Day: April 16, 2023

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”

Throughout Holy Week we hung upon the words of Christ in the unity of the Scriptures, most especially, we hung upon the words of the crucified Christ. The tradition of the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ developed, as we noted by the Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya in the late 17th century in Peru, carried over into Europe and then back again to the Americas. It belongs to the Church’s constant attention to the Passion of Christ. That ordering of the words of the crucified as drawn from all four Gospels also carries us into the Resurrection and into the Easter season. For the Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion; if anything, each intensifies our understanding of the other and brings to light the radical concept of eternal life shown in both. The ‘death of death’ of Christ crucified is eternal life. It is Resurrection.

The proper preface for Easter and Eastertide makes the connection between the Passion and the Resurrection quite clear. We praise God for Christ’s “glorious Resurrection” for he is “the very Paschal Lamb which was offered for us,” an explicit reference to the Passion, who “hath taken away the sin of the world,” hence the forgiveness of sins, and “who by his death hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again hath restored to us everlasting life.” Such words explain the theology of the Passion and the Resurrection.

It is radical new life, a new birth. As John in his epistle explains “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” God, he says, “has given to us eternal life” through the Son of God who came “by water and by blood,” referring to Christ’s Passion. Out of the pierced side of the crucified and dead Christ came water and blood which become the symbolic means of our sacramental participation in the radical life of God. “There are,” he says, “three that bear witness, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.” The overcoming of the world is part of the teaching of Eastertide. On the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Rogation Sunday, the Gospel from John ends with the telling phrase that “in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

What is this overcoming? It has nothing at all to do with our idolatry of technology in the illusions of control through the manipulation and destruction of nature and of human life. The overcoming means the breakthrough of the understanding about eternal life as the true and only source of all life and being and of all knowing and understanding. “The witness of God,” John tells us, “is greater than the witness of man.” Lent and Holy Week and Easter and Eastertide are profoundly self-critical of all the forms of human presumption. An essential feature of religion and especially the Christian religion is “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness”. Thus in both the pageant of Lent and Holy Week and now in the Easter pageant, we are not only comforted but challenged. We confront ourselves in our own confusions and the limits of our own knowing. That is the condition of our being reborn, born upward into the things of the spirit. The overcoming is not a flight from the world, nor is it a flight from the body. It is the overcoming of sin whereby we pit the world against God and deny the truth and reality of creation and of ourselves.

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