Author: CCW

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.

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