Never mind what the world calls ‘normal’
Earlier in the week I was able to acknowledge in myself the fact that there is always a rather childlike disappointment in me at the end of the Easter Octave when the Gospels for the day cease to relate the details of the resurrection appearances and return to ‘normal,’ that is, to the adult public life and ministry before Jesus has risen, while Jesus is on ‘this side’ of glory. This year the change is in one sense even more abrupt, for as soon as the Octave finished we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation, so we went from the Gospel of so-called Doubting Thomas to that of the Angel Gabriel announcing Jesus’s incarnation. Since I was on a kind of Ignatian retreat at the time, about to meditate on the Passion, the effect was even more striking and instructive. Christ is risen. Though we celebrate a diachronic liturgical cycle in which we replay the history of Christ’s life from Annunciation to Ascension, in truth all these mysteries are synchronic, a celebration of the Christ who was once incarnate in human history and is now risen and glorified at the Right Hand of the Father and yet with us still to the end of time, with us as Lord, Messiah. When the Gospel “reverts to normal”, as it were, I need to retain the sense of Christ as Principium et Finis, Alpha and Omega. The pattern of Christ’s life is not so much that he has days of glory and days of more prosaic human interactions. This would be a projection of my own spirituality. The real point of the New Testament is that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, has by his resurrection, shown himself to be a person who is God, who in his ‘ordinary’ life was manifesting the Father, and whose apotheosis is not the opposite of his ordinary (in the sense of diurnal) life but the fullest expression of his person. Unless I understand it thus, there is the danger of a kind of split identity in my own faith, which is constantly seeking the experience of being removed from the ordinary and its challenges. To be a Christian is to be baptised into Christ’s death so as to share the life of the resurrection. That means that my own apotheosis will not be complete until I have undergone death, but that even that death, like the smallest detail of my daily life, is now united with Christ. He has transferred me to his kingdom of Light. As the rite of baptism reminds me, I am to walk always as a child of the Light, amidst the half-light of the most prosaic routine, the trials of deep darkness or the sunlit uplands of spiritual progress. As a Christian, the resurrection is not something I am waiting for but something I am waiting to be completed in me, so that I will be recognisable as myself, for I was not made to die in sin, but to live in the Risen life of Christ, with Him at the Father’s Right Hand. This is my identity now, my id-entis, my sameness of being, not just with the “ordinary” earthly Jesus, but with the Christ who is risen, whose state is to be alive, to be stronger than sin and death. The different phases and challenges, the mysteries if you will, of my own life, are not only diachronic, that is, they only will only acquire meaning when I achieve the projected ‘happy ending’ of my history. They are also synchronic, which is what St Paul – though he probably would not put it in quite such terms himself – describes the coping mechanism for the Christian: “We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” Paradoxically, therefore, I cannot subscribe to what the world calls “normal”. It is not “normal” to tolerate sin because it is incompatible with my true identity, in the same way that eating my breakfast on all fours off the floor would not be compatible with my true identity even though “it doesn’t hurt anyone”. The feasting of Eastertide then, is not a time to exorcise the self-restraint of Lent and revert to “normal”. Instead it is the time when the graces which flow from the liturgical celebration of the Paschal mystery, allow the Christian to be renewed in an identity which makes it normal to be zealous in looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
