Month: April 2022

Did not our heart burn within us?

This week in Chapel, the second part of Luke’s story of The Road to Emmaus was read. It is a powerful story about how we come to know things; in this case, it reveals the way in which the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us through the interplay of words and deeds. The story illustrates what will become a distinct feature of the Christian religion, along with other religions, namely, Word and Sacrament, something proclaimed and heard and something seen and touched, ideas which are received in our hearts and minds. “Did not our heart burn within us?”

The Resurrection is an important doctrine of the Christian Faith but not a concept which is exclusive to Christians. The concept and idea appears in late Judaism and is an important feature of Islam as well. The idea of the Resurrection connects as well to other traditions of philosophical questions about what it means to be ‘you’, a self, a person, an individual, that involves the idea of the immortality of the soul, on the one hand, and the place of the body and nature in relation to the soul, on the other hand, in such things as reincarnation. The Resurrection affirms the idea of the individual as soul and body; the body matters in a radical way and belongs to your individuality.

The story of the Road to Emmaus is profoundly counter-culture in several ways. It affirms the individual as embodied and as an integral part of a community as distinct from being isolated and separate from others and in flight from the world and the body. It is the Christian event that opens us out to the universal event of God as essential life. As such it shows how death and sin are not ultimate but neither are they denied. The past is not eclipsed in some techno-fantasy flight to an imaginary future of our own devising. The Resurrection never lets us ignore or forget the Passion.

Last week we read about Jesus coming alongside the two disciples who were fleeing from Jerusalem in fear and uncertainty. Jesus engages them unawares; “their eyes were holden.” They didn’t recognise him since they had assumed he was dead. Our assumptions quite often constrain and limit our understanding. We often only see and hear what we want to see and hear. But in true Socratic fashion, Jesus draws out of them their fears and uncertainties and their expectations. That is part of the teaching.

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“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

This line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, draws upon the lovely story of ‘The Road to Emmaus’ in Luke’s Gospel, the first part of which was read in Chapel this week along with the story from John’s Gospel of Mary Magdalene coming in grief to the empty tomb only to encounter the Risen Christ. Both stories belong to the Resurrection of Christ. Both stories reveal how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection come to birth in our hearts and souls. They are both about the teaching of Christ himself.

The Resurrection is the Christian form of the ancient philosophical “wisdom of the ages and the sages” (Neil Postman) about God as eternal life in our midst. Easter, contrary to what is commonly said, is not the ending but the radical beginning, the beginning which has no ending because it is about eternal life. It is what has been opened out to us in the spectacle of Holy Week and now in the wonder of the Resurrection. It is what Christ teaches us about himself as the principle of radical life. It is not hard to see that the Passion of Christ in all four gospels can only have been written and can only be contemplated in the light of the Resurrection.

Christ’s Resurrection is the event that opens us out to the greater event of God himself. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” These words from Genesis and John shape our understanding of the Resurrection which is nothing less than the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil. Such is the powerful lesson of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion. The sorrows of the Passion deepen the joys of the Resurrection even as the joys of the Resurrection are intensified by the sorrows of the Passion.

The accounts of the Resurrection show us how this idea and its reality come to birth in us and as a consequence shape the accounts of the Passion. Here immortality extends beyond the soul, beyond such ideas as reincarnation – a kind of cycling in and out of various life-forms – to the idea of Resurrection: the body matters. It too belongs to the deeper truth of our humanity, to the fullest possible affirmation of our human individuality. The Resurrection is emphatically counter-culture precisely because it is not a technological flight from reality, from the reality of the body into some imaginary techno-fantasy about the isolated and separated self of gnostic existentialism – effectively a denial of the goodness of creation and of its restoration in redemption.

Mary comes seeking a dead body, a corpse. She encounters beyond all expectation the risen Christ. His words to her are most intriguing. “Touch me not,” he says but then sends her on a mission to the others. She is apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, the first witness to the Resurrection, the first to be taught by Christ himself. “Touch me not” means that she is to know him in a new way, no longer as clinging to the things of the past. The Resurrection is the new beginning, the beginning of a new order and relationship to Christ.

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