Alleluia. Christos Anesti. Christ is Risen!
The Passion and the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ is the very heart of Christianity. As the Gospels and the Old
Testament must be interpreted in light of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead, so too must our lives.
The important news of the Resurrection needs to
be affirmed and confirmed. The modern world’s misunderstanding of the meaning
of the Passion and the Resurrection is profound. As predicted by St. Paul in 1,
Thessalonians 4:13: “Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those
who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope.”1 Many
around us are “without hope and without God in the world.”(Ep
2,12). The disintegration of the family, abortion, the rise of euthanasia, and
an ever increasing desire to satisfy only the flesh are a reflection of the
denial of the redemptive power of suffering. In his Apostolic Letter, Salvifici
Doloris, Pope John Paul II offers enlightening words in this regard. Human
suffering, has reached its culmination in the Passion of Christ and at the same
time it has entered into a completely new dimension and a new order: it has been
linked to love, to that love which creates good, also drawing it out from evil by
means of suffering, just as the supreme good of the Redemption of the world was
drawn from the Cross of Christ, and from that Cross constantly takes its beginning.
The Cross of Christ has become a source from which flow rivers of living water.
Despite tremendous advances in health care and
comfortable lives, we face something we cannot control: death. The more energy
we spend soothing ourselves, the further we move away from an understanding of
our true end and a denial of the resurrection.
And yet, the gospels speak:
"It is true! The Lord has risen and has
appeared to Simon." Then the two told what had happened on the way, and
how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread. While they were still
talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them,
"Peace be with you. "They were startled and frightened, thinking they
saw a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts
rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and
see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." When he
had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy
and amazement, he asked them, "Do you have anything here to eat?"
They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their
presence. (Lk 24,34–43)
Myths, scattered throughout world history,
speak of resurrection. In
Egyptian culture, concepts of an afterlife
first appear with the sun gods. Later, the myth of Osiris has him brought back
to life by Isis and become the judge of the dead. The eastern concept of
reincarnation is related to resurrection. In Mesopotamia, we hear the story of
Tammuz who was banished to the underworld but revived six months later. Attis
was reborn as an evergreen tree, an event celebrated March 25 in the Phoenician
civilization. The Greco- Roman world had Adonis. According to Homer when
the ancient classical world spoke of bodily resurrection they only did so to
deny it. Death could not be undone.3 Writers
of the time maintained that the dead were in fact non-existent. Plato proposed a
radically different view of resurrection. For Plato, the soul is the true form of
the person. The body is temporary while the soul is forever. When a person dies his soul goes to Hades and there, judgment
is passed on him.
The Judaic belief regarding life after death
fall into three categories:
Initially, there was an absence of hope for
life after death. Slowly, the idea that God’s love endures even after death
developed, indicating some kind of afterlife. The final version built on this
concept by including bodily life after death.4 Despite
such beliefs, resurrection makes few appearances in the Old Testament. Into these worldviews Christianity was born.
The first Christians insisted that Christ did rise bodily from the dead. This
hope was at the center of Christianity. It was, at its core, a resurrection
movement and its entire theology rested upon that one event: Jesus of Nazareth
had been raised from the dead in a transformed body.5 In
the Resurrection of Christ, myth and history meet and reality is transformed.
As noted by by C.S. Lewis:
The heart of Christianity is a myth, which is
also a fact. The old myth of the
dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes
down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It
happens - at a particular date in a particular place, followed by definable
historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows
when or where, to a historical person under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it
does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle...this is the marriage of
Heaven: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, claiming not only our love and obedience,
but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the
poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar and the
philosopher.
Details may differ and lengths vary, yet all
four gospels share the story of a visit to the tomb by Mary Magdalene on the
first day of the week. What she found was an empty tomb. Shortly thereafter,
Christ begins to make appearances. The Lord appeared first to Mary Magdalene
who did not recognize him. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where
you have put him, and I will get him.” (Jn 20,15). It was not until Jesus spoke
her name that she recognized him. On the evening of that first day, “Jesus came
and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" After he said
this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they
saw the Lord.” (Jn 20,19–20). In Emmaus he remained unrecognized by the disciples until he broke bread.
The bodily resurrection continues the love
shown by God in the Incarnation and affirms the goodness of God’s created
realm. It demonstrates the importance of this created realm and more
specifically the value of the body. It was upon this value that history was
written for the last two millennia. For art history, the body became subject
supreme as artist used it to express man’s place in the world and his relationship to God.
Christ transformed body is revealed to us through the sacraments. We know from
the experiences of the apostles that this revelation is not immediately visual. It takes place in the heart. “Then
their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their
sight.” (Lk 24,31).
Modern psychology denies sin and rejects the
idea of man’s fallen nature. Science disallows the possibility of resurrection
and the comfort of modern life sees little meaning in it. It is true, we do not
“believe” in the Resurrection because it is not the result of intellectual
inquiry. It is supernatural and a mystery, the place where God and humanity
overlap. Rather we come to faith in the Risen One and when we do, we discover
who we are and what it means to be human.
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