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| White Crucifixion, Marc Chagall, 1938, France |
More than ever, this year, I’ve felt the pain of Jesus’ disciples, as they careened from fear to fury to confusion and guilt. All compounded by unspeakable sadness and an avalanche of doubt.
Imagine investing years of your life in pursuit of what your people had been promised, then watching family and friends shout it down just when victory seems assured.
Consider your own religious leaders, supposed spokespersons for God, speaking and acting in contradiction of all they ever taught you.
Picture a day when evil seems triumphant, when death has the final word, when everything seems scrambled and confused.
Why would we call such a day “good”?
There has been no time in my own lifetime, here in my sheltered world of safety and privilege, when death has seemed so very close. There were more than 700 deaths in New York yesterday, for the fifth day in a row, bringing the total acknowledged coronavirus death toll in New York State to more than 8,600 in just a matter of weeks.
Here in my own state of Pennsylvania, the bell-curve of deaths is still rising sharply, and stories filter through of illness, hospitalization, sudden death. Friends are sewing masks for area hospitals.
Here in my own state of Pennsylvania, the bell-curve of deaths is still rising sharply, and stories filter through of illness, hospitalization, sudden death. Friends are sewing masks for area hospitals.
My husband and I have been in near isolation for a full month now, obeying orders to stay home, praying daily for friends who work on the front lines of medical care and food supply.
It’s a sad, strange, confusing time, made more confusing by conflicting messages from leaders ignoring their own medical experts. Who is in charge? Where are supplies? Why was there no response or preparation until the worst was staring straight at us?
Daily, many times a day, I pause to review the disciplines I wrote of during Lent: lamenting, waiting, praying, opening my hands, acknowledging I’m never in control, never was, never will be.
I am fasting more than planned.
I am praying more than ever.
I am thinking of, longing for, reflecting on resurrection.
I believe, without question, that when this body of mine breathes its last breath I will be present with my savior.
I believe, without question, in a resurrected body and “the life of the world to come.”
I wonder, often, what that world will be like. I expect flowers, laughter, birds no longer afraid of human forms. Feasting with loved ones who haven’t gathered in decades.
I am fasting more than planned.
I am praying more than ever.
I am thinking of, longing for, reflecting on resurrection.
I believe, without question, that when this body of mine breathes its last breath I will be present with my savior.
I believe, without question, in a resurrected body and “the life of the world to come.”
I wonder, often, what that world will be like. I expect flowers, laughter, birds no longer afraid of human forms. Feasting with loved ones who haven’t gathered in decades.
A friend’s young adult son died this week, not of the virus, but of an overdose after years of struggle with addiction and years of being clean.
Did the stresses of the current season push him into relapse?
Will he be resurrected?
From what I know of God’s mercy and love, my friend’s son is already present with his resurrected savior, already celebrating freedom from the weight of addiction and the years of guilt and dread.
During my own years of struggle with doubt and sadness, in my late teens and early twenties, I spent many hours with C. S. Lewis. He grew up an agnostic, studied among intellectual atheists and found his way to faith and joy in a way that gave him great clarity about what he believed and why.
In his slim book Miracles, he wrote:
From what I know of God’s mercy and love, my friend’s son is already present with his resurrected savior, already celebrating freedom from the weight of addiction and the years of guilt and dread.
During my own years of struggle with doubt and sadness, in my late teens and early twenties, I spent many hours with C. S. Lewis. He grew up an agnostic, studied among intellectual atheists and found his way to faith and joy in a way that gave him great clarity about what he believed and why.
In his slim book Miracles, he wrote:
The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection…It is very important to be clear about what these people meant… What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the six or seven weeks that followed His death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so, but on one occasion twelve of them saw Him together, and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians, i.e. in about 55 AD. The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the “first fruits”, the “pioneer of life”. He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened. (Miracles, 188-191)
While I grieve the deaths of those I love, and pray for protection for those near and far living and working in the daily threat of disease, I know death is not the final chapter. Christ “has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.”
In 1 Thessalonians, Paul wrote at length about the resurrection, saying, in effect: “we do not mourn like those who have no hope; we mourn like people who know the resurrection is coming.”
In Romans he took this even further:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
What we celebrate on Easter is the resurrection of Christ, but also the resurrection of fragile people like ourselves, the resurrection of those who have died, of those who will die.
And the restoration of the world itself: broken, damaged, restored, made new. Restoration and eternal healing beyond imagining.
He is risen indeed.
Hallelujah.
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| Orthodox icon of the resurrection: the harrowing of hell |
