Day: March 31, 2024

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Χριστος Ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια! Αληθως ανεστη! Αλληλουια, Αλληλουια!
Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! He is Risen indeed, Alleluia, Alleluia!

And so it begins? Begins? Isn’t this the end of the rather gruesome spectacle of Christ Crucified and hanging dead on the Cross that we would rather not think about? Isn’t this supposed to be the happy, clappy ending to a tragic story? No. Christ’s Resurrection is radical new life and this day marks the new beginning which has actually carried us through the Passion of Christ. Here is the true meaning of Holy Week. The Resurrection is not some sort of add-on; a way of glossing over the ugliness and the despair that belongs to our culture of death now well along in its death throes; that of course is not exactly something new.

We get it all wrong if we think that Easter is the end of the story. It is only through the meaning of the Resurrection that the pageant of the Passion is even possible and thinkable. Heraclitus’s profound observation that we recalled on Palm Sunday bears repeating. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning that the way to the principle, to God, and the way from God is nothing less and nothing more than God in his own self-complete motion and life and that motion in us. What is new at Easter is the making known of that eternal truth and motion for us and in us. And to paraphrase Sophocles, “All that we see here is God,” All that we see in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is God: God in himself and God in us. The radical meaning of the Resurrection is God, the root and source of all life.

Our Easter joys are about the triumph of life over death just as the pageant of Holy Week is the triumph of love over sin. As with Holy Week, so with Easter and Eastertide, we have to think two things together; a challenge, to be sure, to our usual, more linear ‘left-brain’ way of thinking. Sin and love, death and life, have to be considered in their interrelation.

The texts from John’s Gospel provided the interpretative matrix for our thinking the Passion; they now enable us to think the Resurrection. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says, “will draw all unto me.” This complements what Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Eternal life is the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. Here is the love that is stronger than death, as The Song of Songs so beautifully puts it. Here is the love that is life everlasting because here is the source and meaning of all life; the counter to all of the forms of the culture of death in the illusions of our technocratic control of nature and ourselves that deny and negate life itself. The death of death is radical new life. “I will draw all unto me,” Jesus says. “All” here means both everyone and everything. The Passion and the Resurrection are cosmic in scope for such is the redemption of all creation.

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