Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34.37-43; Colossians 3, 1-4; John 20, 1-9.
It has never been easy, and it never will be, to ‘prove’ that Christ is risen, that he rose from death after having completely succumbed to death.
His first witnesses, whom Christians still claim have been first-hand witnesses, had actually ‘believed’ in him. Their witness was not of things seen but of things believed. In fact, the gospel narrative speaks insistently of disciples who met the Jesus they had previously known but whom now they did not recognise. They only acknowledged him to be the Lord on after-thoughts, on believing.
In this long chain of witnesses who saw only by believing, but whose seeing amounts to irrefutable evidence, there are always black holes that at each moment in time need to be filled. It is the vacuum believers in time and space are called to fill, making the Jesus story true and credible.
As Peter claims in Acts, the risen Christ was not an evidence for all to see. And we read also in John’s gospel that until the disciples themselves ran to the empty tomb, “they had failed to understand the teaching of Scripture, that he must rise from the dead”.
Simone Weil sees the cross as marking the infinite distance between God and God, in the sense that it is easier for our sensibility to see God as creator than as the crucified Jesus. Kenneth Leech, in We Preach Christ Crucified, argues that the crucifixion of the Son of God is so outrageous and obscene that none of us understands what it is all about and that we are drawn to it by a powerful and inscrutable desire and love.
It is a mystery too profound and too deeply disturbing to be absorbed easily. Our journey of faith continues in time and space, constantly facing new challenges and new darknesses. It is through our personal experience of darkness that we come to learn what the crucifixion of Christ was meant to teach us. It cannot be seen or understood from the outside.
English theologian and pacifist Charles Raven once wrote of the experience of war that: “Those who can live in it may be purified; those who look on are usually defiled”. The cross is a sign of defilement for the onlooker; it is only a purifying and healing reality for those who share its terrible darkness.
In the face of darkness, there are those for whom it is unbearable and who move towards despair, and those who realise that what is disintegrating might not be their spirit but the false defences. For the latter, the spiritual void can be only the beginning of their liberation. Resurrection injects the hope of being rehabilitated in so many people who fall victim to so many forms of killing addictions.
Within the classical mystical tradition, the authentic spiritual journey consists in moving out from false securities to the point of disintegration and through subsequent upheaval and turmoil. This is always the prelude to resurrection which can’t be reduced to a dead dogma of the past.
We all, to different extents, experience life as fragmented, we all at different points in time feel the hopelessness in the face of injustice, we all fear old age and the insecurities of the future. If the resurrection is hope and promise of recreation, then it is in conjunction with these liminal experiences that it has to be translated.
As Daniel J. O’Leary writes in Passion for the Possible, “In the resurrection we have God’s personal acceptance and adoption of the human condition”. Belief in the resurrection is belief that we still carry in us the capacity for redemption, the transforming power of Easter.
It may sound simplistic in a world that has become complex, but there are simple ways of practising the resurrection, such as by refusing to give in to negativity, or by doing our utmost to overcome fear, antagonism, gossip, passivity, mediocrity and envy.
As Richard Rohr in his Immortal Diamond writes, “The Resurrection accounts are not about proving a miracle as much as a joyous contagion that is spreading around quickly and changing people”.
There is too much that is contagious in our world on the negative side. The gaps on the positive side wait to be filled by the Easter people.