Month: April 2010

“This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our faith”

Peace and forgiveness flow from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the first-fruits of his resurrection in us, it seems, at least as this is signaled in John’s Gospel. Jesus appears behind closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear. He proclaims peace and forgiveness. He institutes the means by which his peace and his forgiveness continue with us – through the Holy Spirit breathed upon the disciples who will be the apostles of his church. They are sent forth to bestow the peace and the forgiveness of God to a fearful and an uncertain world, a world of darkness and deceit, a cruel and dangerous world, “as everybody knows”. “Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained”.

What an awesome charge! And, yet, how little understood. Sometimes known as ‘the power of the keys’, the proclamation of God’s forgiveness through the ordained ministry to his penitent people effects what it signifies. If we truly confess our sins and truly seek God’s forgiveness, then we receive the grace of forgiveness objectively proclaimed in the words of absolution pronounced by the priest and signified in the sign of the cross. We are forgiven. That is the grace which extends from the Upper Room “the same day at evening”, the day of the resurrection of Christ. It is as if we are there in that very moment and in that very room, as if time has stopped and we are caught up into eternity.

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“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.

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