Crucified and Risen! Radical New Life!

Death and Resurrection. They provide the basic and essential pattern for Christian spirituality and life. It is always about dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. In a way, it is a profound critique of the notion of the autonomous self. The ethical point emphasized in Chapel over and over again is that we can only be ourselves in the truth of our individuality through our lives in community with one another. The deeper point is that it entirely depends on the total self-giving nature of divine love which is the meaning of the Trinity in the Christian understanding.

Christ is risen is the Easter proclamation. What does it mean? The doctrine of the Resurrection belongs to a wider consideration about what it means to be human. How do we understand ourselves as embodied beings? There is no disembodied self – that is a kind of philosophical absurdity or fantasy. How do we understand the relationship between soul and body? Does the body matter? Or is it simply something extraneous and endlessly malleable? We may not be ‘happy’ about our ‘body image’, quick to find fault with others and ourselves in our image obsessed ‘selfie’ culture. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are more though not less than our bodies. They are an essential aspect of ourselves.

The Resurrection of Christ belongs to a reflection on the idea of the self in relation to our bodies. It is not the same as reincarnation in either the Hindu sense or in Plato’s imaginary, though both are wrestling with the same question: the relation of the soul to the body in a kind of necessary interrelation. The Resurrection – a concept found in late Judaism as well as in Islam – is, in its Christian form, the strongest affirmation of human individuality understood not as a gnostic flight from material reality and the body as somehow evil but rather as the redemption of creation and therefore of the embodied nature of our being. More importantly, the Resurrection is the radical affirmation of life as greater than sin and death, and as the underlying principle of our being and knowing. That life is what is presupposed in everything. “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” Aquinas observes.

The Resurrection is not simply the ending of Holy Week. Rather it makes visible what is hidden yet present in all of the events of the Passion. The stories of the Resurrection show the process of the birth of the understanding of Christ’s Resurrection in us. It is mostly about making sense of what is seen and heard, of coming to grasp the radical teaching of Christ and doing so in no small manner through the Scriptures of the Old Testament. In Easter Week and throughout Eastertide, we follow the processes of thinking our way into the mystery of Christ whose Resurrection is not the eclipse of the past (and future!) of human sin and experience but its transformation. We are given to see how the idea becomes real in human thinking.

The two Gospel readings for Easter day emphasize our fears and sorrows, on the one hand, and the beginning of a new way of thinking, on the other hand. The first ‘witness’ to the Resurrection is the empty tomb in both John’s account and Mark’s account. What is that about? Mary Magdalene and the other Marys come to the tomb seeking a body, a corpse. Why? To honour and respect the dead. I think this already belongs in a way to the concept of the Resurrection. For it is something profoundly and uniquely human and belongs universally to human cultures globally. The body is not just disposed of and ignored. It is honoured and respected in all of the different forms of cultural expression about burial customs.

One thing stands out; namely, our human sensibility towards death and the body. It matters. The body is bound up in our sense of ourselves. The Resurrection simply expands on that idea by making visible the principle of life itself as absolute. This entails the transformation of death itself as poets and theologians point out. “Death be not proud” or “why swellest thou then,” as John Donne puts it, arguing in his best known sonnet that death is no longer master but slave, that death itself is changed. This is the death of death.  Death is no more in a radical sense because it has become a means to life rather than the end of life. “Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” This is the meaning of the transformations from sorrow to joy that mark the Easter message, the change from cries of hatred and the tears of sorrow to the alleluias of joy and delight in the triumph of life over sin and death. That is Resurrection and it provides the pattern for us in our lives.

That pattern is made visible in the Prayer of Confession in Chapel. It is about recognizing our sins and failings but only because of the grace of life which allows us to rise up to walk in “newness of life” no longer simply defined by ourselves in our wayward “thoughts, words and deeds” and by the things which happen to us. That encompasses, it is worth nothing, the whole of our being, body and soul. What moves our minds and hearts, I hope, is the idea of life as given by God and the idea that out of death comes resurrection. That is the strongest possible affirmation of life itself and the occasion of the joy that, Jesus will say, no one can take from you. In this sense, the Resurrection is the counter to the many different forms of the culture of death in our current world because of its radical affirmation of life and human individuality.