{"id":1232,"date":"2016-03-27T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-27T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sjcmetheology.wpengine.com\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2016-03-27T05:00:07","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T05:00:07","slug":"christ-is-risen-alleluia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/christ-is-risen-alleluia\/","title":{"rendered":"Christ is Risen! Alleluia!"},"content":{"rendered":"

They said to them<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\"Marlett<\/a>\u201cWhy do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is this not the core of our faith which God graciously gives?\u00a0 The tomb is empty and He is risen.\u00a0 This day is just another day\u2014it is the same length as any other day\u2014and yet it is not another day.\u00a0 It is the day<\/u><\/em>, that by which all other days\u2014and all the days of our lives\u2014are measured.\u00a0 Christ is risen and thus death, the end which awaits us all, has been vanquished.\u00a0 Christ suffered and died, just as we all will.\u00a0 Our baptism into that death, though, also promises which this day proclaims, that Christ\u2019s death was not final and thus will not be final for us.\u00a0 Easter proclaims the Resurrection.\u00a0 It is Christ\u2019s now, and someday it will be ours, too.<\/p>\n

The Church knows this day comes at a great price.\u00a0 On Holy Thursday our hearts rejoiced at the institution of the Eucharist, the Last Supper. \u00a0The next day, though, demolished that joy as we hear again the account of Christ\u2019s Passion.\u00a0 Good Friday ends abruptly with Christ entombed.\u00a0 Holy Saturday dawned with everything apparently lost.\u00a0 Carmina Chapp\u2019s reflections<\/a> unite our anxieties with those of Mary and the apostles:<\/p>\n

Holy Saturday is a very long day for me. I imagine what it must have been like for the disciples and Mary during that time between the crucifixion and the resurrection. What they hoped for had never been done before \u2013 a man would rise from the dead. Plus, the Romans would be after them soon, too. What if this really was the end? What if they had been duped? What was it all for? What if they stopped trusting themselves and their own experience of Jesus? Did he really heal and feed all those people? Could they trust their own memories? What if it was all in their imaginations?<\/p>\n

The Rosary<\/p>\n

Over a month ago the movie Risen<\/em> appeared<\/a>.\u00a0 Tracing the experience of a Roman legionnaire Lucius (played superbly by Joseph Fiennes), the movie covers the Crucifixion and the aftermath of the Resurrection.\u00a0 Seeking to dispel annoying rumors that Jesus, whose execution he oversaw, Lucius crashes a gathering of Christ\u2019s disciples. In the tumult Lucius glimpses the resurrected Christ Himself.\u00a0 Lucius sees, but neither understands nor believes. From this scene Bishop Robert Barron discusses<\/a> the tendency of mainstream theologians to downplay and discredit the Resurrection as a merely emotional experience within the disciples\u2019 own subjectivity.\u00a0 In other words, non-believers did not see, and would not have seen, the Resurrection because they did not experience Christ as resurrected.\u00a0 This is a fancy way of denying the Resurrection\u2019s historicity.\u00a0 It did not really<\/u><\/em> happen, but in the disciples\u2019 minds it did happen.\u00a0 Barron details all this quite well, and then brushes it all aside.\u00a0 Working with N. T. Wright, Barron notes that the Resurrection\u2019s reality undergirds the entire realty of the Gospels and St. Paul\u2019s epistles.<\/p>\n

The great English Biblical scholar N.T. Wright is particularly good at exposing and de-bunking such nonsense. His principal objection to this sort of speculation is that it is profoundly non-Jewish. When a first century Jew spoke of resurrection, he could not have meant some non-bodily state of affairs. Jews simply didn\u2019t think in the dualist categories dear to Greeks and later to Gnostics. The second problem is that this post-conciliar theologizing is dramatically unhistorical. Wright argues that, simply on historical grounds, it is practically impossible to explain the rise of the early Christian movement apart from a very objective construal of Jesus\u2019 resurrection from the dead. For a first-century Jew, the clearest possible indication that someone was not the promised Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel\u2019s enemies, for the unambiguously clear expectation was that the Messiah would conquer and finally deal with the enemies of the nation. Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, and the rest could have coherently proclaimed\u2014and gone to their deaths defending\u2014a crucified Messiah if and only if he had risen from the dead. Can we really imagine Paul tearing into Athens or Corinth or Ephesus with the breathless message that he found a dead man deeply inspiring or that he and the other Apostles had felt forgiven by a crucified criminal? In the context of that time and place, no one would have taken him seriously.<\/p>\n

It is hard to imagine such fervor and evangelical joy\u2014with which the Holy Spirit enlivened the Church–stemming from mere good feelings and hopeful postmortem wishes.\u00a0 Granted, we were not there, we do not see the empty tomb ourselves, but we can surely know that something happened, and that something was Christ\u2019s resurrection.\u00a0 Bishop Barron notes<\/a>:\u00a0 \u201cWhat you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened <\/em>to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it.\u201d\u00a0 Its inescapability pursues us just like the risen Christ\u2019s gaze follows us from Pieter Coecke van Aelst\u2019s tapestry in the Vatican Museums.<\/p>\n

And yet, as the photo shows, the blur of modern life bustles past our crucified and resurrected Lord.\u00a0 Jesus emerges from the tomb victorious, and the tapestry\u2019s soldiers turn away.\u00a0 After all, Christ stands triumphantly atop the door He knocked down.\u00a0 We, though, shuffle past, blurry and otherwise preoccupied.\u00a0 Reflecting on this image gave me pause for another reason:\u00a0 Christ\u2019s obvious stigmata.\u00a0 Once a focus for intense popular devotion, Christ\u2019s wounds on hands, feet, and side appear only rarely on the most pious and simple souls, great saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina<\/a>.\u00a0 These wounds serve as anti-triumphal rewards God bestows on whom He pleases.\u00a0 They are not \u2018rewards\u2019 so much as graces given freely, through which the saint and those following might receive even more graces.\u00a0 They certainly are not bragging rights, or if they are, bizarrely reversed ones.\u00a0 Both St. Francis of Assisi and St. Padre Pio suffered the doubts and outright hostility to their new evangelical endeavors, whether it was hearing confessions (Padre Pio heard an estimated five million confessions during his life, roughly seventy per day<\/a>) or preaching the Gospel, joyfully and in poverty, to all who would hear, including birds and Saracens (as St. Francis did).\u00a0 Who would want painful, bleeding signs as a reward and thus a call to such work?<\/p>\n

Well, we do.\u00a0 We are those people.\u00a0 Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us:\u00a0 \u201cIn all reality, Easter occurs on earth, but it does not lead away from the Cross but always to it. \u00a0The whole Pasch\u2014the whole passing-over from death to life\u2014is a perennnially present reality\u201d (The Threefold Garland<\/u><\/em>, p. 114).\u00a0 Precious few, if any, of us will receive the stigmata, but that does not exclude us from emulating the work of those who did and<\/u><\/em> asking for their saintly intercession in our lives now.\u00a0 The Paschal Vigil\u2019s fifth reading<\/a> (Isaiah 55: 1-11) proclaims the mystery\u2014and the confidence to Israel:<\/p>\n

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
\nnor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
\nAs high as the heavens are above the earth,
\nso high are my ways above your ways
\nand my thoughts above your thoughts.<\/p>\n

For just as from the heavens
\nthe rain and snow come down
\nand do not return there
\ntill they have watered the earth,
\nmaking it fertile and fruitful,
\ngiving seed to the one who sows
\nand bread to the one who eats,
\nso shall my word be
\nthat goes forth from my mouth;
\nmy word shall not return to me void,
\nbut shall do my will,
\nachieving the end for which I sent it.<\/p>\n

The stigmata now makes sense only with today\u2019s Easter good news, the original eu angelion<\/u><\/em>.\u00a0 Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again.\u00a0 Those are three distinct realities, and the stigmata merely indicate that, being linked intimately with Christ\u2019s death, the other two realities follow soon.\u00a0 The Resurrection we celebrate today.\u00a0 Thus the Parousia, Christ\u2019s return in power, has started already but has yet to come fully.\u00a0 St. Paul wrote his great letters in this \u201calready but not yet\u201d zwischen den Zeiten<\/u> \u201cbetween the times.\u201d\u00a0 God sustains us as this age passes and the new one dawns.\u00a0 That dawn starts with Christ\u2019s resurrection.\u00a0 Thus we do not save or sustain ourselves.\u00a0 What we do in and through the Church comes through God\u2019s gracious action first, and the empty tomb indicates what God accomplishes among us.<\/p>\n

Guest blogger Jeffrey Marlett<\/strong> blogs at Spiritual Diabetes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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They said to them, \u201cWhy do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised.\u201d Is this not the core of our faith which God graciously gives?\u00a0 The tomb is empty and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}