The Resurrection of the Lord
April 20, 2025 — Year C
Readings: Ac 10:34a, 37-43 / Ps 118 / Col 3:1-4  / Jn 20:1-9
by Rev. Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant

In Lexington where I live, we have a little bit of a reading group, and what we landed on at the beginning of Lent this year, was a work which included some homilies, done in 1981 by a German theologian.  His name was Joseph Ratzinger.  You may remember him; he  became Cardinal Archbishop shortly after Pope John Paul II was made Pope in 1978.  This book, by whom I believe now is the greatest theologian of the 20^th century (although none of us knew it at the time), was published in 1981.  This was a series of homilies that he gave in Munich in 1981.  

Looking at the piercing of Christ on the cross, and at the Resurrection, Cardinal Ratzinger took a different starting point.  It was captivating to me.   When you think of the Resurrection, what image comes to mind?  The scripture doesn’t give us that moment that shows what it was like.  We could look at the Shroud of Turin and we’re free to believe that, somehow in its miraculous way, it captures what happened beyond our knowing.  And so, I think we imagine the stories of the dazzling angels.  So, for me anyway, it’s sort of dazzling.  

But actually, when you see all the stories of the Resurrection, whether it’s the Sunday night in the Upper Room where Jesus joins the disciples, He walks through the door.  So, obviously, there’s something very different here, but He’s still in a body.  He’s still got the wounds.  He’s the same, but He’s not.  By the Sea of Tiberius, He makes a point that He’s eating fish for breakfast, like they are.  Other examples are the story of the women who are at the grave – Mary Magdalene thinks He is the gardener.  She sees Him but doesn’t recognize Him.  On the road to Emmaus, He is not recognized until the breaking of the bread.  Something profound is going on.  

Within what we call the west, there are two dimensions and Pope John Paul II was keenly aware of those.  Of course, Cardinal Ratzinger became the main theologian of the Church and then later became Pope himself in 2005.  So, if you look at what is between Greece and Italy, Greece belongs to the eastern part of the empire,  but from Italy all the way over to Germany, Austria, Finland, England, and Ireland are the western part of the empire.  I guess you could say that Poland is in the middle – it touches both the east and the west.  So, in the two parts of the empire, the art is different.  We have our representational art here; it looks like people.  We don’t want it to become idolatry, but it looks like people.  It’s got three dimensions.  In the east the Orthodox art is much more mystical, and so when you see it, you are seeing icons, perhaps the famous icon of the Trinity, or the icons of Mary with the Infant Jesus.  These are clearly not meant to be exact representations of people because they are only two-dimensional, not three.  They are created this way so that we pass through it to the deeper, mysterious, mystical reality that it leads us through.  

It turns out that this was where Cardinal Ratzinger made the point that, as far as the Resurrection goes, in the eastern part of the west, that half (all the Balkans, and Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Greece) have looked at the Resurrection in a very different way.  If you want to see it, you can see pictures of it; just punch in “the Harrowing of Hell” or “Descent to Hell.”  Remember when we pray the Apostle’s Creed, “He descended to Hell,” to the land of the dead, not to the permanent separation of God for those who have rejected or unconfessed, but the waiting, beginning with Adam and Eve, all the just people waiting for God to set things right.  And so, in the east, since there was no image of the Resurrection, the image they developed was the Harrowing of Hell.  Now, a harrow is an agricultural implement that basically roughs up the ground.  After all the vegetables, fruits, and grains are all harvested, the earth needs to be turned over so it can receive the rain, so it can receive the seed, somewhat like aerating a lawn.  The harrow is a machine that churns up, so we speak of the Harrowing of Hell.  Go online; you’ll see icon after icon after icon and with some of them, you can find the commentary, so you can even understand the details of what the symbols are.  

Basically, the Harrowing of Hell, the Descent to Hades (Sheol in Hebrew), is where Christ goes to bust up Hell. It’s very physical because he comes to break open Hell, to break all the locks, to let the light in to where there was only dark.  So, in the icons, first you see the images of Him going to Adam and Eve who have been waiting for so long, and to all the just souls who have been waiting for that great moment of redemption.  This becomes the final act in Christ’s saving work.  He has come to earth, He has taken on our flesh, and now He has died, which permits the final act – to go down to the land of the dead and say, “I did not make you to live in a dungeon.  Come out.”  The story of Lazarus is a foreshadowing of that.   “Come out,” He says to all the souls who were waiting.  So that’s the redemption.  

The harrowing is that He shows no mercy to Satan.  Satan turns out to be a nothing, just a minor thing.  The Satan that had everybody terrorized is now seen whimpering in the corner.  The death that had everyone terrorized no longer has any power. 

Now we read the Psalms with a different mindset.  Think of Psalm 24.  “Oh gates, lift high your heads.  Grow high you ancient doors.  Let him enter, the king of glory.”  He’ll break those gates open.  It’s physical, it’s athletic, it’s muscular.  Who is that king of glory?  The Lord, the mighty, the valiant.  Oh gates, lift high your heads, because death has no sting.  He has entered the world of death for our sake, His love for us, and blown it up at the middle.  

What Cardinal Ratzinger understood too, was that this is the story that applies; this is a pattern that gets repeated all through history.  For Israel certainly had the experience of the Exodus of being set free from slavery, from the dungeon of darkness, of pure solitude and the loneliness of no connection.  All that is done away with.  This is not just for once; this is a pattern of God.  It is a rhythm.  Lost, then found.  Israel would experience not only the Exodus, but hundreds of years later, the exile.  And the Church would navigate in our own way. The new Israel would navigate seas and waves and tides and winds that we could not have imagined,  every generation going through the pattern.  To even up to now; to yourselves and your stories.  Even in those moments when you felt like death warmed over, you somehow experienced that there was a new life under all this and this is true today as well.  

To go all the way back to the story of Abraham going up the mountain with Isaac ready to sacrifice him and Isaac’s asking where the lamb will come from.  Abraham says the Lord will provide.  And there he is bound on the altar and they look and see the ram caught in the thicket, and that becomes the sacrifice.  The derivative of Isaac’s name is “laughter.”  Ultimately, there is joy for the person of faith because this is the way God has set up the world.  It is a joy that courses in a laugh.  Probably most of us have been in certain situations where we thought we would never laugh again.  But no, we have too much evidence to the contrary.  With Isaac, he laughed to see the lamb, as if to say that, Yeah, I need to learn to believe that when God says, “I got this,” He means it.