Good Friday and Easter, after the devastating death of their master. The disciples cower, question, accuse, and exhort each other as they wonder what to do next. They are able to come to grips with the developments of Good Friday—and the ministry it apparently ended—only by re-telling and re-creating them.
This provocative play reminds us that even though we now worship on Good Friday in full expectation of the Easter triumph, no one was expecting the resurrection after the first Good Friday, not even Jesus’ closest followers, to whom he had prophesied it. It also reminds us that the Saturday before Easter often falls through the cracks in the liturgical year; we hasten from the cross to the empty tomb. But it was Christ’s bodily death and interment—the silence of the tomb on Saturday and the void of his absence among his followers—that accentuates the joy of the resurrection. By lingering on that Saturday, we worship with deeper adoration and gratitude on Sunday.