These days, Christians around the world
recall and celebrate the fantastic explosion of God’s Love in Jesus Christ,
brought to true and enduring reality in the way-too-easy-to-dismiss fact of his
bodily resurrection from the dead. My Easter-time reflection will be from two
others great thinkers and writers, whose words about the resurrection will at
least make all of us think a bit.
“The historical case for the Resurrection
is that everybody else, except the Apostles, had every possible motive to
declare what they had done with the body, if anything had been done with it.
The Apostles might have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it
is very difficult to imagine men being tortured and killed for the truth of a
miracle which they knew to be a sham.” (G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying)
“Saint Paul in one of his Epistles says
that if Christ is not risen we are the most miserable of all men... And,
indeed, if he was not risen we would be, because then all our faith, all that
we call our spiritual experience, all the life we build on it would have been
nothing but a delusion or a lie, a hallucination. But we are the most happy of
all men because Christ is risen. This is not only something that hundreds and
thousands know, but millions know from a direct, personal experience. Many
could say: God exists because I have met him, Christ is risen because I have
met the risen Christ. And not only in spirit but also in the flesh; because we
have the witness of the Apostles, simple men who had run away from Calvary,
knowing - as they thought - that Christ was defeated when he was taken down
from the Cross and buried, knowing that everything they hoped for had come to
an end. And yet, they are the witnesses of the Resurrection, unprepared,
hesitant, and then exulting in the joy of the truth which was revealed to them;
exulting because the women came in the morning to anoint Christ, and they saw
that his body was no longer there. John and Peter came after them, and the tomb
was empty. And when they came to the other disciples, asking themselves
questions, doubting, hesitating - Christ came to them, and he himself said to
them: Fear not! I am not a ghost, I am not a disincarnate vision; a ghost has
no flesh and no bones as you can see that I have! And he ate with them, he
spoke to them, they touched him! And indeed, St John says in his Epistle that
what the Apostles proclaim is what their eyes have seen, their ears heard,
their hands touched, and that they are speaking the truth. Yes, Christ is
risen, risen not as a ghost, not as a spiritual presence but as a living God
with his body, the body of the Incarnation. And indeed, if we truly believe
that the Lord Jesus Christ was God himself become man for the salvation of the
world, then what is beyond our imagination is that he, who is life itself,
could die; and the thing which is obvious and simple is that Life Eternal
should break the fetters of death, conquer death, and that he should rise, in
the body, in the flesh, as a promise to us. Because uniting himself to human
flesh he has shown us that man is so vast and so deep that he can be at one
with God, united with God; that, indeed, a human being is complete only if he
is in oneness with God, when he is a partaker of the divine nature... The
Resurrection is a revelation of the mercy of God, of the power of God, of the
love of God... but also of the greatness of man. Death has no fear for us; it
has become a gate into eternity, and we know that the day will come when the
voice of him who has brought into being all things, the voice of him who is our
Savior will resound, and we will all stand before God, clothed with eternity,
but in a flesh that has become part of this eternity.” (Metropolitan Anthony
Bloom, Easter Sermon)
This is the reality that draws forth the
substance of our faith. And the longer I live and breathe and think, the more
almost self-evident it becomes that the things least able to be explained away
are the things most worth attending to. God’s intimate presence, made real through
Christ’s resurrection is surely one.
