KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 24 April
Resurrection graces
“Christ is Risen Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!” The ancient and great Easter greeting of Christians at Easter says a wee bit more than our more prosaic “Happy Easter” which might just as well mean “may the bunny be with you,” maybe a chocolate bunny? Yet the Christian greeting highlights the main point. It is all about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that means for us.
And while this is specifically a Christian greeting, the idea of resurrection is not unique to Christianity but belongs to late Judaism and to Islam and connects to other philosophical and religious traditions about the immortality of the soul to which the body is now included. In other words, the concept of the resurrection belongs to the long and profound traditions of thought about what it means to be human.
The Resurrection affirms in the strongest possible way human individuality. It affirms in the strongest possible way the body and the physical world. It says that your body is an essential part of who you are, that the body while not everything is also not nothing. There is a cosmic dimension to the Resurrection, too, insofar as it recalls creation itself and pertains to the redemption of the whole world. It is, in short, a new creation, and in the most radical sense of creatio ex nihilo, a making out of the nothingness of sin and evil. The Resurrection is the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil, but only through the most intense realization of the disorders of our lives and world. The Resurrection is radical new life because it grounds our being, our knowing and our loving in the life of God. God alone can make something good even out of our evil. The message of the Resurrection explains its strong sense of joy and hope. As such it is the counter to the despairing and dogmatic nihilisms of our age but without becoming triumphalist and domineering ourselves.