Christ's Resurrection - Part I
Sermon 74 on the Gospel according to St Matthew 28:1-4
by St Peter Chrysologus
Feast of St Elizabeth the Wonderworker; Bright Friday
Anno Domini 2020, April 24
TODAY WE
shall give you a sermon on the Lord’s resurrection. In relation to this, if Christ’s birth from the Virgin is something divine, how much more so is His resurrection from the dead! Therefore, let not that which is divine be heard with merely human interpretation.
“Late in the night of the Sabbath,” Scripture says, “as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week.” The evening of the Sabbath – the day of this world does not know this; the usage of the world does not contain it. The evening terminates the day, it does not begin it. The evening fades into darkness; it does not grow bright. It does not change into dawn, because it does not know the sunrise.
Evening, the mother of night, gives birth to daylight! It changes the customary order while it acknowledges its Creator. It displays a new symbolic mystery. It is eager to serve its Creator rather than the march of time.
“Late in the night of the Sabbath,” it says, “as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, Mary Magdalen and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher.” Earlier, a woman hastened to sin; now, later on, a woman hastens to repentance. In the morning a woman knew that she had corrupted Adam; in the evening a woman seeks Christ.
“Mary Magdalen and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher.” A woman had drawn a beginning of perfidy out of Paradise. Now, a woman hastens to draw faith from the sepulcher. She who had snatched death out of life now hurries to get life out of death. [A woman took death from the tree of life; now, a woman takes life from the tomb, the abode of death.]
“Mary came.” This is the name of Christ’s Mother. Therefore, the one who hastened was a mother in name. She came as a mother, that woman, who had become the mother of those who die, might become the mother of the living, and fulfillment might be had of the Scriptural statement [about her]: “that is, the mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20).
“Mary came, and also the other Mary.” Scripture does not say they came, but she came. Two women of one name came through a symbolic mystery, not through chance. “Mary came, and also the other Mary.” She came, but another, too. Another came, but the first, too, so that woman might be changed in life, but not in name; in virtue, but not in sex. A woman had been the intermediary of the fall and ruin, and a woman was to be the one to announce the Resurrection.
“Mary came to see the sepulcher.” The sight of the tree had deceived her; the sight of the sepulcher was to restore her. A guileful glance had laid her low; a saving glance was to raise her up again.’
“And behold,” the Gospel continues, “there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven.” The earth trembled, not because an angel came down from heaven, but because its Ruler ascended from hell. “And behold, there was a great earthquake.” The heart of the earth is stirred. The depths of the earth leap up. The earth trembles, the huge mountains quiver, the foundations of the earth are battered. Hell is caught, and set in its place. Death gets judged – death which, rushing against guilty men, runs into its Judge; death which after long domination over its slaves rose up against its Master; death which waxed fierce against men but encountered God.
Rightly, therefore, did the rule of hell perish, and its laws get blotted out. The power of death was taken away, and, in penalty for its rashness in attempting to harm its Judge, death brought the dead back to life. Thereupon bodies were yielded up. The man was put back together, and his life was restored, and now everything holds together through forgiveness, because the condemnation has passed over onto the Author of life.
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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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