The death of death is eternal life.
The “death of death” is radical new life. In the Christian understanding, it is the Resurrection. It belongs to the general philosophical and religious idea that life is greater than death and that good is greater than evil. It is not so much the ending of the story of the Passion as the beginning in the sense of being opened to God as eternal life and thus the source and principle of all life. In this sense, the Resurrection is a radical affirmation of life and not its negation since it is ‘the negation of the negation.’
It is the counter to our culture of fear and death. “Be not afraid,” is one of the first words of the Resurrection. Just as Holy Week witnesses to the intensity of the Passion and reveals all the horrors and cruelties of human sin, past, present, and to come, as visited upon Christ in his love for us, a love stronger than death and evil, so the Resurrection accounts witness in a remarkable way the dawning awareness of the idea and meaning of the Resurrection. It is not a flight from reality, from the world, or from the past. It is its recreation, its redemption and rebirth. God makes something out of the nothingness of human sin and folly. The various binaries of human experience, of good and evil, of spirit and matter, of body and soul, are transcended but not denied nor destroyed.
The Passion and the Resurrection challenge us about our illusions of control and power. They do so in profoundly moving ways. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This is the first word of Christ from the Cross in Luke’s account and in what comes to be the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ as developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in Lima, Peru, in the late seventeenth century. Out of the cacophony of the chaos and confusion of human sin in all its ugliness comes peace and joy and forgiveness; in short, life as love, the love of the good. It is transformative but the transformation is not about becoming other than who we are. It is about becoming who we truly are in God, the source and end of all life. The Resurrection belongs to the various ways of thinking about what it means to be human within the idea of creation and in the face of suffering and evil.
To my mind, the story of the encounter on the Road to Emmaus is the most dramatic and illuminating of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It is about how we come to learn, about how ideas come to birth and are realized in us. It tells the story of two unnamed disciples fleeing from Jerusalem just after the Passion and Death of Christ. They are fleeing in fear and confusion and are going to a village called Emmaus. On the way they “talked together of all these things which had happened,” all the things of the Passion. Where there are two there is always a third, we might say, the truth that joins us together. Jesus draws near to them and joins their company but in their confusion they do not recognize him. They are not expecting him and all their expectations of him have been shattered. He draws out of them their confusions and uncertainties. They tell him what had happened including the finding of the empty tomb and the testimony of the angels to the women – the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. He draws out of them their confusion and unknowing; their fear and uncertainty.
Only at that point does the teaching of the Resurrection begin. How? “Beginning at Moses, and in all the prophets, he expounded unto them the things concerning himself.” The scriptures here are the writings of the Hebrews, not the writings that will become the Christian New Testament. In other words, Jesus provides a way of understanding, a way of thinking through the scriptures. The past is not eclipsed but transformed and redeemed. All the classical images of the Resurrection in art show the marks of the Passion. Passion and Resurrection are interrelated; each is in the other because both belong to God’s radical engagement with our humanity.
He tells them but at what point do we learn? There is no end to teaching but that is not the same thing as learning. How does the truth of what is taught come to birth in us? There are things said, rightly and necessarily so, words, but there are also things done, actions. The break-through moment happens when Jesus stays with these two disciples and “sat at meat with them.” What happens is telling. He does exactly what he did on the night of his betrayal at the last supper. He “took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” The Passion and the Eucharist; the Resurrection in our midst. It is all the radical life of God which cannot be contained or constrained by our fears, on the one hand, or our illusions of technocratic control and manipulation of life, on the other hand. Instead we are awakened to the radical presence of eternal life in our midst.
Such is the Passion and the Resurrection; the death of death. It is transformative, not in making us other than ourselves, other than human, whether as becoming machines or different beings, but in finding our freedom in the face of our fears and in what Marylynne Robinson calls “the givenness of things.” Life is something given, first and foremost. It is not something we posit.
The change is profound. It is about a way of facing things, not running away from them. The disciples return to Jerusalem, to the place of their fears, changed in their minds having been set in the motions of love and life. They tell the others “how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Word and sacrament. These are the forms of our participation in the life of God, the triumph of the good, the beautiful and the true; the triumph of love and life.
At the very least, the Resurrection accounts show us something about how we come to learn and grasp ideas in their reality. They are read to challenge us and to give us a way to confront ourselves. We are more though not less than our bodies, more though not less than the circumstances of our lives, more though not less than even the consequences of our actions. The death of death is eternal life; it is Resurrection, a counter to the culture of fear and death.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy