Reaching for images of Easter, the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins calls the risen Christ an “immortal diamond, a beacon, an eternal beam, a trumpet crash.” Sound and light impress him as best suggesting the splendor of the resurrection event.
Others among us think of the Resurrection as a new birth. I feel drawn back in memory to the only birth I have ever actually seen. When my daughter was born, I felt unique awe, mixed with intense joy, at her emergence from the womb to begin life in the world outside.
The Easter event marks the single most important moment in the Christian faith, the one that gives this faith its central meaning. According to the Gospel witnesses, Jesus has risen from the dead with a new life to be shared with all who believe and love.
“Open wide your hearts that they / Let in joy this Easter Day,” the same poet Hopkins tells members of the faith community. And worshippers raise their voices to sing: “Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia.”
My Greek Orthodox friend Theo is visiting Greece this week. There he will be celebrating Easter today and exchanging with fellow Christians the greeting “Christ is Risen / He is truly risen” as the Orthodox have done for many centuries.
My friend feels glad to be celebrating this feast day in Greece. There, he says, Christians commonly recognize it as the most important single day of the year. They realize that the rising of Jesus from the dead forms the center of the Christian faith.
Theo’s full name is Theoharis Theoharis, making him the only person I know who can introduce himself with only a single repeated word. I mention it here because his name also bears a religious meaning since the Greek from which it derives means “gift of God.” That fact may make him realize, more immediately than others, how his very being, like that of every human, comes as a charism from God’s hand.
Believing in Easter brings Christians into a faith more radical than even those deeply committed usually realize. The Orthodox priest John Garvey, writing in “Commonweal,” emphasizes how different it is to believe in the Resurrection from believing only in the immortality of the soul.
“To believe in resurrection,” he says, “means that just as there was no life before conception, there can be no life after death that is not given by God’s willing it to be so.”
And he continues even more radically: “We are putting ourselves completely into the hands of a God we cannot understand, except through trust – -stepping over the edge of a cliff in the dark, hoping that the promised net will be there – – that what we have been told, second-hand, will be true.”
This Easter faith is the gift of generations of Christians who came before us and passed it along. They were not bequeathing to us a smooth reconciliation with death, making it easy to accept the fact of dying. Rather, the believers in the Easter event were offering to their inheritors a religion that would confront them with the fact of all new life coming from God.
Again Father Garvey presses the point: “Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him. This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that ‘death is just a part of life.’”
Easter means that death was not to have the last word; life would.
Easter 2004 comes into a world packed in many places with terror ready to explode without notice. The desecrations recently inflicted upon bodies already dead in Falluja reveal, in case we needed more evidence, the depths of madness to which human malice will take people.
The Easter faith shows a different way, a path of peace based on confidence in God’s desire for human beings to rise toward new life. Easter carries a promise of rebirth that remains open even now, in the conditions of our present life, and for an unimaginably bright future as well.
Richard Griffin