by CCW | 5 April 2018 18:47
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.
The Resurrection counters the idea of reincarnation which assumes a ‘you’, a personal sense of identity somehow separate from your bodily form. Buddhism, too, rejected the Hindu idea of reincarnation but also more remarkably rejects the very idea of ‘you’. There is no ‘you’. That is only an illusion, the illusion of ourselves and our world. The Resurrection, on the other hand, an idea which can be found in late Judaism and which will have its expression, too, in Islamic theology, affirms the idea of the self and the idea of the body as belonging to that sense of ourselves. But Resurrection only happens through dying to ourselves and living to God, the very point of Christ’s crucifixion. Once again, we can see some of the interplay and interactions between the various world’s religions about ourselves and our relation to the world and to one another.
God creates ex nihilo, a later theory of creation argues, and so with the resurrection. God creates new life out of the nothingness of human sin and evil. It does not mean the extinguishing of the past but its transformation.. That transformation means the forgiveness of sins and the way in which sin and suffering become the means of blessing and grace. A greater good is found even in the dark wood of our savage and broken hearts. This, too, is part of the radical message of the Resurrection.
Nothing is more remarkable than the accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels. They show how the idea comes to birth in the disciples and in us. They reveal the process of a dawning awareness about a new way of looking at reality through the deep engagement of God with us. In other words, we discover that our humanity has no life and no meaning apart from God.“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above where Christ sits at the right hand of God the Father.” Our humanity is only and truly itself in God. The Resurrection of Christ sets us in motion towards God and toward one another.
We see that wonderfully in the story of Mary Magdalene coming in sorrow and grief to the tomb looking for the corpse of Christ only to find the tomb empty. She runs and tells the other disciples. She comes again in sorrow and perplexity to the empty tomb and encounters two angels and then the Risen Christ himself. He tells her not to touch him but to go and tell the other disciples that “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” words which echo Ruth’s statement to Naomi in The Book of Ruth, emphasizing in both cases that God is the God of all. Mary goes again to the other disciples to tell them that she has “seen the Lord” and so she becomes “apostle apostlorum,”the apostle to the Apostles, as the Fathers put it, the one who is sent to proclaim the great good news.
“Touch me not,”Jesus says to her, meaning ‘do not cling to me,’ but, then, in the same chapter he will tell Thomas to reach out and touch him. In each case there is the making known to each in a manner that is appropriate and right for each. Such too is education; ideas conveyed to us in ways that belong to the capacity of the beholder to behold. Thus the Resurrection affirms all that belongs to the truth of human personality and identity and sets us in motion towards God and towards one another in love and joy.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/04/05/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-2-april/
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