Resurrection

The journey of the Gospel of John is towards a New Creation, a new and transformed Genesis. The structure of John’s Gospel is along the seven days of creation described in Genesis 1 and 2. Here are brief points of connection: 

   In Genesis 1, on the sixth day of creation, God creates humankind in God’s image. In John’s Gospel on the sixth day, Pilate says pointedly, “look here is The Man”. In the New Creation of John’s Gospel humankind is again created in God’s image; the image is of a broken, crucified Christ.

   On the seventh day in Genesis 2, God rested. On the Seventh day in John’s Gospel Jesus breathed his last declaring “it is finished” and he rested in the tomb. The earth was so quiet one could hear the stillness breathe.

The Eighth Day

Now, on the first day of the new week, the Eighth Day, Mary embraces Jesus in the Garden of the New Eden in the New Creation. Jesus and Mary represent for us the wholeness of humanity, transformed by love, through the Resurrection. There are echoes here of Song of Songs. In both John 20 and Song of Songs the backdrop of the story is a garden. In both Songs of Songs 3.4 and John 20.17 the word cling is highlighted: “…when I found him whom my soul loves I held him" and would not let him go…” and “Jesus said to her, ‘Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

Mary leans into the tomb and sees two angels seated on either end of the place where Jesus lay. What John is alluding to is the Ark of the Covenant entombed in the holy of holies within the tabernacle, the place of God’s presence described in Exodus.  

The Ark of the Covenant, plated in gold, was a box containing the ten commandments, and according to some traditions, a pot of manna and Aron’s rod. The ark had an angel on either end. In between the two angels was the seat of mercy. It was said that God spoke to Moses from the seat of Mercy. Now in John 20 God speaks to Mary from the seat of mercy in the tomb within the Garden of Resurrection.

John’s Gospel is a New Genesis and a New Exodus too. The point of Exodus is that the people may be one with God. The unity between God and God’s people in Exodus is like a marriage. At Mt Sinai the Marriage between God and God’s people takes place and the covenant is given as a gift. Thereafter, the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant are created as a sign of God’s presence in the midst of God’s people. To come close to the ark of the covenant is akin to is God immersing Godself in the midst of us, BEING ONE WITH US – a union. The theme of God with us that began in John 1 reaches full maturity in John 20. Herein lies the Great Good News, that God in Christ is ALWAYS with us, closer to us that the breath we breathe. The Easter claim is that something new has happened in the world, that the Old Creation is utterly transformed into the New Creation. The new Creation is the union of the divine and human, a marriage of the infinite and the finite; we offer the holiness of our humanity and our finitude to God who at the very same moment offers the holiness of God’s divinity and infinity to us and a perfect union is formed.

Resurrection as a pattern in the universe

Resurrection implies a transformation so complete, that one form of life is utterly transformed into a new form of life altogether. But is the Resurrection possible? My own instinct is to look for repeatable patterns, if something is possible in one part of the universe surely it is possible in another. For example, bulbs die in the soil and daffodils rise. The caterpillar dies in the cocoon and from the chrysalis a butterfly emerges.  Our Grandmother star that went supernova and died gave birth to our Sun; the hydrogen from this grandmother star still exists in the water in our bodies and continues to give us life. When we look at the life cycle of biological, chemical, and planetary events, the repeatable pattern is that out of death comes life. Thus, not only is the Resurrection a possibility, but it is also the very blueprint of life and existence. I suggest that Resurrection is a universal pattern of the undoing of death.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a repeatable pattern that happens in the universe all the time. Every act of death is an act of new life in the universe. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus was a pattern of life in the universe long before it was seen in the life of Christ. The Paschal mystery, the mystery that out of death life emerges and that this life creates the universe, is the message of Christ’s resurrection. More than that, what took place in Christ is intended as a future glimpse of where the whole cosmos is headed: union and transformation in the Divine embrace of love. Love unites, and by uniting transforms that which it unites. The Resurrection is a repeatable pattern and also at the same time a foretaste of the next stage of cosmic evolution. The resurrection recapitulates the whole evolutionary emergent creation as a forward movement to become something new, a new heaven and a new earth.

The resurrection happens moment by moment, but this present moment is drenched in our future destiny of a new creation, a new union. As one writer said, the resurrection is “the invasion of the present by the power of what is yet to come.”

Resurrection is about the power of love to create life out of death, here and now, today, and tomorrow. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in persons and history, in nature and universe. Resurrection happens when we say “yes” to the dying and rising of Jesus Christ and when we say “yes” to our lives as the stuff out of which the New Creation dawns. Resurrection happens when we allow the small self, the ego to surrender and the true self, the Christ within us to emerge.

We are the continuation of Christ in evolution and the direction of evolution depends on our choices and actions.  We are to give ourselves to Christ and to his cause and values.

We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in his/her unique personal form and has the capacity to be united with God.  Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine so that Christ is more than Jesus alone; Christ is the whole reality bound in a union of love.

Sources: The writings of

   Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio, Beatrice Bruteau, Bede Griffiths, Cynthia Bourgealt