by CCW | 25 April 2019 18:24
“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.
It also relates to the School at least to the extent to which the School is about the life of the mind. The New Testament accounts of the Resurrection are intriguing and revealing about how we come to know. They are very much about the forms of intellectual transformation, about the activity of our minds with respect to truth and meaning. What they show us is how we can be changed by what we encounter, by what we are given to behold and see. Our assumptions are challenged. Mary Magdalene is the first witness to the Resurrection and in two ways. Mary comes early in the morning to the tomb expecting to find a body. She discovers first that the stone has been rolled away, the stone placed, as John tells us, at the orders of Pilate in response to the fears that the disciples might come and steal his body away. The accounts are already aware of the conspiracy theories which endeavour to explain things away. After telling Simon Peter and John about the stone and the missing body, they run to the tomb and confirm her report. She returns only to encounter the Risen Christ.
In chapter 20, John tells us about Mary’s and Thomas’ encounter with the Risen Christ. To Mary, Jesus says famously “touch me not;” to Thomas, he says “touch and see.” This speaks to the different ways of our knowing and to the powerful idea that we can only come to know the things which truly matter in accord with our own capacities to know; in short, our individual ways of knowing. Mary is told not to cling to Jesus physically or perhaps emotionally. Instead she is raised up into a new understanding and is literally set in motion. “Go and tell my brethren that I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and your God,” Jesus tells her in words which echo the words of Ruth about God as universal, for all, and not just some sort of tribal or personal deity. There is something universal about the Resurrection.
Thomas, on the other hand, was sceptical about the reports of the others to Christ’s Resurrection and demanded empirical proof, as it were. His doubt is really a kind of questioning which seeks to know truth. As another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas observes, his doubt provides for us the greater certainty of faith.
We easily forget that the Resurrection is the defining idea and principle that underlies the accounts of the Passion and indeed the whole of the New Testament scriptures and the emerging church. It is only in the light of the Resurrection that the Passion makes any sense. Holy Week and Easter are not a recital of linear events. They are more about a constant circling around the mystery of God in his engagement with our humanity. They open us out to the greater dignity and truth of our humanity precisely through our learning about sin and evil. That is only possible because of the grace and mercy of God, the goodness of God. We confront the limitations and failings of our humanity. We are broken-hearted, in disarray and dismay, but only so as to be made new. We are raised up into a new understanding. This is the significance of the Resurrection in its transformative power and effect on us.
At the very least, the stories can move us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our humanity. They suggest that we are more though not less than our embodied experiences, more though not less than the realities of suffering and death. As such they open us out to new ways of thinking and living. The Resurrection is profoundly liberating. Our minds are like tombs which the Resurrection bursts open. It changes everything. Our expectations and assumptions are challenged. Death itself is changed. The Resurrection is the death of death, the negation of the negation, and as such a profound affirmation of the goodness of God without which we have no good, no life, and no thought. Far from a fanciful fiction, it opens us out to a larger view of ourselves and our world. It reminds us that we have no life apart from God. Against the idea that the self is just “what I do,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us of the power of grace. “I say more: the just man justices / Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Such are the resurrection graces. Alleluia!
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/04/25/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-24-april/
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