KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 April
admin | 11 April 2018He was known of them in the breaking of the bread
April is the cruelest month of all, T.S. Eliot averred in The Waste Land, making a deliberate contrast with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that “when April with his showers sweet …then do folk long to go on pilgrimage.” But there is a journey, a pilgrimage of the soul through good and ill, a pilgrimage of the understanding, snow and wind and ice notwithstanding. It is all about the Resurrection and it speaks to the sufferings and the sorrows that darken our hearts especially at the loss of lives such as those of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team. We remembered them by name at the Wednesday assembly, placing them and the hearts of those who mourn and are in sorrow with God. Such, too, belongs to the Resurrection.
It gives us a way to face the hard and difficult things of human experience, the things of suffering and death. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in grief and sorrow only to encounter the Risen Christ; “Touch me not,” he says to her. Doubting Thomas, so-called, encounters the Risen Christ behind closed doors; “reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust in into my side; and be not faithless, but believing,” Christ says. And all in the same chapter! Touch not and touch! Nothing affirms so completely the way in which the Resurrection speaks to the radical nature of human individuality and to the realities of the human body, to human experience, and, most importantly, to the forms of human knowing; yet without being collapsed into them. We are raised up to behold things in a new light, to find grace and consolation even in the midst of our sorrows and griefs. The Resurrection strengthens us.
The Resurrection accounts all turn on one fundamental principle: Christ is the great teacher of the Resurrection whose encounter with us overcomes every paradox, every contradiction. We are challenged to see the past in a new way, to see ourselves in a new way, to think the body in a new way. One of the distinctive features of the Resurrection is that it is inescapably a bodily event. It happens in the body and provides us with a new way to think about the dignity and truth of our humanity. Our bodies matter; they are part and parcel of our individual identity, part and parcel of the truth of our humanity as found in God.
But we can only come to that through our minds being opened to the things of God without which we cannot begin to understand ourselves and our bodies, let alone suffering and death. The radical meaning of the Resurrection is that those realities all belong to the far greater reality of God. God is suffering, as Meister Eckhart wonderfully and provocatively suggests, meaning that our lives find their purpose and significance in God and that by grace human suffering is made the way to God through Christ’s sacrifice. Hence the repeated emphasis on the bodily reality of the Risen Christ, the repeated emphasis on the wounds of the crucifixion now become the marks of heavenly love.
We place the dead and the injured of the Humboldt Broncos in the wounds of the crucified Christ for they are now the marks of heavenly love. Such is the radical meaning of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy are completely intertwined.
This challenges our all too linear way of looking at things, impoverished as that is. The Resurrection is about the gathering of all things to God in prayer and praise not in spite of the body but through the body. That is the point of the encounters with the Risen Christ.
This week we had in Chapel the wonderful story of doubting Thomas, the one who insists that he will not believe unless he sees. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” It is a wonderful testament to the empirical, to the reality of the sense-perceptible world, and a wonderful testament to his way of knowing perhaps.
We call him doubting Thomas. I have often wondered if Descartes in part didn’t get his great thought experiment of the hyperbolical doubt from doubting Thomas, even as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, observed that Thomas’ doubt provides for us the greater certainty about the Resurrection. What is this doubt? It is a kind of questioning which at the very least seeks the truth and presupposes that there is a truth to be sought. That alone is an interesting counter to our post-modern uncertainties.
How do we think the Resurrection? That is the great question presented to us in the accounts of the Resurrection, both in the story of Thomas and in the story from Luke about the events on the road to Emmaus. Both stories complement one another in their own way. The one is a direct encounter by name; the other, an indirect encounter in which, through conversation, our expectations, fears, and worries are drawn out of us. Only then can things be explained to us. How? By “opening to us the Scriptures” . By the opening of our understanding.
Christ provides a way to understand his Crucifixion and Resurrection. It changes everything. No story, perhaps, shows us that process of dawning awareness and the birth of new understanding than Christ on the road to Emmaus. It all happens through the firm gentleness of conversation that makes “our heart[s] burn within us” because it provides us with a way to understand the things of Scripture and the events of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection as seen through that lens. But more importantly, there is the emphasis upon what was experienced and remembered now seen in a new light. Not only does Christ insert himself into the conversation with the two disciples who, in fear, are fleeing Jerusalem, but he tarries with them and “he took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” In a wonderful economy of expression, Luke says, “their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” Think about it. The disciples are reminded of the last supper but as seen now through the lens of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. It changes everything.
And it, too, is about the things of this world super-charged with a spiritual significance. “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Resurrection and eucharist.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy