KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 April
He 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.
