Day: April 27, 2025

“He showed unto them his hands and his side”

From Christ crucified and dead to the empty tomb, from the empty tomb to the marks of the Cross in the Crucified Christ. Quite a spectacle. We go from the intensity of the Passion on Palm Sunday to Easter to the wonder and mystery of the Resurrection on Easter to the Octave Day of Easter. Easter Week like Holy Week is one long liturgy: the beginnings of reflection and meditation on the Resurrection. Just as we have immersed ourselves in the Passion of Christ through the Scripture readings of Holy Week, especially through the four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels, so in Easter Week we immerse ourselves in readings that turn on the mystery of the Resurrection.

Holy Week and Easter Week are not polar opposites of one another, mere mood swings from sadness to gladness, as something psychological. First, you’re down, then you’re up (and of course vice versa! Where’s the good in that?). No Passion without the Resurrection, no Resurrection without the Passion. They are intimately and profoundly connected. The theological point is that the Resurrection makes visible what is hidden but present in the Passion; namely, the absolute self-giving life of God as sacrificial love. This is the meaning of the Trinity and belongs to the wonder and mystery of human redemption.

The readings of Easter Week point us towards the logic of the Resurrection, a logic or way of thinking that shows a constant and necessary emphasis on the Passion. The past (and the present and future) of human sin and evil are not eclipsed and negated but radically transformed in the triumph of life and goodness over death and evil. The point is that life is utterly prior and absolute; that life is the essential life of God made visible in the Crucified and Risen Christ.

The Resurrection speaks profoundly to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It belongs to a long tradition of reflection, philosophically and religiously, on the question of what it means to be human. The Resurrection is the strongest possible affirmation of our individuality understood not as autonomous selves, isolated and separated from one another, but as found in a community of reciprocal love and care as individuals committed to the good of one another. All as grounded in the self-giving life of God. That sensibility about human individuality has to do with our lives together as embodied beings. The logic of the Resurrection is that the body matters. It is not merely extraneous and indeterminate, endlessly malleable. There is no disembodied self.

(more…)

Print this entry