Post 163--The Empty Tomb

The Empty Tomb

My guest writer for easter is Father Raymond J. de Souza, quite a mouthful. When you read below about the positions he holds you have more than a mouthful. I appreciate these reflections on the empty tomb and hope you will as well.

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This Easter will look different at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the large church built over both the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Last month, the recent restoration of the Edicule – the chapel built over the burial place of Christ and locus of the Resurrection – was completed. It was the first significant restoration work since 1810.

The structure had become unstable during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine. In 1947, just before their authority expired, the British erected steel girders around the Edicule to prevent it from collapsing. For 70 years, the most important pilgrim site for Christians looked like a ramshackle construction site.

The blackened Edicule has now been restored to its original cream and rose colouring, almost luminous in what remains a dark church. The ugly girders are gone, having rendered their necessary service for seven decades.

All of which makes the church modestly more beautiful – and less embarrassing – to visit. Regardless, though, of the structural soundness of the Edicule, what remains remarkable is that is built to mark an absence. There is nothing inside.

Everything rather depends upon that, as St. Paul insisted: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

As the angel said that first Easter morning: “He is not here.”
The only lasting place mortal man has on this earth is the grave. We speak of the abundant resources of the planet as our common home, but the earth only provides for our life for some decades. For the longest part, what the earth gives to us is a burial place. It is more a cemetery for the dead than a home for the living.
So we have busily set about making our common cemetery decorous. We make the headstones. We landscape the grounds. We mark the graves: “Here lies….”
The Edicule in Jerusalem marks what used to be a grave, but has long ceased to be: “Here He does not lie…”
For those great personages whose lives are remembered beyond the circle of their own relatives, we fashion more impressive monuments, memorials that in time are themselves forgotten. Yet what is inside remains relentlessly egalitarian. Decomposing corpses are more similar than different, no matter the previous station in life.
The formative event of the Chosen People is the Exodus, when Moses led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt by the signs and wonders of the Lord God. By the time of Jesus, did the Jews still carry with them the handed-down memory of the tombs of the Pharaohs? Were there stories told about the great tombs built, the architecture so advanced that even today it remains a mystery of how they were built?
Ancient Egypt was wise. Its people knew that all that really lasts is the tomb, so they set about building grand tombs stuffed full of all that a dead man awaiting life could possibly need.
What Egypt did not – could not – realize, was that what man really needed was not a better tomb, but to leave the tomb altogether. When Israel came up out of Egypt, did they realize that the pilgrimage of salvation history is away from the massive tombs of the pyramids toward the empty tomb of Calvary?
The archaeologists who worked on the restoration of the Edicule removed, at one point, the marble slab covering the burial site itself. It was a rare time in archaeology where the expectation was to find nothing. There was fill material and other detritus of the ages, but nothing of Jesus.
Everything rather depends upon that, as St. Paul insisted: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”
The alternative to the empty tomb is to return to the busy work of grave building, the proper task of man absent the Resurrection. The Edicule is the reminder that man was created for life, not to spend his life building graves.
About the Incarnation we are accustomed to say that the eternal Son of the Father became a man like us in all things but sin. In His passion and death, He who had no sin was made sin, as it were, for our sake. Yet He was not touched by sin, and so had no need of what we need, the resting place of the grave.
He descended to the grave, but life cannot remain there, any more than a corpse belongs among the living. So the one who came to be present with us gives us the gift of a great absence, the empty tomb. It is the presence (absence?) already given in history of that day when all the tombs shall be empty.
We were not made for this world, and so the only enduring offer of this world – a grave, more or less comfortable, more or less grand – is not for us. We do not need what the world can enduringly give; we need rather, to not need that grave.
The Edicule marks the place where we began not to need it anymore.

A blessed Easter to all!
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Father Raymond J. de Souza is the Editor-in-Chief of Convivium, chaplain at Newman House (the Roman Catholic centre at Queen's University), a parish priest, and a Cardus senior fellow, in addition to writing for the National Post and The Catholic Register. His columns can be found at www.convivium.ca.

Post 142--War on Christmas

Douglas Todd is one of my favourite Vancouver Sun columnists. You may have noticed that I quote him quite often in this blog. Well, he did it again with an interesting article on Christmas, this time about the “war on Christmas.”  

Though most of us think of opposition to Christmas, especially its public expressions, with the help of an Oxford don, Todd tells us about a war that’s been going on for centuries. It is inevitable, he writes, that there should be war of some kind against such a large global celebration with its public expressions. It is not the specialty of today’s secularists or atheists. 

To avoid copyright problems, I present you with Todd’s by means of its URL:

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-yes-virginia-there-has-always-been-a-war-on-christmas

This being “Boxing Day” in Canada or “Tweede Kerstdag” or “Second Christmas Day” in my country of birth, this will be my last post dealing with Christmas issues for this season.  However, the effect of Christmas, that is, the birth of Jesus Christ, will continue to permeate these posts. From beginning to whenever these posts are concluded, the reality of Christ will underlie every single one of future posts, though He will not be mentioned by name in most.

In distinction from secularists and liberals who want to reduce the scope of religion to the private and personal, I define religion “wholistically.”  Religion, in terms of faith and commitment, colours all I do. That, by the way, is true of everyone, including those secularists and liberals; they are just so ignorant about religion that they do not realize this about themselves and, very funny actually, deny this about themselves. Can you imagine someone being so blind to his own self?!

Well, be that as it may—and it is!—enjoy the Todd article and be enlightened about “war on Christmas.”

Post 82—The “Christmas Spirit” at McDonald

Today we are going a bit lighter as well as a bit shorter to give you the time you otherwise may not have to do your final Christmas shopping.  If you wonder how come I have the time to write this post when I probably should be shopping feverishly, well, it’s simple: I don’t. Period. Now don’t jump to the conclusion that I—or, rather, my wife and I-- are cheapskates. Remember: before you judge, if at all, be sure you have all the facts at your command. That fact is that we have decided this year to spend our gift money on persecuted people, including refugees. We see little sense in spending fortunes on gifts no one among our family and friends needs. Writing a few cheques or sending monetary gifts online or by Paypal takes off a lot of pressure—and allows me the time to write this post.

The Denison Forum recently featured a story by one Nick Pitts under the heading “250 Mcdonald's Drive-Thru Customers 'Pay It Forward'.” Since it’s a Christmassy kind of story, it is a fitting  post in this Christmas week. In Pitts’ own words, it goes like this:

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Marisabel Figueroa probably started her shift at the Lakeland, Florida McDonalds where she works expecting that day to be like any other. However, one woman's generosity set off a chain reaction that, several hours later, would leave her saying that she'd "never experienced something like that before." It all started when Torie Keene decided to pay for the order of the car behind her and specifically asked Figueroa to tell the driver Merry Christmas, rather than Happy Holidays, when she delivered the news of the free meal. 

As the cashier described, when the other driver was told that her meal had been paid for, she was so grateful that she decided to do the same for the driver behind her. The pattern continued for almost the entirety of Figueroa's six-hour shift, as some 250 customers decided to "pay it forward." 

"I just kept giving everyone the same message, and they were all so stunned and so happy,” Figueroa explained. “One lady even paid for the meals of the next three cars behind her."

After a local news station picked up the story, Keene contacted Figueroa via Facebook to express her surprise, saying that she was "only trying to brighten someone's day." It seems clear that she did that and more as the story has now made national headlines. 

I don’t know just where Pitts’ story ends and where Denison of the Forum takes over. The next few paragraphs amount to a kind of Biblical application of this apparently true story.

The thing is, most of the people that experienced the gift of a free meal and decided to continue it paid roughly what they expected to pay when they arrived at the drive-thru window. The difference is that, because someone had already covered their debt, their actions from that point forward became voluntary rather than necessary. They were given the freedom not to pay but chose to use that freedom for the betterment of others rather than just themselves. 

It's a living example of the mentality Paul describes in his first letter to the Corinthians when he spends the majority of the Epistle writing on the need to think of others before yourself and to place their rights above your own (1 Corinthians 6-14). He is clear that we are not called to make that choice out of an obligation to them but in order to simply be better representatives of Christ in their lives. As he wrote to the Galatians, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1). 

Because of Christ's sacrifice, we have been set free from the burdens of the Law. Will we use that freedom to model the kind of life to which He has called us or will we view his grace as a license for disobedience? How we answer that question speaks volumes about the nature of our relationship with God, and an unbelieving world is watching closely for our response. 

So this Christmas season, let's be intentional about using the freedom that God has granted us for His purposes rather than our own. Our heavenly Father has given us the gift of unhindered access to Himself through Christ and asked us to "pay it forward" by helping others to understand that offer as well. Will you?

The only thing I question in the above few paragraphs is that italicized clause that there was/is no obligation at work here. Presenting ourselves as better representatives of Christ is our obligation. True, it’s also our privilege, but you cannot eliminate the obligation part. And what is the problem with that?  

Maybe this “little” is a reflection of a divide between Lutheran and Calvinist thinking with the former tending towards a negative attitude towards obligation and law while the latter emphasizes that law and grace always go together. 

Perhaps the non-obligatory part is also a reflection of the influence of the general Western antipathy to law that stems way back in our history to the so-called Enlightenment.  The roots of our thought patterns go so deep and long to the point that most of us are not even aware of them; we just act, speak or think along those patterns without any further second thought. 

One of the purposes of this blog is to lay bare for you readers the reasons and roots of our accepted thought patterns or worldview. This obligation thing may be one of those unexamined items in our Western culture. 

I guess I ended up not so short after all nor so light. Next time just read the story without the comments, enjoy it and ponder it for yourself. Maybe even go to Burger King and initiate the same story to see what happens, Christmas or not. Oh, sorry, it was McDonalds, not BK. No matter, for when it's spring, can summer be far way? When you see Big Mac, can BK be far away?