Pure Beginning
Happy Easter, everyone!
Christians (at least Latin Christians) have marked Christ’s resurrection, and thus victory over death. This event forms the core of the Christ Event. John O’Connor at Food for Faith puts it well when he says that the resurrection forms not only the centrepiece of the Christian liturgical calendar. It also forms the centre of all human experience.
We can (ok, I can) lose sight of this fundamental fact of the Christian experience. Underneath all the worship, moral teachings and theology, is the Christ Event - the incarnation, ministry, passion, death, resurrection and ascension of the Divine Word. Being an eternal as well as historical Event, Christ overcodes all of what we take to be reality with His reality. This overcoding is nothing less than the defeat of death (which is the closing off of life) with the abundance of life in the Event.
I got a sense of this in the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. At the hour of Christ’s death, Jesus “gave up his spirit” (Jn 19:30). We can give it a surface reading to say that what occurred was Jesus’ “giving up the ghost”, the end of Jesus’ biological life. However, I think there is another layer of meaning to it, in that in his Passion, the Lord bestowed upon the world THE spirit, the third person of the Trinity.
The reason why this is significant is that, as we profess in the Nicene Creed, the Spirit is the “Lord and giver of life” who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The point at which Jesus gives up His spirit is the point at which the “giver of life” emerges.
The emergence of the spirit is significant again because the Creed’s profession of the Holy Spirit as the giver of life” has its roots in the scriptural witness in Genesis, where Spirit of the Lord hovers over (Gen 1:2) and the divine word of God brings forth life where there previously was none.
I found two things of significance here. The first is the kenotic pattern of self-emptying, where Jesus’ death and outpouring on the cross is the act that creates new life. In this act, we see God’s creativity at work, where what has been closed off in history is opened up again through divine operation. It can be easy to see this as a purely spiritual event, where the finality of death is overcome and God gives us eternal life.
However, O’Connor alerts us to a more experiential dimension, one that touches the concrete events of our experience. O’Connor speaks specifically to the experience of defeat, particularly the defeat that is coupled with the sense of inevitability or familiarity (here I go again, being defeated by this chronic enemy). O’Connor states that with Christ’s defeat over death through the experience of His own (supposed) defeat on the Cross, God is tracing a new path into every human experience. He is even tracing this new path into the experience of familiar repetition, especially the familiar repetition that leads to one’s failure, defeat or disappointment . Where we see a deterministic closing off via a repetition of the same, the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit overdetermines all reality at its core, by reopening up that which has been closed off again and again.
This brings us to the second point of significance, and back to the Genesis account. As mentioned before, this overdetermining is not a spiritual reality. It is worked into the texture of material reality as well. In other words, God’s overdetermination of reality takes concrete form. We see a sign of this in how Genesis frames the passage of the day: rather than say that morning came before evening, Genesis says “evening came and morning came” (1:5). Alexander Schmemann placed great significance on this point in his For the Life of the World. Evening, said Schmemann, marked the death of the day and thus the end of all things, including the “end of all their hopes, the destruction of their very soul” (60). In the logic of Genesis, on the other hand, the end of all things was only marked as the beginning, yet to be overdetermined by God’s creative work. Christians mark this overdetermination in the liturgical calendar, which begins not at sunrise of one day, but at the close of the day before.
What the Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus does is cement overdetermination into the DNA of all material reality, and our own experiences of these realities. As Pope Francis said in his Easter Vigil Homily, faith “is not an album of past memories, Jesus is not outdated, he is alive here and now”. The Word of God who became flesh, died and rose for us is not a past event, but an event that is eternally occurring. What was once an experiential desert is now fecund with the possibilities that only the Word of God can bring. We can look at our events, even those that have been supposedly hermetically sealed by history, and be confident that they are still being opened up again by God’s traces of new beginnings and new possibility.
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