KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 April
Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Christos Anesté! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alethos Aneste! Alleluia! Alleluia! It is the ancient Christian proclamation and greeting at Easter. Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia! And such too is a little lesson in Greek and Hebrew!
What is it all about? It is all about the Resurrection. Easter, itself an ancient Germanic word for the Goddess of Spring, has been co-opted for the spiritual spring of our souls. “All the winter of our sins, long and dark is flying” and suddenly there is an entirely new way to think about reality and about our humanity, about death and life.
The Resurrection changes everything. It means that death is no longer the final statement. Death itself has been changed, a point which John Donne makes very clear in his famous sonnet, Death Be Not Proud. Death is not “mighty and dreadful;” it is not the master of our lives. It is instead “slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.” Death shall be no more; death is dead. Good Friday marks the death of death with God’s death in Christ on the Cross. Easter or the Pascha, the term used in other cultures that refers to the new Passover from death to life in Christ, celebrates new birth, new life; in short, a new creation.
The Resurrection makes no sense apart from the Passion of Christ and vice-versa. That, too, is part of the radical meaning of the Resurrection of Christ. Something new and comforting, a blessing even, is found in the suffering. And so we are given a new way to think about the realities of the human situation with respect to sin and sorrow, pain and death. It is not nothing but neither is it everything. So, too, with respect to our bodily reality. Our bodies are not nothing but neither are they everything. The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of our bodies as being an integral part of our human identity and personality.