Freshness and freedom in the Risen One
Easter Day, 23rd March, 2008
Fr Matthew Healy
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
I speak in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When we gather at Easter to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ each person brings to this solemn festival our own experience and meaning of this great mystery. Though I may be gravely mistaken, I think I can assume that whilst we all faithfully and rightly proclaim our belief in the Risen Christ, it is nonetheless not any easy matter to get one's head around. As a theology professor once postured in a Christology class — the most surprised person on Easter morning was not the disciples, but Jesus.
The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is unlike any other experience of The Divine embracing and entering our humanity through his Son. It is unlike because it lacks our ability to even partly understand or know something of that experience explicitly for ourselves. Other than Jesus, not one person has experienced resurrection from the dead to new life. Not one of us can claim to have clinically died, be buried and then latter, in three days, rise to new life. It does seem far more credible to believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the feast of Christmas: God becoming one with us in flesh by means of the Holy Spirit and the ever-Virgin Mary, and it is a more credible thing to believe because of the sole fact we were all born of a woman, and that most women have given birth, and that most men and women have supported someone through that labour birthing experience. The Incarnation may be a very difficult doctrine to comprehend or fully appreciate, yet it does touch the human sensibilities, our emotion, our own experience, in a more tangible manner. We can humanly empathise with Mary and Joseph, with Jesus as a babe, and the whole array of characters and circumstances that go with that Infancy Narrative.
In a similar vein we can really understand the doctrine of the Cross, for we all know, at a certain time, death will take us. Pain, suffering and death are not strangers to us, nor were they to Jesus, the Son of the God of Compassion. We have all experienced the grief associated with the death of a close relative — perhaps a parent or a child or a partner. The betrayal, passion and death of Jesus were within the realm of human comprehension. It touches our own sense of pain, suffering and mortality; it shares with us our compassion for another person in need; it speaks of something we might do for another person, especially if it is our own child, if it requires us to risk our own life to order to save them. We really do feel for Jesus through the whole experience of his passion, because, though mostly in much milder forms, we have all been there ourselves, and we can also see his passion lived out in the pain and suffering of other people.
The God who meets us in the birth and death of Jesus is made more real for us because we can truly say, he knows our experience, he has shared in our suffering, and is one like us, for he too has meet us in our final human act, death. So when we speak of, or at least attempt to articulate something about, the resurrection of Jesus, we are left with words that, on the surface, do not touch upon anything of our own experience. We seem to have ideas and concepts that are difficult to realise personally, to ground within the milieu of our own experience.
The Resurrection may bring some questions to the fore, questions about our willingness to believe such a difficult teaching if it is something that we can't relate to in any experiential way. Did God's compassion for us, so humanly displayed in Christ's, cease to be communicable at the resurrection event? Could it be that the God who met us so intimately through the birth and death of Jesus has now become distant and unsympathetic to our final end? Or is it that the reality of the Risen Christ is the promise given to us, which is held for us in Christ, once we too cross the Rubicon of death?
The latter question is getting some way there, but it stills falls short from providing us with something that is moderately tangible within the confines of our human existence. This would make it no more than an allusive fantasy without any connection to our present reality. I say that the latter question is getting some way there, because the Resurrection is about the promises of God given to us in the Risen Christ, the new Adam, who has victoriously defeated sin and death, restored our humanity in Christ to its pristine condition in the Garden of Eden. The resurrection of Christ, his victory over sin and death, the fruit of Christ's saving work, is our restoration and our inheritance.
However another aspect about the resurrection of Jesus is much more surprising. You recall the theology professor's statement that the person most surprised on Easter morning was not the disciples, but Jesus? Would it then be a surprise for us to be reminded that you and I are the tangible expression of the Risen Christ in this broken world? That you and I are his personal ambassadors, the people who represent him to others on his behalf? How would you be if it were said that the Risen Christ lives in you and me, and makes his presence made known through you and me? After all, this is what we profess by our baptism vows. We have been brought into the death and resurrection of Jesus through the waters of death and re-birth. We are a new creation; we are people of the resurrection of Jesus. Today's gospel account tells of two disciples running to the tomb, and it is the Beloved Disciple who believes not by a physical experience of the Risen Christ, but simply by seeing the empty tomb. It was his faith and belief in Christ that became the foundation of whatever encounter he was to have with Jesus from henceforth. The promise of eternal life in Jesus was the Beloved Disciple's through faith, not by the sight of his Risen Lord.
Although at times it is not an easy matter, this same faith and belief is asked of us, though not without some help, and that help is by seeing the resurrection as showing forth something very real about how we, and in fact all created matter, live and exist. Thomas Merton, a Cistercian Monk of Gethsemane Abbey in the US, in 1968, the year of his accidental death expressed it like this:
"Christianity may or may not make sense to you..... but perhaps resurrection can make sense. It is a process of being reborn, moment-to-moment, in a freedom that is:
wise in its sensitivity to the interconnectedness of all things;
compassionate in its empathy for all living beings;
and centred in the very mystery of God.
We understand resurrection when we taste a freedom and freshness that lies in the very depths of our lives. From my perspective as a Christian, this freedom and freshness is the living Christ, the resurrected One. 'He' does not have a body that is located in space and time. 'He' is more like the wind, or our own breathing, or the sky.
The resurrected One is the very freshness of God, the very freedom of Holy Wisdom, as a centre that is within us and beyond us, ever-present yet ever-new. There is a freshness and freedom in the very centre of things. In this freshness and freedom, we find our roots and wings."
May the freshness of the Risen Christ bring you more deeply into his freedom and joy.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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