Resurrection: Life Being Transformed

Easter is the celebration of life being transformed. It recognises that life triumphs over death. As the preface of the Mass for the Dead says: “life is changed not ended”.

Christian belief and practice is centrally about resurrection. In the not-too-distant past, theological discussion about the resurrection of Christ tended to concentrate on just how “real” resurrection could be. Did Christ’s resurrection happen in the real objective world or was it something that occurred in the minds and hearts of the disciples but not in the real biosphere?

This was a serious debate and it suited the atmosphere of secularism and individualism that people needed to grapple with at that time. But it was also a distraction because it obscured two other important dimensions of resurrection to which we really did, and still do, need to give serious attention.

In Planet Earth

One of these dimensions is that the resurrection of Christ was and is an event that occurs, as we would say now, in the planet Earth. The resurrected Christ is not a ghost or a disembodied soul somewhere out in space. Nor will we be at our resurrection. Resurrection is bodily and happens within this planet. Belief in it commits us forever to the planet Earth in all its material and spiritual dimensions, including our relationships to the other Earth beings and processes with which our lives interact.

We do not leave this planet at death by collapsing into nothing or by escaping into a ghostly form of celestial travel in space. If we leave a ravaged environment around us, we will stay ravaged along with it until someone restores it. It is not just our home for the next few years or decades but, in the timescale we can imagine, for ever. We don’t just disappear from this planet at death. We shift over into some other dimensions of it that we had not paid much attention to before.

A Social Transformation

A second important but often overshadowed dimension of resurrection is that it is not primarily about individuals. In the New Testament communities, beliefs about a resurrected Christ are that resurrection involves them all. Hence so much emphasis on the community as the body of Christ. The life strands of the Christian community and the risen Christ are interwoven to the point of identification.

Resurrection is not then just about our own individual lives — my resurrection, your resurrection, Christ’s resurrection. Resurrection is a corporate project and an ongoing one. We are engaged in community transformation and social transformation.

At Easter, then, we are searching again for an ongoing transformation of the community. Our own personal transformation is important but it is not just about that. Easter is about more than a collection of individuals enjoying a better lifestyle than they had before or even having a better life after death than before. And community transformation is not just a vague ideal. Most of us have seen it embodied now and then, and here and there, in the concrete actions that characterise a life-affirming community.

A Life-Affirming Community

Some years ago, the Council for World Mission provided this description of what a “life-affirming” community would look like:

• It lives a spirituality of engagement, which is reflected in its worship, and in the nurture and support of its members;

• it is attuned to the wider communities in which it is set and is alert to the needs of the world, so that it is willing to stand alongside and speak out with those who are suffering or are marginalised;

• it does not work alone, being in active partnership with other groups who share similar concerns;

• it is a learning community, with its members taking seriously their re-reading of the Bible and their reflection on their experience, both as individuals and as a community.

If we are becoming like this, or on the way to being like this, we are a community of transformation, a community in ongoing resurrection.

Yet most of us also know that we are not yet like this. Within our communities, there still remain defects — personal, communal and structural — which are barriers to achieving that transformed life. Ours is a Church with alarming defects; and in recent years spectacularly so. The period of Lent leading up to Easter has been about actively seeking to eliminate these barriers. This is not just an individual exercise. It is a community exercise, a corporate exercise. It includes a reformation of the community itself, reformation of the Church.

At the present time we are experiencing “synodality”, our “walking together” — a process which, if we can get it right, may be a powerful tool to renew, reorganise, redirect and bring about a transformation of the Church at both the local and international level.

Walking Together: Synodality

In the way this “walking together” is being understood today in the Catholic Church (slightly differently in other Churches), one of its major dimensions is “participation” (the two other major dimensions being “communion” and “mission”).

“Participation” emphasises that we all have gifts, a rich diversity of gifts, to share. We are called together to pray, listen, analyse, dialogue, discern and offer advice on making pastoral decisions. There is an emphasis here also on ensuring the inclusion of those at the margins or who feel excluded.

This is not about bishops “consulting” the people. It is about all members of the Church playing a part. This is something new, something unusual here within the Catholic Church. Many smaller groups and organisations within the Catholic Church and many non-Catholic Churches have tried this kind of participation in the past. But the sheer scale of the attempt to refashion the whole enormous institution of the Catholic Church in the style of synodality is new. No one is quite sure how it will work or whether it will work at all.

Where I live, beside the Auckland harbour, it is a common sight to see a huge passenger or cargo ship moving rapidly up the harbour at a seemingly impossible pace.

At a certain point, this enormous momentum is redirected as the bow of the ship is dragged around in a great arc away from its direction up the harbour. Its own engines and steerage with a team of tugs push and pull this behemoth around at right angles to its former momentum and force it towards its berth against a wharf.

The huge bulk of the institutional Church with its thousands of passengers and crew, its structures and power centres, is gradually being hauled around, partly using its own momentum built up over thousands of years, partly powered by its own engines, and partly pushed and pulled by smaller forces towards a new destination. This is the task
of synodality.

Even the movement towards synodality, new as it is, has its own momentum. So the language is beginning to change. What started as a lead-up to a “bishops’ synod” is already morphing into an “ecclesial synod”. An ecclesial synod is more than and wider than a bishops’ synod. The language changes as people walk together.

Resurrection is a life transforming process. It is a communal process and a planetary process of tugging and pulling on the huge momentum of a defective and unruly Church yet still full of power and life. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 280 April 2023: 4-5