Resurrection Road

By: JOHN J. FLYNN III

There are moments in life like Good Friday, so dark that the tumult of hope dies, and there is only the silence of the tomb. Perhaps only then can we rise. To suggest that darkness is the pre-condition of resurrection can seem either a hollow, mocking piety, or the only truth in which hope can ever be placed. For some, whether by nature, will, or happenstance, only when the darkness is absolute, when the seed has fallen to the ground and died, is it possible for faith to germinate, and life to begin.

Is that the message of Easter, of the Resurrection of Christ? Is the Resurrection both a moment in history and a metaphor, the conquest of death, and of every other evil that afflicts us in life? If it is a metaphor, it is one grounded in the objective mystical reality of our burial with Christ in baptism, from which we arise with him, out of the water, as out of a tomb. And every moment of crisis is likewise a moment of passage sometimes as dark as death itself. Yet perhaps only there in that place of no hope in the merely human, where the dead are buried, can we find Christ, who meets us there, and then leads us into the light of day.

So, the good news follows the bad news, as fruit is yielded only when the seed has died: Christ is raised because he first descended into hell, where we were waiting. Only in the suffering of Christ is fully revealed the love of God, where a consummation occurred. There, in the pinnacle of his suffering was the union of the divine and human perfected. There was nothing more that God could give than himself, and now the gift was complete, free of all obscurity, no more prefigurement and foreshadowing, only fulfillment and revelation. Only there, it seems, in the valley of death, could Christ lead us out, to begin the ascent of Zion.