Easter - 8 Days After

 

Birds sing and fight ferociously with squirrels, Blue Terminator rests on the kitchen floor, Mex/Latino big bass pounds from the neighbor's compound and it's the second Sunday of Easter. Or the first if you're old skool lectionary.

Lectionary wars aside, here's some Farrer:

THE death and resurrection of Christ draw near to us in this sacrament.  The bread is broken - there Christ dies; we receive it as Christ alive - there is his resurrection.  It is the typical expression of divine power to make something from nothing.  God has made the world where no world was, and God makes life out of death.  Such is the God with whom we have to do.  We do not come to God for a little help, a little support to our own good intentions.  We come to him for resurrection.  God will not be asked for a little, he will be asked for all.  We reckon ourselves dead, says St. Paul, that we may ask God for a resurrection, not of ourselves, but of Christ in us.

 

Christ in us, crucified and risen. What can we do but with Thomas, fall down and worship at touching so great a mystery, my Lord and my God! Some call that the most magnificent confession of faith in Gospels.

Pax,

LSP

A Short Sunday Sermon

 

Then saith he to Thomas, (in the upper room) Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. Jn. 20:27

Thomas wanted physical proof of the resurrection and got it, the risen Christ was touchable, tangible. He had risen bodily from the tomb and, on reflection, anything less doesn't cut it.

What dies when we die, the spirit? Hardly, it doesn't have any physical parts to decay and return to the dust from which they came. The body, notoriously, does; we don't bounce like we used to, to put it mildly. So what has to be resurrected? The body, rejoined to the spirit, between them both making up the whole person.

Without this, we're left with spirit only or in other words, a shade or ghost, and the rising becomes a haunting. This is not the case in the upper room on the 8th day, the Sunday following the Resurrection. On the contrary, Jesus stands before Thomas, the whole man, body and spirit, risen from the grave.

In an explosion of divine power, Christ had taken humanity to a new dimension of existence, a new mode of imperishable, glorified being. No wonder Thomas fell down and worshiped, he touched the Glory, "My Lord and my God." And note this.

When Christ appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday, the "doors were shut" for fear of the same people who'd crucified Jesus crucifying them. For fear of death. With the reality of the resurrection upon them, made concrete on the 8th day, the fear was gone. And so they went out and died in the proclamation of the Faith, knowing they would rise in and with their Lord. 

What hope! As opposed to the dismal, wretched, con-trick despair of our disbelieving age. God grant us the faith, hope and love of the disciples in the upper room, and with Thomas the grace to fall down and believe, "My Lord and my God."

Christus Surrexit,

LSP

Resurrection - Evolutionary Leap

Are you incapable of serious thought, so-called "LSP"? Good question and for the most part, yes. So it's a good thing there's people out there to do the heavy lifting, like Benedict XVI. He describes the resurrection as an "evolutionary" or "ontological leap." From Jesus of Nazareth Pt. II:

Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding...we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical evolutionary leap, in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal.

He continues.

Essential, then, is the fact that Jesus' Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point, but that an ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.

In brief, the risen Christ is Man taken up to a wholly new level of existence, physical and bodily yet transformed and radically other through total communion with God. He has transcended death, much less the constraints of time and space.

Thomas touched this and worshiped. 

God bless,

LSP