What the Resurrection means for mankind.
The mystery of the Resurrection of Jesus reveals to us what no eye has seen and no hear has heard, namely, the fulfillment of God’s promises of a new form of life that goes beyond our wildest dreams. The resurrection reveals that life on earth is the prelude of life in heaven, so that heaven reveals the true meaning of our being on earth. So this blog is going to both follow and use the amazing insights of Peter Kreeft in his book on Heaven and especially on the issue of how the resurrection changes everything, especially our conceptions about heaven. In the words of Peter Kreeft the importance of the issue of heaven is this, that:
‘the world beyond the world made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth “under the sun” something more than “vanity of vanities”. Earth was Heaven’s womb, Heaven’s nursery, Heaven’s dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth’ (Everything you ever wanted to know about Heaven but never dreamt of asking, (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990), p. 17).
As Peter Kreeft tells us, our journey on earth has been revealed as strewn with signs and images of heaven, the goal of the road of life.
The ‘signs’ are disclosed both in Nature and Scripture (God’s two books) wherein:
we find general providence operating in Nature [which, if we will, can lead us to our true happiness or if we will against it, can lead us to an eternal loss];
and of course there are the special miracles disclosed in the Scriptures [the word ‘miracle’ translates the New Testament Greek word semeion, which literally means “sign”].
The ‘images’ that surround us point to the hills surrounding the Holy City of Heaven. Images like that of the saints that depict what heaven means for us beings on earth. They are not merely images of the human, but as human images of the divine, windows unto God. Not merely stone or wood shaped images of men and women, but men and women shaped into gods and goddesses. Dressed in the apparel and dress of kings and queens with a heavenly glory that spells not the lowest common denominator of modern society but the colour, romance, and chivalry found in such pre-modern words like glory, majesty, splendour, triumph, awe, honour.
Today, secularism means that many have lost a sense of heaven because they have lost a sense of heavenly glory. They do not have faith in Heaven because ‘they have lost the hope of Heaven, and they have lost the hope of Heaven because they have lost the love of Heaven’ (Kreeft, ibid, p.19). But the question of Heaven is a realistic question for it raises the question ‘how big is reality?’ For my greatness depends on reality’s greatness. If reality does not extend to heaven then nor does my reality. So it is that Space is not the final frontier and nor is the Cosmos. Heaven is the final frontier!
If reality then extends beyond our noses, beyond our grasp, beyond our sight, beyond our senses, beyond our human knowing, then, if One comes to tell us what no eye has seen and no ear has heard because He has gone beyond and returned from man’s mortal horizon, death, should we not at least give ear to what He has to say? Should we not give ear to those who have been given glimpses of this far undiscovered country by He who is the Resurrection and Life, the Saints and the Mystics? Or are we a people no longer able to lift up our souls from the grindstone of a world of our own making, to a world of God’s own re-making?
In the Book of the Apocalypse, John, has a vision of a new heaven and a new earth in which at the center is the holy city called the New and Heavenly Jerusalem. The first heaven and the first earth have passed away for this is the vision of what the Resurrection means for all creation and all history. God has created the universe so that it may bring forth the Church.
The Church is the heavenly Bride in which God dwells in his new creatures that have become, through the risen Jesus, his adopted sons and daughters. The goal of the Cosmos is to give birth to the glory of the sons and daughters of God [Rom 8:12-23]. But before that day comes, we on earth are pilgrims in time making our journey together within the womb of a Pilgrim Church on earth who is our spiritual mother. Hence, Christianity is not a movement, nor is it a culture, nor is an ethnic people. It is the Church and this means ‘The People of God’ who are made visible by being the Body of Christ and the Sacrament of Salvation for all nations.
Thus the relationship of the Church and the world is at the heart of history. It was St. Augustine who first explored the significance of history and gave us the first classical expression of a Christian theology of history in his ‘City of God’. It is here that he interprets history as an unceasing conflict between two dynamic principles embodied in two societies and two orders - the City of Man and the City of God, Babylon and Jerusalem. They are intermingled continuously but they are separated by an infinite spiritual gulf because history is the meeting point of eternity and time. In the words of Dawson:
‘History is a unity because the same divine power which shows itself in the order of nature from the stars down to the feathers of the bird and the leaves of the tree also governs the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. But this divine order is continually being deflected by the downward gravitation of human nature to its own selfish ends - a force which attempts to build its own world in those political structures that are the organised expression of human ambition and lust for power...’
‘Although the state or City of Man seeks the ideal of temporal peace, it never is strong enough to overcome the dynamic of human self-will, and therefore the whole course of human history apart from divine grace is the record of successive attempts to build towers of Babel which are frustrated by the inherent selfishness and greed of human nature.’ (Dawson, p. 220 Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson, (Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C.)).
So, who is in the Church? Well, firstly there are those in the Church in heaven where all those who have gone before us marked by the sign of faith, the Cross; having fought the good fight they are now in the company of God’s mystical beings, the Angels. Secondly, there are those who are in the Church Purgatorial; they have been saved by true sorrow for their sins but are now undergoing the spiritual operation that burns away that disfigurement caused by their sins for which they have not done a full penance. Thirdly, there are those in the Church Pilgrim: those visibly part of Her life through Baptism and there are those invisibly part of her through the seeds of the Word according to which they seek to live authentically and through the gift of the Holy Spirit who inspires all men and women to do the good and avoid evil [the baptism of desire].
In other words, where ever grace moves the human will there the City of God is being built. However,
‘even the Church which is the visible sacramental organ of the City of God is not identical with it, since as [St. Augustine] writes, in God’s foreknowledge there are many who seem to be outside who are within and many who seem to be within who are outside. So there are those outside the communion of the Church “whom the Father, who sees in secret, crowns in secret.” For the two Cities interpenetrate one another in such a way and to such a degree that “the earthly kingdom exacts service from the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of heaven exacts service from the earthly city.”’ (Dawson, ibid, p. 222).
It could be said that the Church’s relationship both to the Cosmos and to time, experienced as history, is one of a struggle for the hominisation of time between a nature without grace and a nature graced. Fundamentally, it is a view that declares, in the words of Dawson, that ‘the essential meaning of history is to be found in the growth of the seed of eternity in the womb of time’ (ibid., p. 230).
In Eucharistic Prayer 3 after the Consecration and the Mystery of Faith we find the words:
‘Therefore, O Lord, as we celebrate the memorial of the saving Passion of your Son, his wondrous Resurrection and Ascension into heaven, and as we look forward to his second coming, we offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice.’
These words tell us that Christians attending the Sunday Mass are called to be ready to meet Christ. In other words, our bags are packed and we are ready to go to heaven. We are called by the Our Father to be a people who do the will of the Father on earth as it is in heaven. Thus the Eucharist is fundamentally oriented to the future and that as followers of Christ we are called to live that future here and now. The Eucharist brings about a Eucharistic Community who lives on earth a state of existence that conforms to the reality of existence in heaven: ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ This has profound implications to how a Eucharistic community is a sign and an instrument that constantly seeks to bring God’s peace on earth for all nations through sign, ritual and symbol, that expresses the thoughts, words and deeds of a Christian existence animated and inspired by eternal and divine love. In the words of Peter Kreeft (1990):
‘When we do this, life on earth becomes a liturgy, a sacred time. Liturgies are not measured by secular time; they are not measured externally, by clocks, but internally, by their events, their actions, their meaning. Living liturgically means living life as “a dance, not a drill”; poetry, not prose; a song, not a speech’ (p. 185).
Let us take the Apollo rocket as a sign of our times, a modern tower of Babel. As the rocket ascends it jettisons in stages everything but the Apollo-module that is eventually launched into space. So it seems the modern world jettisons nature in a destructive way to get into the heavens. The Church, however, in Her ascent to Heaven brings all of nature and all the Cosmos with it. It does not destroy nature to build a tower into the heavens, rather, through the sacralization of the Cosmos She climbs the ladder to the heavens. New Evangelisation means not just an inculturation of the Faith in terms of a Theologic reason it must also mean an embodiment of the Logos of faith that is the Sacralization of the Cosmos through a sacramentalization of culture. At the heart of which is Mystery, Reverence and Respect that reveals the religious dimension of the human person and the constellation of persons sown, born and grown in a sacramental culture and ecology. This in essence is the project of the Eucharistic community.
Catholics all too often reduce their faith to following laws rather than following Jesus. It is our personal relationship with Jesus that brings us to that freedom of being able to act from a true and informed conscience, as opposed to the slavery of actions moved by impulse, wound, appetite or compulsion. Christ did not begin his mission with ‘Keep the Law’; he knew we hadn’t been able too because we were deeply wounded by the effects of Original Sin. The effects of that Original Sin have been passed down through generations, bringing about man’s inhumanity to man both in the family, in our institutions, between races and creeds, and between nations and empires. None of us are exempt from it’s effects on our character, our personality, our minds, souls and bodies. That is why memory calls for the healing of memories and this in turn calls for heaven where all things will be well and all things are well. It is for this reason that we truly need a process of dying and rising that is the power of the Cross and the Resurrection to be en-fleshed in our lives, personally, communally and culturally in and through God’s ‘technology’, the Sacraments! It is in the Sacraments that Our Lord personally and ontologically acts to transfigure us for his Kingdom.
