Kathleen Rushton reflects on how John 20:1-31 speaks of the death-resurrection of Jesus in God’s evolving and unfinished universe.

We shall hear John 20 proclaimed in the Easter season liturgies. This chapter focuses our attention on the Risen Jesus who empowers the people of God every day of the year. Augustine described the Christian community: “We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song.”

I shall first discuss the death-resurrection of Jesus within God’s purpose in creation by exploring how “In the beginning …” (Jn 1:1) evokes biblical meanings. And how Greek speaking people of that time understood the expression. The two understandings help us to consider the death-resurrection in the light of science and evolution today.

Creation and the Death-Resurrection of Jesus

Cosmology is the study of the universe — our effort to use all we know from the natural sciences to understand the whole universe, including how it came into being. In the Scriptures, the cosmology of creation is presented as the Garden of God. We read in Genesis 2 that God “planted a garden in Eden, in the East” (Gen 2:8). Like a gardener, God cultivated it (Gen 2:9) and walked in it (Gen 3:8). Elsewhere, God is described explicitly as a gardener (Numbers 24:6; 4 Maccabees 1:29).

John begins with a Prologue (Jn 1:1-18) which sets the tone, introduces concepts, characters and contains clues to what will unfold in the story.

The Gospel begins by recalling the garden of Genesis: “In the beginning (En archē)” (Jn 1:1) and it ends with a garden: “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden, there was a new tomb …” (Jn 19:41). This is the only Gospel that places the death-resurrection of Jesus in a garden. There are references to the Genesis creation story. Jesus rose on the first day of the week (Jn 20:1) and also appears to his disciples on the first day of the week (Jn 20:19). This links the incarnation and death-resurrection with the Genesis creation story, suggesting God’s unfinished, evolving creation.

John 1:1-5 has other creation motifs — light, life and darkness — which flow throughout the Gospel. As God is central to biblical creation, so is Jesus who is inserted into the story of God’s ongoing creation.

John’s prologue portrays Jesus as Wisdom-Sophia who was with God at the beginning of the work of creation (Proverbs 8:22-36). Through his life and death-resurrection Jesus works to complete the unfinished work of God.

Creation and Greek Cosmology

“In the beginning (En archē)” (Jn 1:1) recalls the cosmology of Genesis and the Wisdom books.

In the first-century Hellenistic society, this same expression conveyed many philosophical and cosmological notions.

En archē is a “beginning” that does not itself have a beginning and which has continuous existence.

Professor of Classics Rosemary Wright explains that for early philosophers en archē referred to “what there was before there was anything else; it has a role as providing a causal explanation for the world and its phenomena but does not have to be explained itself.”

The evangelist John uses a cosmology informed by both the Genesis and Wisdom cosmology and Hellenistic cosmology to insert Jesus into God’s evolving, unfinished story of creation. This raises questions for our own understanding of the death-resurrection of Jesus in the light of our understanding of cosmology.

Death-Resurrection of Jesus and Evolution

From an evolutionary perspective death is a biological necessity and a fact of evolutionary life.

In the Jewish and Christian accounts of “the Fall” death is seen as a penalty.

Traditional Christianity taught that through procreation everyone inherited Adam’s original sin. And even though original sin is forgiven through the sacrament of the baptism, sinful desires persist in us leading us into sin.

Within God’s purpose for creation, Jesus’s death-resurrection saved humanity from the evolutionary destiny of individual death, rather than from sin.

British theologian Jack Mahoney calls this “the evolutionary achievement of Jesus.”He explains that Jesus accepted his death “as a human being and in his rising from the dead, he achieved a new phase of evolutionary existence, into which he could now usher his fellow human beings.”

The Gospel Prologue and the death-resurrection of Jesus, and our reading of the Gospel with an evolutionary understanding can integrate the biblical themes of promise and liberation.

We can embrace prophetic justice and the covenantal promises that Scripture associates with a creative and renewing God. We can be affirmed and challenged to participate with a wisdom which inspires a transforming spirituality and ethical action in our complex, evolving, beautiful, suffering and global world in which the works of God are unfinished.

John’s Gospel repeatedly calls us to participate with Jesus in completing the works of God in the unfinished universe — there are 28 references to God or Jesus or disciples working to complete the works of God. We can participate in God’s universe which recognises creation as a process rather than an event.

This includes the resurrection of Jesus, which Benedict XVI spoke of as being like: “a qualitative leap in the history of ‘evolution’ and of life in general towards a new future life, towards a new world which, starting from Christ, already continuously permeates this world of ours, transforms it and draws it to itself.” (Easter Vigil Homily, 2006).

John 20 concludes by referring to the believers of all times (Jn 20:30-31), in other words, the Church. Pope Francis calls us to enter into God’s creative process for in “the Christian understanding of the world the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ” (Laudato Si’ par 99).

With Augustine we can say we are an Easter people and we can follow Francis’s advice: “Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope” (LS par 244).

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 280 April 2023: 24-25