Paying Attention To The Sky

This is part of a wonderful essay by Fr. Jose Granados where he situates the paschal mystery in relation to the historical faith of Israel and in relation to the human experience of time and matter. In the resurrection the history of Jesus, which includes in itself the history of humanity, is totally subsumed in the current of love that unites Father and Son: “Easter inaugurates the time of Jesus’ promise, which holds days, years and centuries together.”

The first confessions of faith in Jesus’ resurrection come to us directly from the liturgy of the first Christians. They attest to joy at the surprising event of Easter and its world-changing character: that very Jesus of Nazareth who preached in Galilee and was crucified under Pontius Pilate has now been raised by the Father to his right hand.

In order to interpret this unique event, the Church had an essential conceptual background at her disposal: the Old Testament scriptures. According to Jewish expectations, the resurrection was not a return to normal life, but the inauguration of the definitive stage of time and of its eschatological fulfillment, which entailed God’s final transformation of the world. Should we deduce from this vision that the resurrection entailed a reviling of history, a sort of spiritual flight into the beyond?

To the contrary, this fulfillment was described in continuity with the history of Israel. The God who had made a covenant with his People and had come down to live with them in the Holy Temple, promised to rebuild this Temple with his own hands and to bestow new life on his children in order to make a permanent dwelling with them. Thus, resurrection meant the assumption of this concrete world and history into its ultimate destiny. Ezekiel’s parable of the dry bones that come back to life (Ezekiel 37:1-14) can serve without contradiction as an image both of the People that returns to Jerusalem after the exile, and of the final resurrection of the dead.

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.  He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.  I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.  I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.
Ezekiel 37:1-14

Aided by this Jewish backdrop, the disciples formulated how the Easter event was in continuity with the history of the earthly Christ while it also brought a radical transformation. The image of the body of Christ as the new Temple, destroyed and rebuilt, is important in this regard. The sentence “one and the same,” which was to be applied later by the Church Fathers to express the unity of man and God in Christ, finds its roots in the unity between the risen Lord and the crucified Christ. “It is I myself’ (Luke 24:39), says Jesus when he appears to his disciples; and he shows them his wounds in his hands and side (cf John 20:20).

While the Old Testament context was necessary for the interpretation of the Easter event, Jesus’ resurrection surpassed the scope of Israel’s expectations. For while the resurrection was conceived in Jewish circles as an event that was to affect the whole of humanity once history had been concluded, in Jesus’ case the unsurpassable eschaton found fulfillment in one concrete individual and within the course of history.

Although the event differed from the Old Testament assumptions, it was interpreted within the communitarian categories of Scripture: the disciples understood it not only as the private fulfillment of the individual Jesus, but as the beginning of a new era that had consequences for the whole of world history. The question, then, had to be raised: how is it possible that the definitive time of fulfillment could take place together with the continuation of history and its attendant trials and expectations?

The second essential novelty in the Easter experience, with regard to its Old Testament background, is that Jesus did not attain only a privileged place very close to God, as Israel’s martyrs were expected to enjoy in their resurrection. The exaltation and enthronement of Christ at the Father’s right hand meant that he had been granted the Name that is above every other name, that is, God’s very name (cf. Philemon 2:9; Hebrews 1:4). How was it possible for a human being to reach this height? How could a concrete human history, lived out in the midst of uncertainty and threatened by the continuous presence of death, arrive at the end of its trajectory in the heart of the divine essence?

The Church developed its first Christology by reflecting on Jesus’ earthly path in light of his final glorious destiny. The Easter event, precisely because it extended to the core of the divine essence, could not simply be the continuation of a purely intra-historical thread. No one could go so high if he did not come from above; no one could ascend into heaven, had he not descended from heaven (cf. John 3:13). Faith in the resurrection was the departure point for understanding the eternal pre-existence of the Son and his eternal coming-forth from the Father, a belief that led to the confessions of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Thus, Easter is as much a mystery of Jesus’ final destination as it is of his origin; it is as much about his going to the Father as about his coming from him. The risen Christ appears indeed to the disciples as coming from the Father with the Father’s own authority and glory.

The language used in the New Testament to speak of Easter reflects what we have said. Two schemes are used: that of Jesus being raised again to life (resurrection), and that of Jesus’ glorification at the Father’s right hand (exaltation). The first highlights Easter’s continuity with the history of Jesus the second, its novelty. It is important to note that the emphasis is on the Father’s action, though the Son’s activity is also mentioned. In this way the resurrection is presented as a new birth and prompts the question of Jesus’ origin in the Father. Paul’s encounter with the risen Lord is described as the Father’s revelation of his Son in the Apostle (Galatians 1:16).

Faith in the resurrection redefines our vision both of God and man. With respect to God: it is at Easter that he is revealed unequivocally as a Father. For if, as the disciples experienced in their encounter with the risen Christ, God has space within himself to receive Jesus as his only Son, it is because his relationship with the Son was internal to God from all eternity. Otherwise, God would constitute himself as a Father somewhere in the course of history and would not be able to bring salvation to history. With respect to the human being: if human history is able to enter into such a fullness of communion with God, it must have been capable of this fulfillment from the beginning. From the final destination of time we illumine man’s origin and path as a journey toward the fullness of divine filiation. Maximus the Confessor summarized this view when he wrote: “the one who has been initiated in the ineffable and hidden force of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God created originally all things.”

We have, then, two statements about Easter that are in continuity with Jewish expectations, while also presenting a radical novelty: a) the resurrection as the eschatological fulfillment of history in the person of Jesus; and b) the resurrection as Jesus’ entrance into the very essence of God as his Son. The Christian theology of history develops from the union of these two statements. At Easter the history of the world comes into its meaning because it is included in the dynamism of love between Father and Son that constitutes God’s deepest mystery. The worldly course of events is not guided by chance or determined by an anonymous deterministic law, but can rather he explained in light of the Son’s path from the Father to the Father.

The Church Fathers expressed this claim by saying that Easter took place on the eighth day, a day which both follows upon the seventh day in the series of the week, and also extends beyond the week’s circular rhythm into eternity. Moreover, the resurrection was also joined to the first day, Sunday (day of the Sun), which God created the world; “we all hold this common gathering on Sunday, since it is the first day, on which God transforming darkness and matter made the Universe, and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead.”

In this way Easter appeared as the final revelation of the origin of all things in God. At the dawn of Easter a search for the source of all things begins, a search that starts with the life of Jesus and moves backwards to the rest of time. This search implies that the Gospel’s reflections on the virgin birth, on Christ as the new Adam, and on the eternal coming of the Son from the Father are all internal to the experience of Easter. In this sense the resurrection is not just one mystery among others, but a dimension that pertains to every mystery of Jesus’ life, the light in which the entire Gospel is written and ought to be read.

2. History And Its Meaning
We can conclude that at Easter the concrete history of the world plunges into the Son’s eternal filial relationship with the Father, into his coming from the Father and his going toward him. In this light, Easter is much an affirmation about eternity as it is about time. For what Christians learn in this mystery is not a desire to run from history, but rather the ability to affirm its goodness fully in light of its primordial origin and final destiny in the Father’s love.

The attempt to affirm Jesus’ return to the Father and the manifestation of his divinity, but not that he took with him human flesh and human time in their concreteness and materiality, is the core of the Gnostic temptation, which takes different forms in the history of the Church. This temptation is related to various contemporary attempts to reduce the resurrection to a mystical experience, as if it happened only within man’s interiority. In this vein, it has been said that the empty tomb is not necessary for belief in the resurrection; or that the experience of the disciples is just a light that allows them to reinterpret their memories of Jesus.

As we have seen, the continuity with the Old Testament background excludes the possibility of such an explanation: since the Bible tells the story of God’s coming to man’s flesh and history, its fulfillment too must he related to corporeality and time. Moreover, this connection with our concrete space and time is of extreme importance for understanding Easter’s significance for contemporary culture, for the problem Christianity faces in post-modernity has to do precisely with the possibility of God’s manifestation in bodyliness and history.

To isolate Christian faith from these realms in order to make it acceptable only condemns it to irrelevance. As Romano Guardini has noted, if God is not the God who acts in our body and time, then he is not real enough; he is not present in a significant way in man’s life and can he reduced to a beautiful or a consolatory theory. C. S. Lewis expresses a similar point in The Great Divorce, where risen bodies are described as heavier, more solid, than earthly ones. Accordingly, solidity ought to be added to the traditional properties of the glorious body, such as clarity and agility.

Robert Spaemann, in an article devoted to the existence of God, has recently insisted on this point. What does it mean, he asks, to believe in God? The answer lies in the connection between two fundamental aspects of human experience. Human action is pursued, on the one hand, with the implicit assumption that meaning exists and can he found; that there is goodness in the world and that we can live according to it. On the other hand, the human being is continually faced with the irrefutable facticity of things: the laws of nature that rule at every moment do not depend on us and do not necessarily contribute to the construction of a meaningful life. These two realms seem to coincide only by chance, for man perceives that the events of the world proceed according to their own necessity and independent of his intentions.

Spaemann argues that faith in God means to believe in the coincidence of these two realms, which he relates to two divine attributes: goodness and power. Everyone knows that in the world there are areas of meaning and goodness; everyone knows that in the world there are effective forces beyond our will that influence the course of events. Only the believer knows that these two elements are not extrinsic to each other but are rather one in God’s providence.

In other words, the believer accepts that God is good and that his goodness is powerful enough to determine the course of events. In this regard Spaemann complains that many a preacher talks only about a loving God but does not mention faith in God’s omnipotence. A confession of God’s love that would then deny his capacity to act in the world would ultimately confess a love that is full of good intentions but not real enough and, therefore, not good enough. On the other hand, a powerful God without goodness would not be powerful enough, for this power would be conceived always as in opposition to other forces of reality, and thus limited by them.

In this light we can turn to Christian faith in the resurrection, with its insistence on the connection between the earthly life of Christ and his exaltation at Easter. Easter tells us that the concrete course of history finds its fulfillment when it is located in the current of love that unites the Father with his Son. The facticity of things, with its apparent lack of meaning, is explained as a path that leads from the Father’s love to his final embrace. Because the resurrection is God’s final word on Jesus’ concrete life and death, we know that his love is powerful enough to act in the world; because the life and death of Jesus are included in the resurrection and not canceled by it, we know that this power is the power of love, which reigns in the world through the self-offering of the Father’s Son. The resurrection is the exact point in which we find the confluence of both affirmations: God is good; God is omnipotent.

Once we accept that the resurrection brings forth the final reconciliation of history, then we can measure the extraordinary power it requires of God. For Easter is not just a happy ending, a way to escape time and leave behind all the accumulated traces of evil through the centuries, a new beginning that would forget what had gone before. In order to achieve its real goal, the resurrection has to be powerful enough to bestow meaning on the whole of history from beginning to end. For this purpose, a simple reinterpretation of the events does not suffice, since this would take too lightly the non-coincidence of fact and meaning in our experience.

In other words, it does not suffice to reveal to us how things have gone according to a wise plan, even if we could not see it at the time. The keys held by the risen Lord, the keys of death and of the nether-world according to Revelations 1:18, must not only disclose the meaning of every single event of the world’s history (showing what was hidden) but must also transform it, purifying it from evil and allowing it to be fulfilled and assumed into eternity, it is in this regard that Benedict XVI cites the German thinker Theodor W. Adorno in Spe salvi: “[Adorno] asserted that justice — true justice –would require a world ‘Where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.’ This would mean, however… that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead.” When formulated this way, the resurrection appears as the most powerful act of God (cf. Philemon 3:10). “The One who raised Jesus from the dead” (cf Romans 4:24; 8:11) becomes God’s honorific title par excellence.

How can we explain this confluence of the power and goodness of God that are proper to the resurrection? How is it possible for the concrete time of the world to be infused with fullness of meaning? To understand the resurrection as the arrival point of history allows us to see in turn the path that leads from the human experience of time toward Easter. If history is able to bear the fullness of the divine presence, if it is able to enter into a total relationship with the divine, this is because it was ready for this transformation from the beginning.