KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 April
Then opened he their understanding
The simple truth is that the accounts of the Passion of Christ in the four Gospels could only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy are not simply opposites. Each intensifies the other: the sorrows of the Passion intensify the joys of the Resurrection and vice versa. Passion and Resurrection go together. Yet this Christian understanding belongs to the great ethical teachings of other religions and philosophies in making known the idea of essential life which is greater than suffering and death. Life is greater than death. Thus Easter challenges our culture of death and fear. The Easter message is about the triumph of life over death and the counter to fear. “Be not afraid.” This has a certain resonance in our own fearful times.
Having immersed ourselves in the sorrows of the Passion we now immerse ourselves in the wonders and joys of the Resurrection. What we are given to see is particularly profound and speaks to an important aspect of education. The accounts of the Resurrection are really about the process of understanding. They present to us a certain critique of reason and open us out to a larger understanding of reality. They show us the necessary interplay between ontology and epistemology, between thinking about being (reality), and thinking about thinking, about our various ways of knowing.
Mary Magdalene and the other women come to the tomb expecting a body only to find the empty tomb. This marks the first moment of the beginnings of a change. The women are told by a young man – an angel – that the one whom they seek, “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified,” is not here. “He is risen. Behold the place where they laid him.” In our cynical world of conspiracy theories and false truths, we might assume that this must lead to the fabrication of a tale. But the evidence of absence is not the same thing as the absence of evidence. The Resurrection accounts all turn on the presence of God, of the life and light that is greater than death and darkness. That is what is “made known” through the encounters with Christ, encounters which open our understanding.
The phrase is Luke’s and belongs to his extraordinary accounts of the making known of the idea of the Resurrection especially in the wonderful story of the Road to Emmaus. Two broken-hearted disciples are fleeing from Jerusalem, perplexed and confused about the events of the Crucifixion. Jesus runs out after them, as it were, but “their eyes were holden,” as Luke puts it. After all, they had no expectation of seeing him having seen him die on the Cross. But the amazing thing about this scene is how Jesus draws out of them their confusion and perplexity. Only then does he provide them with a way of understanding which is based entirely on a way of reading the Jewish Scriptures about the sufferings of Christ. Here Jesus speaks in third person narrative about himself. He teaches by providing them with a way of understanding. In this case, a way of understanding texts, things written.