Now after the
sabbath, toward the dawn of
the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and
the other Mary went to see the sepulcher…Matthew 28
The risen Jesus is for Matthew no deus
ex machina, no literary invention artificially ushered in to solve the
riddle of a dead Messiah. His appearance on the scene does exhibit
theophanic qualities that reveal the active presence of God, yet not in an
outburst of mythological inventiveness. The only “wonder” that Matthew wishes
to record in connection with the risen Jesus is very simple and fundamental:
the very fact itself that, having been killed, he is now alive. A violent
death, having destroyed his body, was itself in turn destroyed by his Father’s
all-powerful love, relentlessly intent on raising his Son from the dead.
For Matthew this obvious and all-determining fact speaks for itself. Jesus has
kept his promise to return to his friends after his suffering and death so that
they too might accompany him into fullness of life. Any imaginative
elaboration, any impressive symbolism, so useful elsewhere in the gospel, would
here cloud over rather than manifest openly the invisible light of transparent
faith that evades the senses.
In this passage we are witnessing the same
mystery that the Book of Revelation proclaims in its apocalyptic style with
solemn resonance. When the Risen One appears to him, the seer of Patmos echoes
the experience of the holy women in Matthew: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet
as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the
first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for
evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades’” (Rev 1:17-18). The specific
elements of a Christological theophany have nothing to do with overwhelming
external phenomena. Jesus is here revealing the presence and activity of his
divine Person solely by exhibiting traits that are specific and essential
predicates of God’s nature as Love: his fidelity to his friends, his desire to
be with them, his keeping all the promises he had made, his determination to
share his own life fully with them, and his design to knit them together beyond
separation by his act of exhaustive self-giving on the Cross.
These wholly spiritual events, which have
nothing in common with dazzling sensory fireworks, are the aspects that truly
overwhelm us in Jesus’ manner of appearing and interacting after his
Resurrection. In other words the Lord continues to be and to do all the things
he had been and done before his Passion and death, and this accounts for his
clear recognizability by his own. But the Resurrection has now raised the
Mystery of Christ in the lives of his followers and of the world immeasurably
from the sphere of promise and inchoate realization to the dimension of
divinely accomplished and irreversible fact. Insofar as the eternal Word
possesses a full human nature, consisting not only of soul, mind and spirit but
also of all the mineral and vegetable compounds that constitute the flesh, we
must say that Christ’s Resurrection from the dead has changed the quality of
creation itself. In him the whole universe rises from decay and is
flooded with divine light.
Meditation by Father Simeon.
