Our Life in the Lord Part Eight: The Eighth Day
Before dawn on the first day of the week, the women come to the tomb with spices to finish a burial, and they find the stone rolled back. The angel speaks of Jesus in the present tense: “Do not be afraid! I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified” (Mt 28:5). The crucifixion belongs to Jesus still and forever: he is the crucified and the glorified, both names permanent; he keeps his wounds, remaining in heaven and forever the Lamb once slain who dies no more. What he is now, he is as the one who was slain for us.
Folded Linens
The first evidence is plain. Peter and John run to the tomb; John arrives first and waits at the entrance, and Peter goes straight in, so that John’s reverence and Peter’s boldness stand side by side before the same empty tomb, a pairing the Church has recognized in herself ever since. The tomb holds only the burial cloths, rolled up and separated from one another, with no blaze of light, and since grave robbers do not fold linens, something other than robbery has happened at this tomb. That is, the risen Lord announces himself the way he will operate from now on: he leaves order behind him, so that those who are looking for him recognize him, and those who are looking elsewhere miss him.
Easter’s Question
Easter morning changes what a human life is for, though the world’s arrangements looked identical by Monday. The baptized wake each morning to a question: who am I, given that I have been redeemed. Some read Easter as a contest with other faiths or with the secular world, or as the end of an argument, and that reading mistakes the Kingdom for one more contestant. From Easter we learn to read the world backward from eternity with God, on the timescale of eternity, where a hundred-year life is brief, and then to live forward accordingly. The empty tomb is the place from which everything else is read.
The Glorified Body
The body that rose is the same body that hung, transformed. Jesus bears the wounds in that body and eats broiled fish; he passes through locked doors; he looks like a gardener to Mary Magdalene, and Mary Magdalene saw him correctly; he walks a road with two disciples who take him for a stranger, until a familiar gesture gives him away. This is what the Church promises the rest of us in the Creed when it says the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting: this flesh, glorified, rather than the survival of a spirit.
The Church’s tradition, reading what scripture shows and what Paul says of the seed and the plant, has long taught four properties of the glorified body. The Roman Catechism, the catechism of the Council of Trent, lists them:
Impassibility: beyond suffering and decay for good.
Glory: shining with the soul’s own share in God.
Agility: free of distance and heaviness.
Subtlety: wholly obedient to the spirit.
Those four properties make the body fully what a body was for, with the old war between flesh and spirit ended. The glorified body is a body still. God glorifies each person whole and distinct, so that no one melts into a composite; he calls us into that life with our distinctness intact, our utmost selves at last.
Emmaus and the Order of the Mass
On the road to Emmaus Jesus gives the Church the order of her worship before she knows she has one. Two disciples walk away from Jerusalem in despair, a stranger joins them and opens the scriptures to them, Moses and all the prophets, until their hearts burn, and then at table he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and vanishes from their sight the instant they recognize him, leaving them the bread. In that exposition of scripture, Jesus melds the song of their longing with the melody of God’s promises. Word, then sacrament, the scriptures opened and then the bread broken: every Mass since has followed the Emmaus road.
The Eighth Day Kept Ever Since
The Church moved her day of worship because of the Resurrection. Sunday is the Eighth Day, the day beyond the seventh, the first day of the week become our final day’s preview. The old week measured the first creation, and God rested on its seventh day. The new week opens onto the new creation; the Church keeps its first morning as her feast forever. In this day creation comes to fruition, and through the Paschal Mystery God opens to us the rest of Eden, and a better rest than Eden’s. Every Sunday since has been a small Easter, which is why the Church has never been able to treat missing it lightly: no cleric invented the day, and no one shifted the Jewish Sabbath over for convenience, for Sunday is the weekly anniversary of the morning everything changed.
The Charcoal Fire
The risen Lord mends the shepherd of his flock beside another charcoal fire. Peter had denied him three times beside a charcoal fire in a courtyard, so on the shore the risen Lord builds another fire and asks three times, beginning, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (Jn 21:15). The Lord gives a threefold healing for the threefold wound, accepting the humbled love Peter can offer and entrusting the sheep to him. The Lord had promised the keys at Caesarea Philippi, and here he makes the man who will hold the keys merciful enough to carry them, a redeemed sinner set over redeemed sinners.
Thomas and the Wounds
Thomas was missing on Easter evening, and his week of refusal became the Church’s classroom on faith. He demanded the wounds: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25). A week later the Lord returned through the locked door and gave Thomas exactly the terms he had demanded: “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe” (Jn 20:27). Thomas answered with the shortest and highest confession in the Gospels: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28). The Lord’s reply reached past Thomas to every believer after the apostolic generation: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (Jn 20:29). Jesus teaches in that scene what faith is: the commitment of our inmost selves to a person who has shown himself trustworthy, and never poking and probing until doubt is impossible. The wounds Thomas touched answer every era’s suspicion that mercy might be soft: the mercy of God is a wounded man, alive, holding out his hands.
The Oath Kept in Blood
The Resurrection settles an old accounting. Salvation history had always been asymmetrical: God made promises and kept them, and we made promises and broke them. God, who cannot deceive, swears by himself, since there is no greater to swear by; now the oath has collateral beyond which nothing can be pledged. God himself calls us into this life with him, and he guarantees it with the blood of his Son. Every human excuse for distrusting God had been borrowed from our experience of unreliable men, and after the third day the excuse is spent. The one who kept the hardest promise, through death and out the other side, can be trusted with the rest of them.
The Ascension as Hinge
Forty days later Jesus ascends as the disciples watch. The Ascension is the hinge of the whole priestly economy. “For Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf” (Heb 9:24). The Day of Atonement had rehearsed it for centuries: once a year, one man, through the veil, with blood. Now the true High Priest enters the true Holy of Holies once for all, as the priest, the altar, and the lamb of sacrifice, and where the high priest of old carried the blood of goats, he carries himself in, and our nature in with him. God has thereby seated human nature itself, the substance of our frailty, at his right hand, a place Eden never gave it. Because the Church is his Body, when Jesus offers himself to the Father, he offers us as well, and every offering laid on every altar since is joined to that one offering. Jesus is at work in heaven, for he lives forever to make intercession for us, the Lamb standing as though slain, until the last sheep who wills to come home has come home.
The Church confesses this elevation in two small places easy to miss. At every Mass, as the drop of water disappears into the chalice, the priest prays the water-and-wine prayer of the Incarnation, that we may come to share in the divinity of Christ. The first Preface of the Ascension declares that he ascended not to distance himself from our lowly state but that we, his members, might be confident of following where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before. That is, the Ascension completes the Christmas exchange: at Bethlehem God took up what is ours, and at the Ascension God seated what is ours where he is.
Pentecost and the Undoing of Babel
Ten days later the Holy Spirit answers Babel. At Babel the human race pooled its pride, and God scattered the builders into mutual incomprehension. At Pentecost the Spirit descends in wind and fire on a huddle of frightened men, and they pour into the street speaking, and every pilgrim in Jerusalem hears them in his own native tongue. God answers the scattering at Babel while letting the many languages remain, giving one Gospel intelligible in every language, for God desires the unity of peoples, and unity is not uniformity. The Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who overshadowed Mary, who drove the Son into the desert, now animates a Body. The harvest feast of Sinai becomes a harvest of souls, three thousand the first morning.
The Son sends the Spirit from the Father for a purpose, which a sentimental version of Pentecost obscures: the Apostles were already comforting themselves behind a locked door, and the fire put them into the street. Every title of the Spirit, Advocate, Helper, Comforter, Counselor, is a title for mission, and the anointing each of the baptized later receives continues the long line of anointings that always meant deployment: priests anointed for sacrifice, prophets for hard truths, kings for directing whole nations to God. The Spirit comforts in order to send: his comfort is fuel for the Great Commission.
The Deposit and the Final Age
God gave the apostles graces in a manner never repeated since, and what the apostles received and handed on, the Deposit of Faith, closed with them, so that the Church looks for no new public revelation and spends the centuries drawing out, with the Spirit’s aid, what God has already given, ever ancient and ever new.
Pentecost began the age in which everything since has happened, the age the scriptures call the last days and the Church calls the final age: the long season between Pentecost and the Lord’s return, in which the Kingdom is already in-breaking and not yet complete. Nothing essential remains to be revealed. The work of this age is the harvest of souls: the Gospel preached to every creature, the nations baptized, the Body built up one soul at a time, until everyone who will come home has come home. It is the age of the Church, the stretch of the story in which we are all living.
Comments