Easter Day |
The Day of Resurrection. Mary saw Jesus standing in the garden but did not know that it was Jesus. Something had happened. The tomb was empty and in ancient times nobody ever disputed that – although there was an argument about what precisely had happened. It was obvious that the risen Jesus was not simply a resuscitated corpse like his friend Lazarus or Mary would have recognised him instantly, which she only did when the Master called her by name. There was certainly an event which transformed his friends who had been so full of fear that they had all forsaken him and fled, into a world-converting community prepared to defy death rather than deny the truth of the resurrection.
In our day we tend to ask questions about the resurrection as if it were simply a past event. Even if someone had taken a photograph of the actual moment, it is part of the flatland thinking that is second nature to us only to be able to regard the resurrection as something past and separate from us. At best we translate it into some inoffensive metaphor describing an inner emotional state in which winter gives way to spring.
In divine reality, of course, the world of individual bodies and separate events is embedded in a vast continuum in which body, mind and soul are interpenetrated by the Eternal Spirit.
The message that Mary was to communicate to the other friends of Jesus is “Say to my brethren that I ascend to my Father, and your Father, and my God, and your God”.
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. His Word became flesh in the living, dying and rising of Jesus Christ, God’s human face. In response the Son gives himself to the Father; and the Father is the Father because the Son, who has answered his call, has given him his name. The Spirit enables creation to participate in this dynamic of giving and receiving.
Humanity is one of the languages which the persons of the Trinity use in communicating with one another. The Trinity is not some divine threesome but a union in which the persons call one other into being. They give themselves up to one another in the Spirit and in doing so each evokes in each what else would never come to be. The resurrection opens the door to a participation in this way of being fully human. “Say to my brethren that I ascend to my Father and now your Father and my God and now your God”.
The resurrection is a revelation of the life of God which was expressed on the first Easter Day but the resurrection is also the open door to a new creation in which we are called to participate in the life of the Trinity and to discover that life in all its fullness comes not as we hoard up ourselves and set our hopes of happiness on accumulating things, but when in the power of his Spirit we give up ourselves to one another and so bring a new world of possibility into being.
This has been proved experimentally in the lives of the saints. Even to those of whom St Peter said “they did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.”
This keeping him company continues. God holds out the gift to us of life with him and he has started the work of building a holy people.
The day of resurrection has dawned. It is accomplished. But the resurrection is also happening and the resurrection is full of future hope in a world where we have only just begun to learn how to speak the language of humanity as God intends.
