Tolle Lege

In the Catholic tradition, we are still in the octave of Easter, which means that we are still celebrating liturgically the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In light of this continued celebration, I want to offer some thoughts on the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus. I think these events have become somewhat commonplace to us, raised as we were in a culture and civilization saturated with Christianity, but I think they are often misunderstood. It’s a good idea to take some time to truly reflect on their novelty and meaning.

 I have heard it said that grace is the distinguishing feature of Christianity. According to one story I’ve read a fair amount, even C.S. Lewis thought that. But I would (gasp) disagree with Lewis here. It does seem to me that Judaism and Islam contain some sort of notion of grace. All three religions of the book are profoundly aware of man’s distance from God and man’s need of help from God to bridge that distance. What I think is unique to Christianity is the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

Pontius Pilate, saying his famous Ecce Homo (Behold the man)

Of course, there are pagan myths that talk about a dying and rising God, but, and here I think Lewis was correct, they were foreshadowings or intimations of the events that were to occur in Palestine in the 1st century A.D. The pagan myths were not presented as history, but the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ very much is and was. Right in the middle of the Nicene Creed, the Church in Her wisdom stuck the phrase “was crucified by Pontius Pilate.” This unnecessary insertion of another historical person’s name serves as a reminder of the true historicity of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, of the fact that the Church actually proclaims Christ’s dying and rising as an historical event. This is what makes Christianity unique: that it actually believes that the same God who created everything came to earth as man and while here suffered every possible kind of pain and poverty before dying in the most degrading way on a cross. Then, in some mysterious way, that death was overcome in the Resurrection of Christ three days later.

 The implications of these doctrines are enormous. I would just point to two. The first is that the Crucifixion shows us that suffering is redemptive. One can have all the abstract arguments one wants about how a loving God could permit suffering, but such a discussion is incomplete without a reference to the loving God who underwent suffering. Not just run of the mill suffering either, but profound and deep suffering, both physical and spiritual, to the point where He himself even felt abandoned by the Father (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Moreover, as I recently had pointed out to me, Christ’s wounds didn’t heal. After he was raised, He still had the wounds in His body. That’s how deeply He, God made man, suffered. 

 And yet because, when He was in the midst of the deepest possible agony and pain, He offered up His suffering to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins, His suffering had meaning. We are all going to suffer in this life, one way or another, no matter what we believe. But if Christianity is true, then that suffering need not be senseless. There is no such thing as senseless suffering after the Cross. If we offer our pain up to the Father in union with Christ’s offering our suffering attains purpose and meaning. God suffered in solidarity with us and through it suffering became redemptive. That’s the first implication of the Holy Week that strikes me. 

 The second is that, in the end, evil, pain, suffering, and death do not have the last say. In popular movies, good always wins. In life, however, it doesn’t always seem to work that way, much as we wish it did. However, what the Resurrection, if true, tells us is that no matter how dark and depressing life seems, how complete the victory of evil appears to us, there’s still more to the story. To Christ’s followers, His death, the death of the Messiah, was the most tragic event possible. But that tragedy was not the end of the story, because on the third day he rose again. By his Resurrection, Christ teaches us to remember in our worst hours that goodness and love has won and will win in the end. 

 In the last book of the Lord of the Rings, Frodo, waking after the ring has been destroyed, has the following conversation with Gandalf: “‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?’ ‘A great Shadow has departed,’ said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land.” The message of the Resurrection is truly that, in an important way, everything sad has come untrue.