For today, it leaves behind an empty cell, But frosty brooded birds in bloom, Proclaiming Christ as herald held. For neither death's horrendous hold, Nor stone events before the tomb, Nor God's individual nor the seal, Could keep apart the spouse and crew. Amid his friends awake with fear, Christ comes and breathes on them God's peace, That peace the world can never give, His gift to us ours to increase.

[01:12]

O Father, now in Christ behold, The world as first it came from you, Sing in our Easter praise your joy, Whereby the earth is made anew. Amen. Romans 6, 1-11. Romans 8, 18-27.

[02:14]

Romans 16, 25-27. Then switching over to Ephesians. Chapter 1, verses 3-14. Chapter 2, verses 4-10. And then over to 1 Corinthians. Chapter 1, verses 18-31. Chapter 15, verses 1-58. And finally 2 Corinthians, chapter 8, verses 9. Chapter 12, verses 7-10. And chapter 5, verses 14-21. I'd like to begin with a poem by Francis Thompson. It's called Ode to the Setting Sun. You may have heard of it before. For birth hath in itself the germ of death,

[03:26]

But death hath in itself the germ of birth. It is the falling acorn buds the tree, The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern plants moulder when the ferns arise, For there is nothing lives, but something dies, And there is nothing dies, but something lives, Till skies be fugitives, Till time, the hidden root of change, up-dries, Are birth and death inseparable on earth, For they are twain yet one, and death is birth. This captures some of the points I was making last night, but in a very kind of general, not specifically or explicitly religious sense.

[04:32]

But still that idea of birth in death, death in birth. And the focus of this second reflection is to continue upon last night, and really to respond to a basic question that I'm asking. What does Jesus' death, resurrection, I'm kind of putting that as a hyphenated word, one word, one reality, death, resurrection, what does it reveal? And the first thing that it reveals is that there is more than one kind of death. And I alluded to that last night, and I'd like to go into that more. There is more than one kind of death. There is death that is the consequence of sin, and I'm going to call that sin death, hyphenated. And that's death as foreign to God. Death that in some sense is foreign to humanity,

[05:38]

and foreign to creation. Death that was not there in the beginning, taking the words from the creation story in Genesis, God saw everything that God had created, and God said, it is good. Somehow death is not in that beginning, it is not in that picture. Death is not what God has created. It is foreign. This is the first kind of death Jesus reveals through his death, resurrection. It's death as an unnatural intrusion. Death as a degenerative dynamic, which throughout our lives creates havoc, alienation, separation, isolation, destruction. This is the death which threatens not only the body,

[06:40]

but also the spirit. This is the death which even Jesus himself takes on and experiences and embraces out of solidarity with the fallen human race. This is the death which he fears in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the point of sweating blood. Biblically, it is associated with another garden, the Garden of Eden, where death first appeared as a result of human pride and disobedience. And this is the death that we all fear and try to avoid, and try to keep at arm's length, and try to run away from. Jesus, on the other hand, faces this death

[07:42]

in all of us, in everyone and everything, and embraces it on the cross. In doing so, he more fully exposes this death for what it is, along with its accompanying horror and fear. He pierces through and more fully exposes what no human can fully face or embrace. Sin and the absolute worst that it can do is experienced by Jesus on the cross and is laid bare and exposed and brought out into the open. The cross becomes a sword piercing to the bowels of the earth

[08:45]

and hell itself as we sing, Hell has been harrowed. You know that old English word means plundered. So like the sword piercing through to the bowels of the earth, breaking open, laying bare. When Simeon tells Mary, it's interesting, we can have a more devotional interpretation, but you can interpret it this way, he says, a sword too will pierce your heart, a sword that will lay bare the thoughts of many. That sword ultimately is the moment of his death, is the cross, laying bare the secret horror of death in sin, sin death. In doing so, Jesus shows us an aspect of the human condition that must be faced. He is not going to be the Messiah and Savior that will enable us to run away from our own wounded humanity.

[09:48]

He doesn't rescue us in this way, but rather first reveals just how inhuman we are, how less than human we all are, and secondly, how we must go deeper into our humanity, not run from it, go deeper into that humanity to its divine source. In this aspect of his death, Jesus reveals that he is more fully human than any of us. He confronts us with ourselves, and we can't bear looking at him hanging on the cross, seemingly conquered by sin death. We see that depicted here, in this other version of the John Gospel. You notice it's really depicted the horror, and Mary's in a faint, and I assume that's Mary Magdalene with the long hair, who's all distraught and weeping,

[10:52]

the sense of loss, and gripping her hand, something to hold on to, and John, well, he has a rather relaxed face, and you almost see what he's going to later write about, and he's pointing to something. There are other versions where John is like this, and he can't bear it, and it's kind of interesting, but the artist is giving us one particular thing, not everything that the cross has revealed, one particular aspect, and that's Jesus goes more deeply into this aspect of sin death. It's almost as if the healing requires the deeper exploration. The scalpel must go deeper. He's probing. He's probing into what is so difficult for us to face, and yet, as some people, writers have said, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of in life is that we're going to die, and yet we run away from it all the time. We don't want to think about it, and it's the only surety, and we're looking for everything else to make that sure, and yet that's the one surety,

[11:53]

and the top one, which is the burial scene, we see that that artist has captured that aspect of sin death, sin death, which is this feeling of loss, this separation, this horrible grief, this weight, this heaviness that is touching all of these people who have now lost this person. Jesus reveals that more deeply than any other human death and human dying. How could a human being be so human? His death, therefore, also reveals that he is so fully human that he has to be God, and he is so fully God that he has to be human, writes Leonardo Bach in his Christology book, Christ the Liberator. I'm going to repeat that. His death reveals

[13:01]

that he's so fully human that he has to be God, and that he's so fully God that he has to be human. The Scriptures insist that Jesus freely embraced death, this death, though he experienced everything that went with it, and it was not just his own death, it was every death, not only of every human being, but of every living thing. He embraced, he faced, and all the fear he took upon himself. Yet the Scriptures emphasize he freely, he didn't reluctantly drag and kick because he was like the rest of humanity do, you have to just accept it as a fact of life. No, no, there's a free turning, facing everything that goes with it, and then choosing, embracing. I lay down my life freely, no one takes it from me. That's a paradox statement.

[14:04]

We say death, you know, you don't choose death, it chooses you. What are we talking about here? In his dying, it's as if he has taken on the death of all the world with all its pain, and suffering, and fear. Who but a God could endure it? We can't even endure our own. Who but a God could endure it? I'd like to share a very personal experience of mine when I was discerning leaving my other community to join this community. I think it was my second visit here, and the first visit I certainly didn't know that I would end up here at all, it was just to be on a retreat. And on the way up here the second time I'd stopped and I'd visited someone close to me that had just been incarcerated in prison. It was my first visit, and the person had been there a few months by this time. And naturally it was not

[15:06]

the most pleasant experience to see this person in this prison. And I could really experience and feel his pain, and his shame, and his sense of powerlessness. And his depression, and confusion, and fear. But, you know, I sort of sensed this in that visiting room and all the other prisoners there. And I even sensed something about the guards. Somehow, I mean, this whole situation was not the most humanizing one even for them, and the Constantine wire all over. It was just the whole thing. So I remember coming in here late, a Friday night after, right from the prison, and sitting in the rotunda. And the experience felt fresh, you know, and deciding to just sit to do my sitting meditation. Violence. After a while,

[16:07]

the images of this person and the other people in the prison started coming, flashing, almost like a slideshow going rapid fire. And I could feel this pain, which was the pain of this one person I knew, but then it was the pain of all the prisoners and the pain of all the guards. But then it kind of expanded like a ripple on a big lake after throwing a rock in. And it became the pain of every prisoner in every prison in the United States and every guard who somehow was dehumanized. And then it kept going to every prisoner in every prison, in every country, in every part of the world. And it became a sea, an ocean of pain. And I remember I started weeping and I didn't understand, well, what is this pain? Because it became like a generic pain. And I remember feeling this horrible weight. And I don't have these kinds of experiences in my Centering Prayer,

[17:09]

so it was a very unusual kind of thing. I felt this weight and I couldn't, I sit in the semi-modus and I couldn't keep sitting up. And I finally just bowed over with my forehead touching the floor, the carpeted floor in the rotunda. I was there all alone in the dark. And the tears coming and saying, God, what is this pain? What is this pain? I can't stand it. And suddenly this awareness that I was in the heart of God. And I said, how can you stand it? I said, take it away. I'm a creature. I can't stand this. And I felt like I was being pressed down, squashed down under this weight. And this feeling of tremendous compassion for God and then from deep within me

[18:13]

this voice saying, if you choose to come here it will not be paradigm. It will be to share in my pain, which is the pain of the world and to not be able to lift one finger to take it away. To just share in it. And I remember a shiver went up my back, my spine, and I said, what kind of invitation is that? I'm not coming to the Hermitage. Who would ever accept such an invitation? And I said, I can't do that. I can't stand this for a minute. And again there was silence and then the voice said, your mind and your heart are too small now. They will have to be stretched and expanded. But also, for you to know my joy, which is the joy of the world,

[19:18]

your mind and heart are too small. To know my joy, you must know my pain. And your heart and mind are too small. And I was just bowed over and then there was silence and then the voice simply said, continue on the path you're on. Who but a God could endure it? That's the first thing Jesus' death did to us. Which we might say, my God, in itself, that's quite a bit, you know. Jesus is so fully that he has to be God and so fully God that he has to be human. Yet we claim that he conquers this sin death by dying.

[20:21]

How can death conquer death? This is the stumbling block to the Jews, Paul writes. This is the folly to the wisdom of the Greeks in Greek philosophy. A dying man does not conquer death. He's conquered. Yet that's what we say. Death has conquered death. What are we talking about? What else has Jesus revealed on the cross? And I think he reveals a second kind of death. That is the death of love. That is the death of complete and total trust and self-surrender. That is the death that is generative, not degenerative. That is constructive, not destructive.

[21:24]

That is life-giving, not life-taking and destroying. That is earthing. It is this free loving unto death with total trust in the Father that confronts sin death. Turns around, faces it, removes its ugly mass to what's behind, embraces it, strips it bare, exposing it for what it is and in the process removing the power of its hidden secret. O death, O death, where now is your sting? A great part of the sting of sin death is its secrecy. The mask is not removed. We're always running from it. Jesus plunges into

[22:28]

the heart of sin death but he's doing that as who? He is the very heart of God plunging into the heart of sin death and he now becomes that secret in the heart of death. In death is hidden another death which is loving birth. The way to overcome sin death is to plunge into it and find Christ there as love death. That's when the sword, the cross is a tree and we're back to the garden image. It's the tree of life in the middle of the garden in the Genesis story. Thus Jesus is the perfect unity of the human

[23:28]

and the divine and that unity is love unto death. Love in death, death in love which alone is fullness of life. He reveals on the cross that God loves unto death, self-emptying and that all creation is the fruit of God's self-emptying in and through Jesus Christ. His death reveals that Christ is the victor, healer of all that afflicts the human person and that he heals from within the human, within time, within history, within race, culture, family, within creation itself. Jesus is the son of man and the son of God because his entire life

[24:28]

illuminated and marked by his death resurrection is shown to be love, fully poured out, a continual and faithful dying to self and living for others. This is his Paschal character. And so he thus reveals that the ultimate meaning of life is to live in communion with God as selfless loving which is God's very way of being, the one in whose image and likeness we have been made. Thus Jesus is the fulfillment of what God intended in the beginning for creation as well as the effective instrument for creation moving towards his full realization. His self-emptying throughout his life culminating at his physical death is really a filling up, a birthing. Birthing and dying

[25:30]

occur continuously in him, simultaneously in him who is divine life and love fully in human flesh. To love as God does is to die and be reborn continually. Every act of true love must require death. Every act of true love occurs in a death, requires a death. The ecstasy of loving union writes St. Thomas Aquinas is a death. The very word ecstasy, extasis, out, going out of oneself which is death. Our physical death therefore can be the climax of this Paschal process, dramatically illuminating it and culminating it.

[26:31]

Jesus in his death, resurrection, thus liberates us in and with and for love. He takes upon himself and liberates with love all that alienates us and then gives us back to ourselves change. Jesus reveals a life totally open to communion with God who is self-emptying love. The pattern of his life and death reveal the pattern of his shared life with God as the word, as wisdom. He lives our life and dies our death before we do. In order to be our new reality, our new self, our new world, our path of life, he thus opens up a new possibility for human existence, faith with absolute meaning

[27:34]

in the face of all, in and with and for love. And he calls on us to participate in this weakness of God, quotes, this weakness of God in the world, this weakness of selfless I think his first name is William Buckley. S.J., in an article I read a while back, plays on this theme and he makes a contrast between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus and how different they are. Socrates, who goes to his death as the strong one, totally in control, and Jesus, who goes as the weakness, the weakness of God, this love poured out. The Christian way

[28:38]

is a path of the weakness of selflessness and the world certainly continues to try to tell us that that is not the position of strength but weakness. Thus we have, in and with Christ, an absolute future which conditions this life, casts light on it, and gives it meaning. Having said all this, however, Christ also reveals, if you think of these two deaths now, that human death, depending on how we approach it, is an ambiguous event. And I suppose the ambiguity is part of the struggle for human beings too, for Christians, for believers. Karl Rahner in his book on the theology of death, which I would highly recommend, as well as Bob's book that I mentioned earlier, Christ the Liberator, he mentions that part of human death is the experience of sin death

[29:38]

as well as love death. It doesn't mean that for the Christ follower feelings of abandonment and alienation and loss of everything, when we experience Christian death, we don't just smile and laugh through the whole thing. As Paul says, nor should we fully give in like the non-believers do to grief. These aspects of sin death will be there hounding us at the moment of death, when we think about our lives, tempting us to despair, to isolation, to not entrust ourselves to another. Especially at the moment of our physical death, which is its last chance to lead us into despair. But for the believer, grace is also there.

[30:39]

Christ is there who's died my death before me, urging us to peace, faith, hope, loving self-surrender. Dying to self in love and openness to God and others throughout our lives is actually the enactment of our final dying at physical death. It is then that our death reveals our dying with Christ and is the culmination of our appropriation of Christ's redemptive death. To die in and with Christ is to live as he did. It is to experience continuously the pattern of his birth and dying in selfless love. Thus every act of dying in love, culminating in our physical death in love, is a sacrament. So death is a sacrament of encounter with Christ. Faith, hope, and love

[31:41]

become the true reality which transform death into the highest act of believing, hoping, and loving. Thus, with Christ, we can say, into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit and act of loving trust. The Christian dies throughout life into death as a dying and loving with Christ. We must continually die with Christ and thus contemplate his death. On each side of Christ two symbols hanging in death, two men cursing death because they could not understand. One of them gazed at the death of Christ and what he saw was enough to make his own death comprehensible to him. We can be

[32:45]

either of those two people and maybe we are at both because death for most people is a process that they go through their physical death. In another very good book on this theme that I would recommend, the book is The Mystery of Death by Ladislaus Boros, S.J., he writes, in his death, Christ and his sacred humanity that is in the world. This Christ presence penetrates into the inner fibers of our spiritual dynamism. He becomes a single center of meaning. Because of Christ, my death is an awakening to complete presence to the world, total self-encounter and final decision for or against God, which is the same as saying for or against trust. Death, therefore,

[33:49]

is a basic sacrament mysteriously present in all the other sacraments and inwardly supporting them at the same time, transcending them. My physical death is the supreme and most decisive and clearest and most intimate encounter with Christ. Of all my life, summarizing all other encounters, concentrating in itself the whole spiritual history of a person and facing them with one final decision. I remember with my dad's own death, and some of you perhaps have heard me talk about this, but in the final scene, the death scene, and, you know, he wasn't at least not fully conscious as far as we were able to determine, and finally my two brothers came into the room, my mom and my sister and I were there, and I quickly kind of orchestrating the whole thing, telling him, hurry up, go up and tell him he's going, you know, tell him who you are

[34:50]

and that you love him, and so they go on either side and they're a bit kind of unsure what to do and I'm kind of coaxing them, and then they were there and they're all here, and at that instant he stopped breathing. You could see there was something about that moment, and for me it cast the whole light on his whole life, and he chose, he chose that moment and elsewhere I've mentioned how my dad was a rather private person about his inner feelings and certainly about his faith or relationship with God, and I think death is the most personal moment because you're stripped of everything, all the persona, all the illusions,

[35:50]

all the nice clothes, it's gone, even control over your bodily functions, it's gone, and he chose that to share with his family, and you see the Paschal pattern in it, it's Paschal, I saw Christ's death, Christ saying, Father into your hands I swear, he made a conscious choice or some kind of conscious choice because it couldn't have been an accident that right at that split second, it's like I had announced his cue on the stage. The physical contact with Christ's humanity reaches its final intensity in death. Boros mentions, he says, death therefore is our first completely personal act and is therefore by reason of its very being the center above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom,

[36:51]

for encounter with God, for the final decision about one's eternal destiny. Carl Jung, in another book I would recommend entitled Eternal Life, Hans Kuhn rather, not Carl Jung, Hans Kuhn, both Germans, easy mistake, Hans Kuhn makes the observation that, quote, death is as it were a departure inward, a retreat into the innermost primal ground and primal meaning of the world and humanity, into the ineffable mystery of our reality. Out of death into life, out of the visible into the invisible, out of mortal darkness into God's eternal light. Not an arbitrary intervention, he goes on writing, contrary to the laws of nature,

[37:52]

but an interception at the point where nature can go no further according to its own laws. End of quote. By losing oneself into the reality of God, one gains oneself. By entering into the infinite, the finite person loses their limits so that the present contrast of personal and impersonal is transcended and transformed into the transpersonal. In death and from death Christ died into that incomprehensible, now this is from Kuhn, I would never write this, in death and from death Christ died into that incomprehensible and comprehensive absolutely final and absolutely first reality, was accepted by that reality, his resurrection, which we designate as God. Thus Christ teaches

[38:53]

that death is a passing into God, a homecoming into God's mystery, an assumption into God's glory. In death we are taken out of the conditions surrounding and determining us. Seen from the world's point of view, however, from the outside, as it were, death means total unrelatedness, the breaking off of all relationships to persons and things. And as another writer, in another book I would recommend, Peter Kreef, in his book Love is Stronger Than Death, he says, I love this image, we are locked in a car, meaning the body, rushing furiously down a hill, meaning time, through a thick fog, meaning ignorance, the doors are welded shut, the steering wheel works only a little, meaning control, the brakes are non-existent, meaning we can't stop

[39:54]

our momentum towards death. That's his description of one kind, that's sin death. He says, this is looking at death from the outside, and that's what sin death tries to keep us on the outside with its mask, see that frightens us, but looking from the inside, contemplatively, from God's point of view, death means a wholly new relationship to God as ultimate reality. In death a new, eternal future is offered to us, to the whole undivided person. That's only possible at the moment of death. To find and choose and experience my death, to be experienced in Christ, is to face the ultimate moment of trust and decision. And it's a trust that God has both the first and the last word.

[40:54]

There is no depth of human existence, no guilt, no hardship, fear of death or forsakenness that is not encompassed by God, who is already ahead of us, even in death, even in being deeply, fully human. We, in and with Christ, do not die into a darkness, a void, but into a new existence, into fullness. Thus death is a medium of revelation, beginning with Christ and continuing with each one of us. I'd like to end with something from a book that I wrote. I'll take a little excerpt from it, which was made into a movie, which I just re-read the book, I guess four or five months ago, by Margaret Craven. I Heard the Owl Call My Name. You probably have read it or seen the movie.

[41:56]

It was fine, too, and I don't know if it was just a movie for TV or what it was. But if you remember the story, a young Episcopal priest is sent to a remote village by his bishop to live and work among the natives there. The bishop sends him there because the priest has at most one year to live, though he has not been told this. The doctor contacted the bishop. They decided not to tell the young priest. So, in light of this, the bishop sends him there. The bishop himself, many years ago, I don't know in the early parts of the book exactly why. Towards the end of the book, after the priest has spent almost a year there, the bishop visits him but still doesn't tell him, you know, I didn't tell you, but he doesn't tell him that. Though the young man is beginning to be suspicious because with this

[42:57]

Native American tribe, their tradition is you know the next person you die in the village is they will hear the owl call their name and he has heard the owl call his name and he tells one of the old women and she says, yes, I know. She knows, the bishop told her, but she's never discussed it with him so he's kind of perplexed, you know. Anyway, the bishop comes to visit him and decides not to tell him and he's taking him by boat. He has to take him and the bishop says, you know, as he's about to leave the young Episcopal priest, he says, this village and these people have always been special to me. For me it has always been easier here where only fundamentals count to learn what everyone must learn in this world. Enough of the meaning of life

[44:01]

to be ready to die. Now I would just do a caveat here and add the two deaths here. He doesn't say it, but what does he mean? Ready to physically die, ready to love. They're both in there, it's hidden in there because that's indeed what young Father Mark has learned. He's learned both there. To learn what everyone must learn in this world. Enough of the meaning of life to be ready to die. I have another caveat. I think it's when we're ready to die that we learn enough of the meaning of life too. But then a little further on the writer who's telling the story has Mark kind of thinking to himself. And the writer then says, everything looked different because he's been told he's being transferred and he's going to leave it.

[45:05]

And the thought filled him with a twinge of sudden anguish and a little unexpected fear that precedes any big change, sad or joyous. How would he live again in the old world he had almost forgotten where people throw up smoke screens between themselves and the fundamentals whose existence they fear but seldom admit. Here where death waited behind every tree for him, he had made friends with loneliness, with death and deprivation and solidly against his back had stood the wall of his faith. When he had first come to the village, it was the future that loomed large. So much to plan. Then it was the present that had consumed him each day with all of its chores and never enough hours to do them. Now, time had lost all its contours.

[46:05]

He seemed to see it as the bald eagle flying high over the village seas must see the part of the river that has passed through the village and the part of the river that has yet to reach the village but as one and the same river. End of quote. So I'll end with that.

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