The Messenger - April 2008 - Resurrection Man
By Fr. Jim Corkery, SJ - 01 April 2008
The Pope’s Intentions: This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that Christians may never tire of proclaiming in their lives Christ’s resurrection, the source of hope and peace’.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the heart and centre of Christian faith. It gives us energy and hope: hope for a better future already in this world - and assuredly in ‘the life of the world to come.’ Immediately after the death of Jesus, when all those who loved him were convinced that he was no more - gone forever - their hearts nearly broke with loneliness and they lost all energy and hope. They walked away. They turned back to the old life. They flailed around in confusion and despair.
And then, re-entering their lives in a new and surprising way, Jesus, risen from the dead, drenched them with boundless joy. They were flabbergasted: flabbergasted to find his tomb empty when they went there; flabbergasted to meet him in the depths of their disappointment as they tried to stitch together their lives without him. Their joy was almost unbearable. They wondered: could it really be he?
But the stories began to come in: some had met him on the road, others while fishing, still others while gathered in a locked room; and there was one who, searching for his dead body, heard his living voice pronounce her name: ‘Mary’ (Jn.20:16). And so it was, through encounters such as these, that people full of disappointment and fear were transformed into men and women with the kind of energy, strength and conviction that enabled them not only to proclaim that he was alive but eventually to give their lives as testimony to this. Christ’s resurrection had done for them what no earthly gift could ever achieve: it had made them witnesses to the belief that, as he who had died was now risen, so too, would we rise with him one day to newness of life.
The change in Jesus’ companions that resulted from their encounters with him after his death is attested to in the stories of their preaching and martyrdom. Christians can rely on these stories today as we seek, with our early companions in faith, to tell our world that Christ is alive and that hope is not in vain. A real conviction that Jesus Christ is alive has the effect on people that they cannot stop talking and cannot stop walking! Once convinced, those enthusiastic early Christians could keep neither their mouths shut nor their feet still; they were itching to get going! Resurrection faith gives wings to our feet and sparkle to our eyes.
But perhaps, as you read these words, you wonder about your own energy and sparkle. Maybe it needs a little rekindling, a re-connecting, perhaps, to that very faith in the resurrection on which it depends. Such a rekindling is offered to us again this Easter as we celebrate, together, the amazing gift of resurrection.
Pope Benedict XVI, who prays this month that we may never tire of proclaiming Christ’s resurrection, knows that we can tire at times. He once wrote that we cannot live the Christian life on our own and that, on some days, I need to be able to rely on your faith, while on other days you need to be able to rely on mine.
We are Christian believers not in isolation, but together, just as it was the infectious faith of the first Christians that sustained them in their task of proclaiming Christ to the world. Pope Benedict always puts the emphasis on the liturgy, therefore, because it is there that we encounter faith as ‘together-belief’; and this helps us not to tire by trying to do everything on our own.
There are other helps against tiring: resurrection is everywhere right now! Go to the gardens and parks and watch the trees and shrubs and flowers bursting into new life as they do, spring after spring. Their ‘rising’ after the darkness of winter is a message from God, a reminder that his Son rose out of the darkness of death and that we will one day rise from that same darkness into ‘the bright promise of immortality’.
God is gentle, nudging us here, cajoling us there, to see the marks of resurrection in the very world he has created. He is reminding us that he is the God of life, not death, and that in all the places where we experience lifelessness he is quietly, imperceptibly, lovingly drawing us towards new life. Do not tire of proclaiming to others the new life and hope and peace that his resurrection has already placed along your path. This is the God who wipes away tears, who promises a future, who presents us with a love that is stronger than death.
Why can Christians say this - proclaim this - with such confidence? Again, a word from Benedict XVI comes to mind. He was a professor of theology at the time and was trying to help his students and readers to understand something of the resurrection and everlasting life.
So he reminded them that God, from the moment he brought them into existence, began a conversation with them that could never end, because God’s memory could never fail. This is why we remain alive forever in an eternal, loving conversation with the one who made us out of sheer love in the first place and is now incapable of forgetting us; his memory lasts forever, and so do we because we live in it.
It is like this: when his word created us, it was like his re-creation of Mary of Magdala through the word he spoke to her in the garden after his resurrection: ‘Mary!’ Being called into being by the God of life means being burned indelibly into his memory, there to live forever in his love. This is awesome; how could we tire of proclaiming it?