“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.
The two Gospel readings provided for Easter emphasize the empty tomb. This is but the beginning of the process of thinking the mystery of the Resurrection. Yet it speaks to an intriguing and essential feature of all forms of human culture from the earliest time that, in various ways and customs, honour and respect the dead. This is something uniquely human which belongs to the sense of ourselves as human beings. The dead are not simply cast out without a moment’s thought, as if nothing worth. Mary Magdalene and the other Marys come to the tomb seeking a corpse, a dead body. They come bearing burying spices. They come to honour and respect the body of one who was alive and is now dead.
That sensibility already signals the idea that the body matters and that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences and our deaths. We may be losing this ethical sensibility in the contemporary culture of death which, in so many ways, reduces us all to just things, to commodities, without regard for the radical idea of personal agency and individuality. That to forget of what the Resurrection celebrates, namely, the restoration of our humanity, individually and collectively, to who we are as made in the image of God, in the image of Christ, in imago Trinitatis. They are all really the same.
The doctrine of the Resurrection belongs to a tradition of philosophical reflection on what it means to be human in terms of the relation between soul and body. In this sense it relates to the ancient Hindu thinking about reincarnation and as that idea is found in Plato’s Myth of Er and in Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance. Those ways of thinking are about a kind of relation of souls and bodies through an endlessly recurring cycle but nonetheless point to a necessary inter-connection of soul and body. This is what the Resurrection elaborates upon and proclaims.
This morning’s Gospel from John emphasizes the reality of the body of the Risen Christ explicitly in terms of the Passion. “He showed unto them his hands and his side.” Tonight’s second lesson continues from this same chapter to highlight Thomas’s doubt, on the one hand, and his coming to know and embrace the Risen Christ, on the other hand. The point is that the Resurrection is not a gnostic flight from bodily and material reality but its transformation into something mystical and spiritual. It emphasizes that the things of the past are not eclipsed but are gathered up and made part of the restoration of our humanity to its wholeness in Christ. It is not reductionism to material determinism but the redemption of the world and the body through its participation in the radical meaning of creation restored through Christ’s Resurrection. That transformation from death to life overcomes the betrayals and contradictions of sin and evil. It is the basis for the transformations of sorrow into joy which is so much a feature of the Easter mystery.
We rise up into a new and deeper understanding of our humanity that gives us the freedom and grace to think about ourselves and one another in a new way. The end of today’s Gospel makes this clear: Christ’s Passion and Resurrection is the forgiveness of sins and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. It is “newness of life,” now and forever. Death and Resurrection constitute the essential pattern of Christian life.
The short ending of Mark’s Gospel properly concludes with the words, “for they were afraid.” This is a commentary on our fears and uncertainties that paralyze us because they bury us in the isolation of ourselves. A sense of fearfulness haunts our culture. It is a form of gnosticism that sees the material world, the body, and others as threats, as evil. It leads to the idea of salvation as a flight from the body and the world, a kind of dualism, but, even more, a form of nihilism. It negates the logic of creation that creation is good and indeed “very good,” to which the Resurrection is testament.
Among the current confusions and conflicts about identity is what Christopher Lasch identifies about the classical myth of Narcissus. He drowns in his own reflection but without knowing that it is his reflection. In other words, he is unable to recognise himself and what is other than himself. This is solipsism which thinks that reality is just what is in our heads. Dead to God, to creation, and thus to ourselves and one another.
The logic of the Resurrection which Easter Week and Eastertide proclaims and teaches is about the radical redemption of our humanity, the counter to all of the crude determinisms and empty nihilisms of our world and day. We learn the Resurrection most clearly and most fully through the person of Christ. On the Road to Emmaus, he opens our understanding of the Scriptures and opens our hearts and our eyes. “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” That explicitly recalls the Passion on the night of his betrayal at the Last Supper.
This morning “he show[s] unto us his hands and his side”. The wounds of the crucified are transformed and become the marks of love written in the very flesh of our humanity in Christ. What is highlighted here is what is proclaimed at every Christian burial and committal. Our bodies are not just thrown out with the trash but committed to the ground “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.” What we shall be we do not fully know other than that we shall be like Christ, knowing even as we are known in the wonder and mystery of God’s endless life of love. The Resurrection is the fullest testament to the honour and dignity of our humanity.
“He showed unto them his hands and his side.”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter 2025