He is risen!
In each of
the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ the events of a single week occupy a
sizeable portion of the text. This is the
week which began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey in
fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah, and thus publicly announcing Himself
to the nation as the long-awaited Messiah.
This is the week which ended on the Sabbath in which in the visible
world His body lay in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid it while
in the invisible world He in spirit had entered the other Kingdom of Death not
as those who had gone there previously, a captive, but as a Conqueror. (1) In this week, the week of Creation is
recalled and fulfilled. On the day
corresponding to that in which God said “let there be light”, Christ, the Light
of the World, announced Himself publicly.
On the day corresponding to that in which God made man in His Own image
and so finished His work of Creation which He pronounced good, Jesus Christ just
before dying proclaimed the word τετέλεσται (Jn. 19:30) which means “It
is finished.” The work He thereby proclaimed
finished was the work of redemption, the work of propitiation, the work of
Atonement, the work made necessary by man’s fall into sin. Then on the day corresponding to that in
which God rested from His work of Creation, His body rested in that borrowed
tomb.
Last week was Holy Week, the week in our liturgical Kalendar
devoted to special remembrance of this week of Gospel events. It began with Palm Sunday, in which palms are
waved and hosannas shouted in commemoration of Christ’s Triumphal entry.
On Maundy Thursday we were reminded of the Last Supper where
the Sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted, where the New Commandment, “A
new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you,
that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), so like those with which the Lord
summarized the Law and yet so different at the same time, was given, and where
the Lord Himself set the example of this by washing His disciples’ feet, an act
ritually re-enacted on the day which takes its name from the Commandment.
On Good Friday the Crucifixion itself was the focus. In outward appearance, this was the opposite of
the Triumph at the beginning of the week.
Instead of “Hosanna”, the crowd cried “crucify Him”, instead of riding
into the city He had to carry His cross out of it. Beneath the outward appearance, of course,
this was His true moment of Triumph. He
had told His disciples from the moment St. Peter had confessed “Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) at Caesarea Philippi that this
would come, that it was for this purpose that He entered into the world, that
this is what it truly meant for Him to be the Christ. He had not come to bring political deliverance
to the Old Testament nation, but to bring deliverance from the slavery into
which the Fall of Adam had delivered all mankind, slavery to sin and death, and
He could only do this by suffering and dying Himself. Since St. Anselm, we in the West have tended
to think of this primarily in terms of the payment of a debt. Man owed a debt but had no resources to pay,
God had the resources but could not pay the debt qua God, so He became Incarnate as a Man and the God-Man paid the
debt on behalf of the world. In the
East, they tend to think of it more in terms of a hostage situation in which
Death, man’s enemy, has held him captive and Christ, Who is stronger than Death
and over whom Death has not even the usurped claim due to sin, allowing Himself
to be taken by Death so that He could destroy Death from the inside and set the
captives free. Both ways of thinking about
it are taken from Scripture. Ultimately,
Charles Wesley spoke for Christians East and West when he put it “Amazing love!
How can it be, that Thou my God should die for me!”
Holy Saturday commemorates both the resting of His body in
the Grave and His Descent (as Conqueror) into Hell. Traditionally, the second of these themes
received more emphasis in the liturgy of Holy Saturday. That this is not the case today (2) is in part
due to unfortunate liturgical revisionism that has been influenced by the even
more unfortunate theological revisionism which is squeamish about anything
having to do with Hell. (3) The other
part is that often the only service on Holy Saturday is the evening vigil which
begins with the Holy Saturday themes but moves into the theme of the Resurrection. The evening of Holy Saturday is, by the
reckoning of time established in the week of Creation (4), part of the
following day.
That following day, of course, is the most important day of
celebration in the Christian Kalendar.
In the English-speaking world we call it Easter, similar to how the
Germans call it das Ostern. Those silly
and foolish individuals who come creeping out of the woodworks around this time
each year to denounce the celebration as “pagan” get most of their mileage out
of this name. Even if, however, their
questionable etymology of the word were to be proven correct, their argument is
still nonsense because the thing itself, the feast day, was around long before
this name got attached to it.
The Hebrew word פסח (Pesach) is the name of the most
important feast day of the Old Testament religion. It is called Passover in English and it is
the day on which the Israelites remembered their deliverance from slavery in
Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. By the time of the New Testament the
Israelites were speaking Aramaic more often than Hebrew and in Aramaic פסח took
on a final aleph to become פסחא. In
Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written and the primary
language of the Church in the earliest centuries, this was transliterated into Πάσχα
and at least as early as the second century this term was used for the Christian
feast as well. It retained this name in
the North African/Western part of the Church where Latin superseded Greek as the
primary language and in Latin it is spelled Pascha. To this day, in the vast majority of
languages the feast called Easter in English is called Pascha or some variation
thereof and even in English we use the adjective “Paschal” to refer to things
pertaining to Easter.
The history is clear.
The holiday did not begin as a pagan feast named Easter that was appropriated
by the Church but as the Christian Passover.
This remains the essence of the feast regardless of what other names
derived from the time of year in which it occurs became attached to it later in
countries with Germanic languages.
Our silly and foolish friends if they are capable of
pursuing their case any deeper than the superficial argument about the name may
point out that the authorization for the Old Testament Passover, along with
detailed instructions as to how to keep it, came directly from God, and ask
where the similar authority for a Christian Passover is to be found. The answer lies in what the New Testament
teaches about the relationship between the events commemorated by the Old
Testament Passover and those we commemorate in Holy Week leading up to Easter.
According to the New Testament, most especially the book of
Hebrews, the Old Testament consists of types which prefigure or foreshadow the
Gospel. The blood sacrifices of the
Levitical system were types of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God,
Who takes away the sin of the world.
The earthly Tabernacle/Temple was a figure of the Heavenly Tabernacle made
without human hands. Other examples, not
spelled out the way these were in Hebrews, are just as clear. Moses, for example, the Law-Giver, was
allowed to lead the Israelites up to the Promised Land but he was not allowed
to lead them in, that role was given to Joshua (5) in which can be seen
prefigured everything St. Paul had to say, which was a lot, about how the Law
cannot make one righteous before God, only the grace brought by Jesus Christ
can do that.
The Old Testament Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance
from Egypt. Israel had gone down into
Egypt during the years of famine in which Joseph was the highest official in
the land under Pharaoh whose favour he enjoyed.
They remained there four hundred years after which another Pharaoh, who
feared rather than favoured the growing nation, had them enslaved. Moses, Hebrew born but adopted into Pharaoh’s
family, met God in the wilderness Who told him that He was sending him to
Pharaoh to plead for Israel’s deliverance.
Multiple times Moses and his brother Aaron entered Pharaoh’s court with
God’s demand that His people be set free, each time Pharaoh refused and a new
plague fell upon Egypt. In the final
plague, the angel of death was sent to take the firstborn of every family in
Egypt – only they, to whose door posts and lintels the blood of the Passover
lamb had been applied, i.e., the Israelites, were spared. Pharaoh then commanded Moses to take the
Israelites and leave, only to change his mind again once they were gone and
pursue them with his army to the Red Sea.
God opened a pathway for the Israelites through the Red Sea, then brought
the waters down on the Egyptian army.
This entire event forged Old Testament Israel’s identity as
a nation. It also prefigured another,
greater, deliverance. The salvation of
which the Exodus was but a type was not a deliverance from physical servitude
but of spiritual servitude to sin. Nor
was it merely the deliverance of a nation but of the entire world. This is the salvation accomplished by Jesus
Christ on the Cross which event took place on the Old Testament Passover.
Since that of which the Old Testament redemption of Israel
was a shadow has come to pass, we who believe in Jesus Christ look back to that
rather than to the shadow. That there
would be an annual Christian Passover celebrating Christ’s redemption of
mankind was settled very early in the Church.
When it is first mentioned as such in the writings of the second century,
it is treated as having been long established.
This would imply that it is Apostolic in origin and, indeed, the
Apostles were barely in their grave before a dispute arose not over whether
there should be a Christian Passover but over when it should be held. (6) Those
who held the Quartodeciman position argued that the Christian Passover should
fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover (the fourteenth of Aviv/Nisan on
the Hebrew calendar), others held that it should fall on the Sunday after. Although the sides in the controversy tended
to fall along regional and ethnic lines, there is clearly an underlying
theological issue here of whether the Crucifixion or the Resurrection takes
precedence. The first ecumenical council
of the Church, which met at Nicaea in 325 to address the heresy of Arianism,
also ruled on this matter. Ruling
against the Quartodecimans the council determined that the Christian Passover
would be held on the Sunday that follows the first full moon on or after the
spring equinox. (7)
The ruling of Nicaea I made it clear that the Christian
Passover would be a commemoration of the Resurrection rather than of the Crucifixion
although by this time Holy Week was starting to take shape with Good Friday
being already firmly established. (8)
In this, can be seen a parallel to the decision made by the Apostles that
the Church would meet on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath (Saturday). That this decision was made, we know from the
New Testament in which the Church is depicted as meeting on Sunday (Acts 20:7,
1 Cor. 16:2). Although neither the decision itself nor the occasion for it are
recorded, the reason why Sunday as opposed to say Monday or Wednesday, was
selected is quite obvious. The Sunday
after Christ was crucified on the Old Testament Passover, the women among His
disciples went to the tomb to complete the burial which had been done in haste
due to the onset of the Sabbath. They
found the stone that sealed the tomb rolled away, the grave clothes in which He
had been buried folded up and empty, and an angel there to tell them that He
was not there, He was risen.
The importance of Christ’s Resurrection cannot be overstated. St. Paul explains it exquisitely in the
fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians. Against those who took the Sadducees’ position
that there will be no Final Resurrection, He argued that if the dead do not
rise then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen we are without hope,
but that since Christ is risen, then we know that the dead will all rise. We are all dead in the first Adam because the
sin by which he brought death into the world passed from him to all of us bringing
death along with it. Christ underwent
death for us that He might remove the sting of death which is sin. His victory over this final enemy is our
victory, in Him, the last Adam, we are made alive. His Resurrection was the firstfruits of the
Resurrection in which we one day will all fully share even as we are to participate
in it even now by walking in newness of life by faith. His Resurrection, while in the same body in
which He had died – He displayed the scars in His hands and side to His disciples
– was not to the same life that He had left behind in dying, but to a new and
higher kind of life which death can never touch.
In this we have a clue as to why the day of the week on
which Christ rose was so important to the early Church that they set it both as
their weekly day of corporate worship and the annual Christian Passover. In the New Testament it is called the “first
day” with reference to the week that follows.
The early Christians, however, also called it the “eighth day” in
reference to the week which preceded it.
The week signifies the week of Creation, and, as we have seen above, this
was especially true of the week of Jesus’ life and ministry on which the
Gospels concentrate, the week we remember in Holy Week. What then does the
eighth day that follows the seven which signify the Old Creation signify?
One early Christian writer described it as “a beginning of another world” (9). St. Augustine argued that the Sabbath day of
rest of the Decalogue was but a figure of the eternal rest to which the eighth
day, revealed to the Christians in the Gospel, looks forward. (10) The eighth day, then, is the day which comes after
the seven of the Old Creation, the day of the New Creation, the life of which
Jesus entered in His Resurrection, and in which we can share even before our
own resurrection on the Last Day because we participate in His life as members
of His mystical body, the Church.
How appropriate and how utterly unpagan is that annual Lord’s
Day of Lord’s days, the Christian Passover of Easter in which after the
reflection on our sin and mortality in Lent, culminating in our remembrance of
the week which led from the Triumphal entry to Golgotha and the tomb, on the eighth
day we joyously proclaim He is risen!
He is risen indeed.
Alleluia!
(2) In the West. In the East, the Descent into Hell is still very much the focus of the liturgy of Holy Saturday. Due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, of course, the Eastern Holy Saturday and the Western Holy Saturday do not fall on the same day.
(3) The Hell in the Descent into Hell, is the Hell referenced in note 1, vide supra, and not Gehenna, the place to which those who render themselves incurably wicked by rejecting Jesus Christ will be condemned at the Last Judgement. That Christ did indeed descend there as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is Scriptural despite the claim of certain evangelicals to the contrary. St. Peter, in his sermon on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost), quoted Psalm 16:10 and applied it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:25-31). If the Resurrection fulfils “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell”, then Hell, again Sheol/Hades, is clearly where it was prior to the Resurrection. There is no conflict here with Christ’s words to the dying thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43). Paradise is wherever Jesus Christ is. On the original Holy Saturday, Hell itself was Paradise.
(4) “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5) It is because of this pattern in the Creation account that days in the sacred Kalendar of Christianity are counted sunset to sunset, as they are in the corresponding sacred calendars of Judaism and Islam, regardless of how days in the civil calendar are counted (midnight to midnight). In the Bible itself, this is the one of three ways of counting days, and certainly the primary way in the Old Testament. The other two are to count from sunrise to sunrise (morning/evening rather than evening/morning) and to count from midnight (only St. John does the latter, which is why the hours during the Crucifixion account in his Gospel differ from those in the Synoptics, which count from sunrise).
(5) Joshua is the English spelling of a Hebrew name which, taken from Hebrew into Aramaic then Greek, becomes the name of which Jesus is the English spelling.
(6) According to Eusebius the controversy broke out as early as the time of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in what is now Turkey and personal disciple of St. John the Apostle who was martyred around the middle of the second century.
(7) This calculation formula translates the date of Passover in the Hebrew lunar calendar (Aviv/Nisan is the month of spring, the fourteenth is the Ides or full moon of the month) into an approximation in the solar calendar.
(8) The commemoration of the Crucifixion on the Friday prior to Pascha/Easter is referenced as early as Tertullian. The name “Good Friday”, of course, came much later. Note that this was no concession to the Quartodecimans. The 14 of Aviv/Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, like the dates on the civil calendar, move across the week from year to year. Commemorating the Crucifixion on the Friday before Easter, follows from commemorating the Resurrection on the day of the week on which it occurred.
(9) The Epistle of Barnabas, 15.
(10) St. Augustine, Letter 55, 12-13.
