The Sad Brightness
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21-22)
I am sometimes caught off guard at how my life’s events refuse to conform to the Christian calendar. Somewhere within me, I assume that the arrival of Easter should bring satisfying closure to the interior battles I fought during Lent. I love Eastertide, I love the renewal and the sense of hopeful expectation for the good work of ministry ahead. So why does it also feel like I’m back to the grind? Why has the world already moved along and why am I returned to the slow work of spiritual growth? For answers, I think we have to go back to Easter Day again.
It’s very easy to think of Easter as celebrating Christ ‘coming back to life.’ This is understandable. There are other stories in the Gospels about people rising from death. We’d be forgiven to think this is what happened with Jesus. But it’s important to understand that the life to which Christ rises is not, like the others, a revivifying or resuscitation. His is a true resurrection. He does not come back to life but goes forth into a new kind of life and then returns to us with an offer of that new life. The gift of life He brings is like nothing we’ve ever seen, but He means to bestow that life on every familiar thing. This is not, I think, just a matter of linguistic or theological nitpicking. It matters very much how we think of His rising again because it directly pertains to what we think it means for us to die and rise with Him again as Christians.
We can think, for example, that Jesus ‘comes back to life’ to shake the grime and mortal dust off of the life He laid down. His rising again means the bestowal of mere immortality to the old life—applying a mystical cheat code to produce invincibility or granting an existential essay extension. Christian life, under this understanding, will become about doing what we want with our lives, with salvation meaning that the Lord allows us to avoid the unpleasantness of decline. Our religion will exist to ensure we don’t have to change that much, that Christ is probably pleased enough with our bourgeois delights, and that he wants to make sure our party doesn’t really have to stop. But this is sub-Christian, a puny view of the Resurrection.
On the other hand, we can think that Jesus ‘comes back to life’ in order to wipe it out and replace it with something completely other, that the Resurrection is discontinuous from our Lord’s life before the Passion. We can think of Resurrection life as a discarding of nature and the humanity He assumed in the womb of His mother. If we adopt this view, we will tend to think that the life we receive in Christ eradicates the world and our lives in it in a kind of puritanical ragnarok. Our religion under this assumption becomes a way we establish contempt and discontinuity with everyone and everything for fear of their holding us back. But this is also unbecoming of a Christian whose hope is in the Resurrection.
Both of these errors share a common flaw: we think the risen Jesus ‘comes back to life.’ The problem here is actually a false assumption. We think that He comes back to life because we think that the place and people to whom He returns are, indeed, alive. They are not.
John 20 focuses on two instances of enclosure. The first is Christ in the tomb. The second is the disciples in the locked room. These are meant to mirror each other. Jesus rises in the Resurrection and then leaves His tomb. The disciples, at the end of the day, return to the room and cannot leave the room by themselves. Jesus goes to that room, declares ‘peace,’ and He breathes the Spirit on them. As God breathed the Spirit into Adam at the beginning, so now He does again for His disciples. He gives them new life that comes from His new life. The giving of the Spirit performs the word of ‘peace.’ It restores them to communion with Jesus and empowers them for the work of mission ahead. As the Father sends forth the Spirit to alight on Christ as He emerged from the waters of Baptism, so now the Spirit with Christ goes to come alongside the disciples and send them to their work.
Perhaps that is why Eastertide is so mixed. Bp. Scarlett taught me once (I believe drawing on St. John Chrystostom) that maturity in the Faith means carrying Easter in our Lent and Lent in our Easter. We bear with us always the sober discipline that confronts the dying world and our place in it, and we bear with us the eager expectation of future glory made present to us in the Spirit even now as an assurance of the salvation to come. On Easter Eve we blessed fire and water and received them again–we died and rose again with Christ and received His peace and His Spirit. But we have to remember that the first thing the Spirit does is to lead Jesus into the wilderness to overcome the world–and to share in His life means that we will be sent to do likewise.
To enter Easter is to re-enter the battle of Lent with the power of Christ’s resurrection. Lent brought us to that good defeat–that bright sadness–by which we could again need and desire and receive salvation. Easter brings victory to the site of our defeat, leading us into a life that can only begin once we realize we are dead. It is eternal life hidden in those who are dead-coming-to-life. Eastertide is the image of the everlasting Easter, but it is not that Easter. The brightness of His rising goes before and behind, but along the pilgrim path we live a dappled life. We are being utterly changed into light–but for now Eastertide remains the already-not-yet; it is, for now, the sad brightness
As Jesus said: These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)