Christ's Resurrection - Part 2
Sermon 74 on the Gospel according to St Matthew 28:1-4
by St Peter Chrysologus
Feast of St Savvas the General of Rome; Bright Friday
Anno Domini 2020, April 24
“AND BEHOLD
there was a great earthquake.” Now there was a great earthquake. Oh, if at that other time even some light whirlwind had blown down that death-bearing tree! Oh, if some smokelike cloud had darkened that woman’s vision! Oh, if a dark cloud had enveloped the beauty of that deathly fruit! Oh, if the hand had trembled upon touching the forbidden fruit! Oh, if unholy night had darkened the day of sin, and taken away the sorrows of the world, the multiplying deaths, and the insult to the Creator! However, allurements always promote vices, and sweet things further sins, but austere and manly pursuits conduce to virtues.
“For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven.” Through the Resurrection of Christ and the defeat of death, men once more entered into relationship with heaven. Moreover, woman, who had entered into a deadly plan with the Devil, now enjoyed a life-giving conversation with the angel.
“For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, and rolled back the stone.” Scripture did not say rolled, but rolled back
the stone. When rolled forward it was a proof of His death. When rolled back, it was proof of His Resurrection. Blessed is the stone which could both conceal Christ and reveal Him! Blessed the stone which opens hearts no less than the sepulcher! Blessed is the stone which produces faith in the Resurrection, and a resurrection of faith; which is a proof that God’s body has arisen! Here, the order of things is changed. Here, the sepulcher swallows death, not a dead man. The abode of death becomes a life-giving dwelling. A new kind of tomb conceives one who is dead and brings Him forth alive!
“For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and drawing near rolled back the stone, and sat upon it!” An angel does not weary. Then why did he sit? He was sitting as a doctor of faith and a teacher of the Resurrection. He was sitting upon a rock, that its very solidity might impart firmness to those who believe. The angel was placing the foundations of faith upon the rock, on which Christ was going to build His Church, as He said: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church” (Matt. 16:18).
“His countenance was like lightning,” the Gospel says, “and his raiment like snow.” Is not brilliance of lightning enough for an angel? What did raiment add to the heavenly nature? But by such splendor he foreshadowed the beauty and pattern of our resurrection. For, those who arise through Christ are transformed with the glory of Christ.
“And for fear of him the guards were terrified, and became like dead men.” Wretched men! The fear of death struck them at the very time an assurance of life was being restored. But these ministers of cruelty, these executors of another’s perfidy – how were they to gain belief about heavenly matters? They were guarding the sepulcher, setting obstacles to the Resurrection, and taking care to keep life from entering in any way, or death from perishing. The arrival of the angel rightly struck them prostrate. O wretched mortal men, always hostile to themselves! They grieve that they must die, yet they struggle to forestall a resurrection! It would have been far better to open up the sepulcher, and furnish anything possible to facilitate the Resurrection, that a miracle might shine forth from the fact, and hope might arise from this example, and full certitude about Him who returned, and belief in the future life. This is indeed colossal madness, that man should be unwilling to believe in that which he desires to come to him.
Let these remarks about these guards suffice for today. In order not to be tedious now, we shall later explain what our faith contains – through the help of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with God the Father forever, Amen.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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