The Word Embodied

The Vigil

“The story seemed like nonsense,
and they refused to believe it.”
(Lk 24:11)

Light and Goodness. Let it be. Heavens and earth, day and night. Movements of moon and stars that would never have been, had they not been willed into existence. Water, sky, and earth. The great parade of natural kinds, nurtured by earth, fills the horizons. Waters teem and trees flower. Fertility. Multiplicity. Creeping creatures, urgent and easy, wild and gentle, small and great. God is the original environmentalist, the first cause of all our species, the eternal lover of diversity.

Good.

Yes.

Then the final good gift. “God created them in God’s own image; male and female God created them.” This final nature, a human one, would be given all else: as gift to nurture, name, and affirm. All is benefaction, and the human, made specially in the likeness of God, is empowered to know existence and pronounce it all good. All is benediction.

At least one might have thought so.

But the creature with the power to name, with the freedom of “yes,” said “no.”

It was a rejection of the great order and the great orders. There would be a resounding “no” to the goodness of limits. The tempter was a liar. They already had the tree of life as their shade and comfort. They would not die anyway. They were already like unto God. And yet, resistant to the very condition of their creaturehood they ate of the tree of limits. They wanted more than the power to name all the goods of the earth. They wanted to name evil, to dictate right and wrong. They wanted to control all, even if it meant losing everything they were.

In exile, there was left to them either despair or faith in a journey back. But such a journey could be led only by one who knew the way, only by one who could be absolutely trusted, one wholly other than the namers who misnamed it all. Thus Abraham, against all hope, learned to place all hope in the promise that God made, to yield and obey at the core of his very being. Thus he became the ancestor of all faith, even in the face of total loss.

The return was rife with peril, traps set by alien powers. Our people were horrified by the odds. The sea of frenzied life seemed impassible. Yet steadfast Moses, armed with nothing more than the “other’s” promise, split the very sea in two, offering passage. He became the ancestral leader of all journeys.

The return had its snares, captivities of every manner. Our forebears, like us, knew days and years of being lost and abandoned. Moved by our affliction, the one who first pronounced us good consoles us in prophetic voice. “With great tenderness I will take you back ... with enduring love I will pity you.” The covenants of Eden, of Noah, Abraham, and Moses will never be forgotten.

Something new is promised: a water, not of chaos, but of cleansing; a new food of unremitting nourishment; a mercy confounding, lavish in forgiveness; love beyond the grasp of mere human imagination. “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” God’s very word will come to be the final “yes” of goodness.

But what of our sin, our resistance, our ritual of death and folly, the compulsive repetition of Eden’s inhabitants? How might the wisdom of God penetrate our thickness? If our hearts would only turn, Baruch chides us, with the humility of the stars. If our minds might only surrender to the will that moves the earth. Yet we cling to other gods, their twisted principles and precepts.

Ezekiel, who saw our horrors and shame, indicted us but also promised that the covenant holds despite our deed. Unfaithful, we stay cherished. Besotted, we will be purified. Hard, cold, and lost at sea, we heard Ezekiel’s rumor of our ransom. Could we chance a hope for some new spirit, for hearts no longer made of stone, for a homeland?

Who would have guessed that our home might be a person? Who would have dreamed that the passage through the sea was just that: going into the water, even under, but with someone who, like a sleek, glorious dolphin of grace, would bear us on his back?

Jesus entered the deeps of death, a plunge he need not have made had he not loved us in our sorry state. But he went to death with a “yes,” with the utter trust of Abraham, the constancy of Moses, the bright reliance of Isaiah. In Easter’s vigil, we plunge with him: “Are you not aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Being like him through likeness to his death, so shall we be through a like resurrection.”

The risen crucified one sounds again God’s original “yes” to us now, even in our sin, even in the death which sin brought on us. Allowing us to be like and in him since he became so fully like unto us, he carries us, as one of his own, to safe land.

If we have died with Christ,
we believe that we are also to live with him.
His death was death to sin, once for all;
his life is life for God.

Rising

“If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above” (Col 3:2)

The postmodern world has problems with resurrection. It has problems with anything transcendent.

This life is all there is. You only go around once. Grab all the gusto. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Bound by immediate distraction, enthralled by skills of indulgence, we are jarred by talk of heaven. It is inappropriate.

Discomfort with transcendence churns in us Christians as well.

We want to make good sense of our faith, especially to those who think our beliefs a bit outdated. Our own discourse becomes less a matter of heaven and hell, forgiveness and redemption, than of self-fulfillment, illness and recovery, and how to be our own best friends.

Sometimes there even seems to be a hidden assumption lurking in our theology and ritual: This life is all there is. And—although more rarely—complaints can still be heard from premodern survivors that they rarely hear homilies and sermons about the four last things.

We are very much a people of this age, the here and now.

But to the extent that we partake of postmodem sensibility, we are on a collision course with the content of our worship. In fact, if we ever thought for a minute about the reality we claim is taking place in our Eucharists, we might run for cover.

Or cover it up.

Do we speak much to each other about the fact that there is something much more astounding than warm fellowship happening in our churches? Do we expend much energy over a sacramental reality that is more stirring than music and crafted homilies? Do we admit that the act of our liturgy is more significant than its style and decor?

The Eucharist is about our salvation and our destiny, or it is nothing. It is the pledge of eternal forgiveness. And Communion is not a mere bread for earthly flesh.

Quite the contrary, it is nutrition for transformed bodies. It is the sustenance of wayfarers on their way beyond this life. It is the bread of angels, the food of heaven.

Easter is Eucharistic because it is the promise of an eternal banquet. Christ, having entered into the depths of our humanity, even to the extent of dying its death, is claimed as risen.

Of course there are people who say that this cannot have happened. It was projection, a fabrication, a corporate wish-fulfillment. But the accounts of his followers seem quite otherwise. Something most real had happened to them. They said that their master had appeared to them bodily.

It is their witness which is at the origins of our faith.

If we take soberly enough the passion and death of our own lives, of humanity itself, and of Jesus who is the eternal Word made flesh, we will more fully appreciate the radical nature of our faith, especially at Eastertime.

We believe there is more than meets the eye. There is more than the earth in all its might, more than our projects and exploits in all their splendor.

“We believe in the resurrection of the body
and the life of the world to come.”

Say “Amen,” somebody.

John Kavanaugh, SJ

**From Saint Louis University