“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.
In Luke’s account of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, Jesus comes alongside the disciples who are fleeing Jerusalem in perplexity and fear about what had happened at Christ’s crucifixion and burial. They are in great confusion. Jesus comes alongside them and enters into their conversation. Like Socrates he draws out of them what they think has happened and what it is that they had been expecting. This is the beauty of the Resurrection accounts. This story shows Jesus as teacher, “expound[ing] unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” providing them with a way to think the radical meaning of the Resurrection. It is about God as essential life who is always in our midst.
He comes near, he enters into our conversation. Sometimes we learn from one another in our conversations but, if so, it is only because there is a “third who walks always beside us,” the truth that joins us together in a deeper understanding. Such is the Resurrection, an awakening to a deeper understanding of our individuality as found in community, an awakening to a deeper understanding of our humanity as found in God, and an awakening to a deeper understanding of the affirmation of creation and ourselves as embodied beings.
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy