by CCW | 24 April 2022 08:00
It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.
Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.
It is in this sense that the Resurrection belongs to the ancient wisdom and the insights of other religious and philosophical traditions that argue for the immortality of the soul, such as in the Hindu treatise, The Bhagavad Gita, or with Plato, along with the ways in which those traditions seek to understand the relation of the body and nature to an abiding principle through such concepts as reincarnation. In this sense, the Resurrection is the most radical affirmation of human individuality, the most radical affirmation of creation and the most radical affirmation of the body in its particularity. “He showed them his hands and his side.” The body matters, though not in terms of cycling in and out of various life-forms but in itself. In this sense, the Resurrection is profoundly counter-culture because it is emphatically not about a flight from reality nor a flight from the body as if matter and the body were evil which are some of the dominant features of our technocratic culture. It also counters the contemporary culture of the existential individual isolated and separate who faces an indifferent and hostile world. This, too, is a profound forgetting of how we are inescapably part of a larger reality. Human individuality is found not in separation from one another but in community. This is what the Resurrection accounts all show us through Christ in our midst.
On “the same day at evening” Christ came and stood in the midst of the disciples and speaks peace and forgiveness. Peace and forgiveness come out of the Passion and the Resurrection. “Father, forgive them,” Jesus says on the Cross. “It is finished,” is his last word in John’s account of the Passion. Such is the peace that belongs to the overcoming of sin and evil, “the peace that passeth human knowing” as John of Damascus’s great Easter hymn puts it, because it is about God’s truth and goodness. “The witness of God is greater” than any human testimony as John tells us in his first Epistle.
Here time seems to stand still and yet Christ sets us in motion towards one another in love. Ours is a culture of fear and death. The Resurrection changes our outlook and understanding. As Maryilynne Robinson observes, “fear is not a Christian habit of mind” because “Christ is a gracious, abiding presence in all reality”. In him, time and human experience find their meaning but not in the tombs of the past or the tombs of our minds closed in upon ourselves in our fears and obsessions; nor in the idolatry of some future of our devising in the vanity of progress which is secular Christianity, as George Grant noted, but which has now given way to a post-Christian culture and church. Both past and future close us off to the present and the presence of Christ in our midst.
Such is the radical teaching of the Resurrection. Christ is in the midst. That is our joy and our peace in the face of all our uncertainties. We are freed from ourselves in being freed to God. The Resurrection opens us out to the essential life of God. “For this is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.” Today’s Gospel reveals to us the dynamic of the Resurrection in the change from fear to love, from sin and death to forgiveness and life. Such is the peace of Christ in our midst. Such is our joy in the life and light of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 2022
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