“Christ is risen from the dead”
The truth of this day is that we are, actually, absolutely dead; dead in ourselves, that is to say. Why? Because we only live when we live for one another. And, yet, how can we live for one another? It is one of the great questions for our age.
The great insight of Holy Week is that our humanity, collectively and individually speaking, is dead when it lives only for itself. It is dead in the world’s conflicting demands; dead in the unceasing contradictions of all our souls; dead in its pretensions and follies; dead in its antagonisms and enmities. The pageant of Holy Week has shown this in all its fullness. “All is vanity,” an empty nothingness, as Ecclesiastes put it so long ago. We have, of course, all felt this at one time or another. Yet, all this is nothing new, as “everybody knows.”
The further point is that we can’t live for one another unless we live for God. We are only alive in him. This goes down hard in our world and day and yet it is almost, we might say, an empirical statement. We do hurt those whom we love the most, and, no, we don’t always do what is even in our own best interest. To pretend that “it’s the end of the world and I feel fine” (with thanks and apologies to Great Big Sea) is just that, a pretense. We don’t feel fine whether it is or is not the end of the world.
If we are honest, we know that things are not altogether as we would like them to be, let alone what they should be from almost any kind of ethical consideration. If it isn’t scandals in the Church, both sexual and other forms of abuse, such as the abuse of power, all of which suggest a “lack of credibility,” it is scandals everywhere else. As the Leonard Cohen song suggests, there is nothing new about this. “Everybody knows that’s the way it goes,” the world’s way of deceit and betrayal, the way of self-interest and denial, whether in society or, sadly, in the Church. Yet precisely against this deadly cynicism stands something radically new. It is simply this.
We only live when we live to God. This is the burden of our teaching, for then, and only then, we live beyond ourselves, beyond the death of ourselves, beyond the death of the human community and beyond the death of the world. We live simply (and only!) in the unending life of God. Such is the teaching of the resurrection. We can only begin to learn what it means by running with the Word of the Risen One in the glory of the resurrection.
The resurrection is radical new life. To live it we must die to ourselves. And yet, we can only die to ourselves and live to God and for one another through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It cannot be accomplished in ourselves alone. In ourselves alone there is only death. Doesn’t everybody know? “Everybody knows the Plague is coming/ Everybody knows it is moving fast.” Out of the grim realities of Good Friday and quiet peace of Holy Saturday comes resurrection. The Risen Christ is life – our life with God and his life in us.
The resurrection is the triumph of the Son’s love for the Father and the victory of his love for us. The resurrection is the triumph of love over all that denies love. Death is the ultimate denial of love. It is the way we choose when we seek to live for ourselves and not for God and for him in one another. “Everybody knows.”
The reality of the Fall is that God would have us live for him and with one another in the goodness of his will for us. But we would not. This is the original sin which is ever actualized in each of us in the contradictions of our souls, in “thought, word and deed”. We would presume to be a universe unto ourselves. We are not. But we get what we want. We get the universe of ourselves. Guess what? It is Hell. Holy Week gives us the image of Hell. Jesus is delivered into our hands. We do with him what we will. It is not a pretty picture.
“Hell is other people” (Sartre, No Exit), it is famously said. It is, indeed, if the assumption is that Heaven is ourselves. But we are not so constituted. To live for ourselves is the illusion of freedom. We become the captives of ourselves, the captives of “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” the captives of death, as “everybody knows.”
The resurrection is freedom: our freedom to God and to one another. Why and how? Because Christ conquers death, our death and death itself. He conquers death in the body of his humanity. He liberates us to himself in his love for the Father.
The resurrection is radical new life and freedom. It goes to the roots of the denial of love in us. Christ dies. He dies in his perfect love for the Father and for us. That makes all the difference. All our loves are imperfect and inconstant. All our loves have death in them. Christ’s love is the perfect love of man for God, the perfect love of the Son for the Father; in short, the perfection of love is in him. There is no death in it; only life. He dies in his love and love lives. There is resurrection; “he liveth unto God.”
His resurrection changes everything. It changes death, and it changes us. There is a resurrection of the understanding. The resurrection means new birth, new life, new hope, a new way of thinking and being. We look on death differently. This is the radical and significant meaning of Easter.
The resurrection is in the body; the body of Christ. His resurrection is the hope of our resurrection. There is no resurrection without the resurrection of the body. The body is something more, not less, than what we presently are. We are made for God, for life with God in the perfection of our humanity. We live the life of the resurrection now in the body of Christ, the Church. And the Church has to be what it proclaims. That is the constant task and the only answer to the Church’s current lack of credibility.
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what you’ve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows…
Beyond this despairing sadness, there is the wonder of this day, the wonder of the resurrection; the “Sacred Heart” that lives anew. Doesn’t “everybody know?” Sadly, no. And so it has to be constantly proclaimed. It has to be constantly grasped anew by hearts and minds, especially of those who have, perhaps, experienced that empty world which “everybody knows.” The resurrection speaks to that empty world of our empty souls. It proclaims exactly what everybody needs to know.
The resurrection is about the whole of our humanity – soul and body and community. In this sense, the resurrection vindicates the ancient and modern philosophical teaching about “the immortality of the soul” (think Plato and Descartes, ancient and modern respectively), even as it proclaims the redemption of the human community and the world. The resurrection signifies the greater completeness of our humanity; we are souls with bodies and our bodies are not nothing. And we are not alone.
We live in him, but only through his death and resurrection. Only in him do we begin to learn to live beyond ourselves. “Christ is risen from the dead.” There is, we might say, hope for us all!
“Christ is risen from the dead.”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2010