“Christ is your life. Christ is all in all”
I know. You have heard it over and over again, perhaps even on Good Friday. We know the end of the story, it is commonly said, the happy, clappy ending of Christ’s Resurrection that risks eclipsing Good Friday and the Passion of Christ. We may think that Easter is mere wishful thinking, a kind of hope against the experience of reality, the reality of a world of misery and hurt, of violence and destruction. That it is an escape from reality.
We get it wrong. The Easter celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is not the end of the story but its radical beginning. Paul in Colossians states the deep truth about our life as “hid with Christ in God,” the one “who is [our] life.” But not just us – the few, the elite over and against the deplorables, the others, the ‘them’ whom we despise – no. “Christ is all in all.” His Resurrection reveals the radical truth of our humanity as found in God.
We get it wrong. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how to think it right. They show us how the idea of the Resurrection and its reality comes to birth in human souls. They show us the awakening to the radical beginning. What is that radical beginning? That God is life. “In the beginning God.” “In the beginning was the Word.” “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” “In the beginning” means “in the principle”; our life in that which ever abides. Christ’s Resurrection is not simply an event in time; it is eternity in our midst. It cannot be contained in a tomb let alone the tombs of our minds. The Resurrection is the great break-through moment about essential life that is greater than death, the light that is greater than darkness, the good that is greater than sin and evil.
Postmodernism in its various forms is profoundly anti-intellectual, profoundly anti-spiritual, profoundly negative because of its weddedness to a technocratic way of thinking against which it rails in vanity. Why? Because it is trapped in the very problem which it seeks to escape. Technology per se is not the problem. It is our fixation on it as the form of thinking and being that is the problem, the problem of our linear thinking, of calculative reasoning, as Heidegger puts it, that eclipses meditative thinking. The consequence is nothing less than a loss of our humanity. It is anti-life. The paradox is great. The gnosticism of existentialism that pits the individual in his or her subjective experience against an indifferent and hostile universe parallels the technocratic culture in its flight from that world premised upon an absolute conviction about the isolated self. It seeks to flee the world but forgets, as Neil Postman observes about the issues of technology, that “there is no escaping from ourselves.” Such an insight belongs to what he calls “the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” The Resurrection is the Christian form of that wisdom.
Holy week is about confronting ourselves. But that is only possible through the truth and power of God without which our lives are but pretense and nonsense, folly and narcissism, sin and evil. Holy week has made that perfectly clear to us, if we have the eyes and the hearts to hear and learn.
The simple point is that Easter is the beginning, not the end; the beginning which has no ending. The simple point is that Easter goes before and makes possible, indeed demands, the rigours and intensity of Holy Week. The accounts of the Passion, after all, are written and can only be pondered in the light of the Resurrection. Far from being a linear journey, going from point A to point B, we have been engaged in the dance of the understanding, a kind of circling around and around the mystery of life and death as gathered into the greater mystery of God. The sorrows of the Passion are not eclipsed but deepened into joy even as the joys of the Resurrection are intensified by the sorrows of the Passion. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
The Resurrection concentrates everything on God in Christ, who is “the alpha and the omega,” the beginning and the end. This is the Christian truth proclaimed in the Easter greeting. “Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia, The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia.” We are awakened, recalled, and reminded of what is necessarily prior to our own thinking and being. It is about how we are known in God through God in Christ who has engaged our world to bring us home to God.
Radical new life. I like to think of the Resurrection as the fullest expression of the idea of creation ex nihilo; God making everything out of nothing, out of himself, God making something greater out of the nothingness of our sins and evil. The Resurrection is the death of death, the negation of the negation. Easter in this sense is profoundly counter-culture. It counters our culture of death. We are dead in ourselves, buried in our fears and our animosities, in our obsessions and fixations. Easter bids us die to ourselves in order to live to God. In so doing, it proclaims the radical truth of our individuality and our humanity. We only live when we live with God and with one another. The Resurrection is the greatest possible affirmation of our individuality, soul and body. We are more though not less than our bodies; they belong to the truth of creation and thus to its redemption. The Resurrection is the triumph of life over all that negates life. The body matters; it belongs to who we are and how we are known in Christ. Death is the separation of soul and body; Christ’s Resurrection overcomes that separation. The truth of our individuality is found in community, in the body of Christ. We are given a new way to think about ourselves and our world. Christ is our life.
Easter is not an add-on, a feel-good conclusion to an otherwise gruesome and ugly spectacle. No. It expresses the inner truth of all that we have seen in Holy Week. It marks the radical beginning of life, life not as a sequence of events but as the real event itself, the life which begets life upon life and negates death. Death is no longer the terminus, the end-point; death is changed and becomes the transitus, something which we pass through, a means to an end which never ends. It means passing through the grave and gate of death to our life in Christ. Christ’s Resurrection is about nothing less than the proclamation of God as essential life who embraces everything in his life, even death. Christ’s Resurrection is the death of death because it manifests the essential life of God. This is our life. Live it. Live in the joy of the Resurrection, the joy of the God who is life.
And what does all that mean you ask? It is simply to be alive to the presence of God, to Christ in our midst, the life which has no end, the life which gathers all things back to himself. It sets us in motion to God and to one another, running and coming like Mary Magdalene, running and coming like Peter and John to the empty tomb and so into the beginning of an awareness of the mystery of the Resurrection as endless life.
“Christ is your life”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2022