Inviting In Death-Defying Love
William Zambrano MD
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was a time of remembrance. The apostles spent it turning over in their minds all that the Lord had said and done to draw this into a coherent whole in the light of his Paschal victory.
By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read in Eastertide words Jesus spoke on the eve of his Passion. The teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St. John strikes chords then that differ from those struck when we heard it last on Maundy Thursday.
“Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.”
When this “new commandment” was given in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it with the gesture just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night on an errand of betrayal.
The eleven will have remembered how, during the past three years, Jesus had again and again forgotten himself to attend to the troubles of others. They will have thought of the meeting with the hemorrhaging woman, of the healing of the lame man lowered through the roof, of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain.
They will have recalled the detachment required when Jesus, weary, had gone apart to rest, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly, he had taught them what charity looks like.
The fact of Jesus’ resurrection raises our reflection into a further dimension. The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are timeless. By them we shall be judged. Still, “love” in biblical language stands for something more.
“God is love.” Divine love shows itself in kind acts, as when the Lord, sending Adam and Eve forth from Eden, clothes them in garments of skin; when he consoles Hagar in the desert; or sends ravens out to feed his hunger-striking prophet Elijah.
But the love that is God’s Being can terrify, too. It is at work in the Egyptian plagues, in the downfall of Og, in the censuring of David after his calculated adultery with Bathsheba.
We may assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is love’s inverted reflection.
Élie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another but does not bother when others do. Love, seen in this perspective, comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals, communities, or even states pursue no other goal than self-preservation.
In biblical terms, the opposite of love is death. God is love in as much as he is the principle of life, desiring things and beings to exist for the sheer delight of it, without expectation of gain. To love as God loves (“just as I have loved you”) is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger and the other passions that cause us to subsist in a kind of living death. For it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and normal digestion and yet to be soul-dead.
“Death with life contended,” sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: “Combat strangely ended!”
It seems weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of execution, should be the emblem of life restored—it seems weird until we recall that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. “Love is strong as death,” we read in the Song of Songs. That proposition was borne out on Calvary, then proved within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus rose.
We must invite this death-defying love into our lives. John proclaims: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” That reality is not for the end of time only; it is to be inaugurated now, in current experience.
But is this possible?
Already in the earliest times of Christianity, critical voices arose saying more or less this: “You Christians claim that Judah’s Lamb has conquered and the power of death has been trampled underfoot. But look around! Wars rage, the innocent suffer, beauty is stifled by ugliness. Friends betray friends; people once united in love hate one another. And you maintain that the kingdom of heaven is in our midst? Of all pretensions, this is surely the stupidest?”
When we consider the world we live in we must admit: the question has not gone away. It calls for an answer.
The Gospel testifies to Christ’s resurrection. He who was once dead is alive, and lives forever. On this conviction of historical, not symbolic, nature our faith is founded. The risen one was fully human, like you and me. The fact that he emerged from death’s clutches shows that death is not life’s end, but a passage from one form of life to another.
Christians of the East, like the Jews, call Easter Pascha—a Hebrew word whose root sense is, precisely, “passage.” It points towards the first Pasch in Egypt, when Israel after long captivity left Pharaoh’s domain. The angel of death passed over the dwellings of the Hebrews, marked with the blood of the Paschal lamb. What was accomplished in mystery then, in order that Israel might live, shows its significance in Jesus’s Pasch. He takes death on himself and explodes it from within.
An inadequate but suggestive image may be drawn from the realm of computers. Think of a virus invading an operating system to render it ineffective. That is what Jesus did to death, with wholly beneficent viral force. Even though death remains for us a physical fact, it is no longer a closed system. We must suffer it, but are not its captives. In Christ, we pass through it. His Pasch is ours.
Jesus calls himself “the living one”: “I was dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of seat and the underworld.” He descended into hell. He knows that sad neighborhood. No cell of the kingdom of death is alien to him.
It is impressive that the evangelists, bearing witness to Jesus’ resurrection, expose the concrete reality of his death. They show us his wounds. Christian faith is realistic. Our religion is no magic. The God we believe in is no wizard.
The living God acts in life as it is. He sets out from what is old, from lived life, and discloses eternally salvific potential within it.
We may find it hard to believe this. It was hard for the apostles, too. Thomas doubted because he had known the meaning of despair. He had put his hope in Jesus. His devotion can be seen in the story of the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus insisted, in the face of threats, on going up to Jerusalem, Thomas cried out: “Let us go up with him, and die with him.” No one has greater love than he who gives his life for his friends.
We can understand what grief the mere thought of Jesus’ wounds must have called forth in Thomas. Jesus’ response to his doubt is no stern correction. It is rather a gentle expression of friendship: “Touch my wounds: you will see that they are not lethal.”
Thomas realizes: Jesus takes away the sin of the world, not its wounds. His blood, though, flows into them and makes them clean, even glorious.
The Lord is at work in pain, also in the pain of our wounded world. The births pangs of the new creation continue, pointing towards a goal. We know the way to that goal. It carries the name of a person. Whoever says that he or she belongs to Jesus, “must walk as he walked.” The greatest temptation to which we are exposed is the temptation of hopelessness. It is to be resisted bravely.
Back then, in Jerusalem, after the first Easter, “those who were ill and tormented by unclean spirits” crowded together in the hope of being touched even by the merest shadow of the Gospel. “All of them were healed.” That can happen now, too, through Christ, with him, and in him.
Bishop Erik Varden is a Trappist monk who serves as Prelate of Trondheim in Norway. This essay is adapted from several Easter homilies and appeared first in the Tablet.