The strife is o'er, the battle done;
Now is the Victor's triumph won;
O let the song of praise be sung.
Alleluia!
THE resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead is the fundamental proclamation of the
Christian faith, beginning with the testimony of the apostles in
Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost: "This Jesus God raised up, and
of that we are witnesses," (Acts 2.32). But why is the bodily
resurrection of Jesus so important; and how can something that
happened 2000 years ago, however miraculous, affect us now?
The Letter to the Hebrews
explains two fundamental truths about the work of Jesus Christ.
First, Jesus is made like us, so that he can be a truly obedient
priest who takes our sins away: "Therefore he had to become like
his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a
merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a
sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people" (Hebrews
2.17).
Second, what he earns by
his obedience is not just for himself, but for all whom he redeems:
"For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist,
in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their
salvation perfect through suffering" (Hebrews 2.10).
The death of Jesus on the
cross earns us our salvation, and it does so in four complementary
ways. It is a work of merit, in which the Son of God, through
obedient love, earns us the reward of everlasting life. It is a
work of satisfaction, in which the price is paid for human sin.
It is a work of
sacrifice, in which perfect adoration is offered to God by the only
one fit to do so. It is a work of redemption, by which we are freed
from enslavement to evil and the dominion of death. But the work of
redemption on the cross needs to be accepted, and it needs to be
applied; by raising Jesus from the dead, God does both.
Resurrection is
emphatically something that happens to a body, the body of Jesus in
the tomb. The great Anglican theologian Richard Hooker emphasises
this continuity between the body that Jesus receives at the
incarnation, from his mother, and the body that rises on Easter
Day, and is now glorified at the right hand of the Father in
heaven: "a body still it continueth, a body consubstantial with our
bodies, a body of the same both nature and measure which it had on
earth."
Two points are crucial
here. First, by divine power, life is restored to what had been
dead: as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, "For he was crucified
in weakness, but lives by the power of God." Second, the body so
raised remains definitively human - the human body of the divine
Word, imbued with all the glory of heaven, but still a body like
ours, from which we are able to receive the vitality of Christ's
risen life.
DEATH is the absolute
destruction of what it is to be human, because it destroys the
body. There is a chilling moment in C. S. Lewis's novel
Perelandra, when the diabolical Dr Weston confronts the
hero, and tells how he dreamed he had just died and was laid out in
the hospital.
Another, more sinister
corpse appears at the bottom of the bed, full of hatred for the
vestige of the human form that the recently dead man still
possesses: "I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what
you come down to in the end."
St Thomas Aquinas says
that "if my body is corrupted, I shall proclaim nothing to anyone;
I shall be of no use whatever." The resurrection of the Son of God
is therefore a resurrection of the body, a work of divine power in
which the Christ who obediently glorified the Father on the cross
is, in turn, glorified by him, and in the flesh. This is what Peter
preaches at Pentecost: "For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let you Holy One experience corruption" (Acts 2.27).
When Aquinas thinks about
the resurrection, he sees it in just this way: a truth about Jesus,
and a truth about us. He calls it a demonstration of God's justice,
in which the one who freely humbled himself "even to death on a
cross" receives a glorious resurrection. It is a revelation of
Christ's godhead, as it definitively confirms what the "deeds of
power, wonders, and signs" (Acts 2.22) that accompanied his
ministry taught.
It is a sign of hope for
us, because the one who is our head has already obtained what we
long for: the promise of resurrection. By his rising, our lives
receive a new moral orientation, so that, as Paul writes to the
Romans, "you also must consider yourselves dead to sin, and alive
to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6.11).
Finally, the work of our
salvation is completed, in that as by enduring the suffering of the
cross, Christ delivered us from evil, so in rising from the dead,
he might advance us to the prospect of sharing in his glory.
THE glory of the risen
Lord is preached repeatedly in the New Testament as characteristic
of the resurrection: "Through him you have come to trust in God,
who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith
and hope are set on God" (1 Peter 1.21).
But the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar
reminds us that the sign of visible glory is noticeably absent from
the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Why is this? Paul writes
to the Corinthians that God has "shone in our hearts to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ" (2 Corinthians 4.6). In the Gospel narratives, the reality
of the resurrection is demonstrated by clear signs of continuity
between the body of the Lord before and after his resurrection. He
eats and drinks, sees and hears, talks and reasons. So we learn
that he is the same human person. But he also appears in a hidden
form to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, only to be revealed in
the breaking of bread.
We will know the risen
Jesus not by seeing his glory visibly, but by the knowledge of it
in our hearts, which comes from the preaching of the mystery of the
cross. Like the disciples on the Emmaus road, the "face of Jesus
Christ" for us will be his presence revealed in the scriptures, and
given to us as our food in the eucharist.
The risen and glorified
humanity of Jesus Christ is instrumental in bringing about our
salvation. Hooker says: "It possesses a presence of force and
efficacy throughout all generations of men . . . infinite in
possibility of application." It was this teaching that so exercised
the Church's greatest theologian of the person of Christ, St Cyril
of Alexandria, in his controversy with Nestorius in the fifth
century: "As God he is by nature Life, and because he has become
one with his own flesh he rendered it vitalising."
Hooker describes our
participation in the life of the risen Christ as being "partly by
imputation", the merit of the cross applied to us for the
remission of sins, and "partly by habitual and real infusion" -
what St Paul describes when he writes to the Galatians: "It is no
longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Galatians
2.20).
For Cyril of Alexandria,
this real infusion of the life of the living Christ finds its
culmination in the eucharist. He writes to Nestorius: "When we
perform in church the unbloody service, we receive not mere flesh
(God forbid!) or flesh of a man hallowed by connection with the
Word . . . but the personal, truly vitalising flesh of God the Word
himself." In the sacraments, and in particular in the sacrament of
his Body and Blood, Jesus gives us his resurrection life: "But the
one who eats this bread will live for ever" (John
6.58).
JESUS's resurrection
causes our salvation, but also shows us how we are to be saved.
Christ does not rise alone: Matthew's Gospel reminds us that at the
moment of his death on the cross, many saints of the old covenant
are raised, and appear in Jerusalem after the resurrection (Matthew
27.52-3). When Dante describes the souls of the blessed in heaven
in the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy, he has them
say: "The lustre which already swathes us round Shall be outlustred
by the flesh, which long Day after day now moulders
underground."
Immortality, survival
after death, even the vision of God enjoyed by the souls of the
just - these things are not in themselves the consummation of the
Christian hope. The Christian hope is one of bodily resurrection,
as Paul writes to the Philippians: "He will transform the body of
our humiliation, so that it may be conformed to the body of his
glory" (Philippians 3.21).
The monastic writer
Blessed Columba Marmion compares the linen cloths left in the tomb
after the resurrection to our infirmities, which they symbolise:
"He comes forth from the sepulchre; his liberty is entire; he is
animated with intense, perfect life with which all the fibres of
his being vibrate. In him, all that is mortal is absorbed by
life."
The spiritual body of
which St Paul speaks, and for which we hope, is realised in the
resurrection of Christ. The dominion of sin, death, and corruption
is defeated, and he who is our head receives "the power of an
indestructible life" (Hebrews 7.6).
This indestructible life
is our Easter faith and hope. It is indestructible because it is
the human life of the Son of God, and it is powerful because it
gives to sinful human beings the fruits of the Passion: forgiveness
of sins, victory over death, and the promise of eternal life.
Come,
let us taste the Vine's new fruit,
For heavenly joy preparing;
Today the branches with the Root
In Resurrection sharing:
Whom as true God our hymns adore
For ever and for evermore.
St John Damascene