Chapter Talk
Resurrection: From Emptiness to Fullness
In the oil painting (French 19th Century) showing Peter and John running to the sepulchre on Easter morning, in the early light, their expressions are tense, anxious, full of longing, perhaps of hope also, but not yet joyful hope; there is a sense of desperation in their faces and in their hurrying figures. We know the rest. They find the tomb empty. They are thirsting for the fullness, the full reality of Christ’s presence, and they find emptiness. Yet it is precisely this emptiness which vivifies them, transforms their human expectation, so fearful and hesitant, into theological hope.
Emptiness has been a prominent element during the Sacred Triduum, but an emptiness of grief and near despair. This supreme emptiness is traversed by Christ alone; he cannot, will not take anyone with him into it. He wants to endure it for man’s sake, so that, in the end, he can fill it for man’s sake. Romanos Melodos in Hymn 35 describes a dialogue between Mother and Son at the foot of the Cross, where Christ explains how, like a doctor, he must strip off his clothes, so as to reach that place where the mortally ill are lying and there heal them. The Mother pleads to be taken with him. He warns her that the whole creation will be shaken, mountains will tremble, the tombs will be emptied. We are not told whether it is possible to follow the Son into this chaos or as Balthasar movingly puts it in his Mysterium Paschale: “whether all that remains is the anguished following gaze of Mary as her Son disappears into the inaccessible darkness where no one can reach him. The apostles wait in the emptiness. Or at least in the non-comprehension that there is a Resurrection and what it can be. The Magdalen can only seek the One she loves at the hollow tomb, weeping from vacant eyes, groping after him with empty hands.” This subjective experience of emptiness is ascribed to Christ himself in his total solidarity with mankind, his desire to experience all that man may experience, his mission to substitute himself for man in order to transform man’s pain and solitude, his poverty and powerlessness in death. Balthasar quotes another text which makes Christ say: “I looked into the abyss and cried, Father, where are you? But I heard only the everlasting, ungovernable storm… And when I looked from the immeasurable world to the eye of God, it was an empty socket… that stared back at men.” Total bleakness then that the Son of Man desired to know propter nos, for us.
We are not told whether it is possible to follow the Son into this chaos or as Balthasar movingly puts it in his Mysterium Paschale: “whether all that remains is the anguished following gaze of Mary as her Son disappears into the inaccessible darkness where no one can reach him. The apostles wait in the emptiness. Or at least in the non-comprehension that there is a Resurrection and what it can be. The Magdalen can only seek the One she loves at the hollow tomb, weeping from vacant eyes, groping after him with empty hands.” This subjective experience of emptiness is ascribed to Christ himself in his total solidarity with mankind, his desire to experience all that man may experience, his mission to substitute himself for man in order to transform man’s pain and solitude, his poverty and powerlessness in death. Balthasar quotes another text which makes Christ say: “I looked into the abyss and cried, Father, where are you? But I heard only the everlasting, ungovernable storm… And when I looked from the immeasurable world to the eye of God, it was an empty socket… that stared back at men.” Total bleakness then that the Son of Man desired to know propter nos, for us.
We have this passive endurance of emptiness on Holy Saturday. And then Christ rises from the tomb. The emptiness, as we saw, itself becomes a sign of hope. “He is not here – he has risen, as he said.” Resurrexit, sicut dixit. Balthasar has another fine passage on the empty tomb. “What does become visible is, first of all, the empty tomb, filled as it is with heavenly radiance. John strongly emphasises the simultaneity of the emptiness, the absence and the heavenly light (‘two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet’): from out of the emptiness of the death of God streams forth glory and sounds the Resurrection word.”
Already on the Cross, we saw, as it were, the sacrament of this streaming forth of glory, when Jesus’ Heart is “emptied” by the soldier’s lance and there flows from his hollowed-out side water and blood and Spirit. Here our theme of emptiness rejoins that of thirst, Sitientes. Out of Jesus’ Heart flow springs of living water that slake man’s thirst for ever. There is another wonderful passage from “Mysterium Paschale” here: “at the moment when he suffers the most absolute thirst Jesus pours himself forth as the everlasting spring … the opening of the heart is the gift of what is most interior and personal for public use: the open, emptied out space is accessible to all.”
As we have seen, this theological understanding of the event on Calvary was absent during Good Friday and Holy Saturday, though the seed of comprehension was sown in John’s mind and reflection and hindsight will perfect his intuition. He is clearly impressed by what he witnessed. “An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true: he knows that he is speaking the truth so that you also may come to believe.” However, we may assume that if Jesus, in his desire for solidarity, experiences total emptiness, on the Cross and beyond, in his sojourn among the dead, the disciples and bystanders do so as well, in their own measure. It is only after Jesus has risen, (and before any of his appearances) that the negative emptiness becomes a positive one, that the emptiness of the tomb co-exists with a supernatural ambience. Again, it is John who grasps the difference. He saw – this “emptiness” – and believed.
Now there follows a time of fullness, though perhaps not what we normally understand by fullness, strange as this fullness must have seemed to the disciples. The ordinary categories of human terminology do not seem to apply very successfully to these 40 days but Jesus himself employs our language and so must we. Before his departure, we recall his promise of the coming of fullness of joy, inextricably bound up with his return. “You will see me again.” “Your joy will be full.” And indeed, when we consider the apparitions after the Resurrection, there is a certain vocabulary of abundance. The disciples in John 21 are almost unable to bring in the net of fish so great is the haul. It “was full of large fish, 153 of them.” We note also that several of His appearances are in the context of a meal, therefore of communion, happiness, plenitude, in the natural as well as the supernatural sense. He eats food with them; he prepares food for them. Think of Emmaus and the breaking of the bread; the upper room when he eats the broiled fish before them; the Shore of Tiberias when he makes them breakfast.
There is a sense of fulfilment in his personal dealings with individual disciples. Loose ends, so to speak, are tied up. Thomas is invited to explore the hollow wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet and side. The gouged flesh of the Lord brings him to a fullness of belief. Peter, whose heart is empty and sorrowful, because of his betrayal, is restored likewise to a full hope and the confidence of love. He, particularly, is called to fullness of discipleship. Do you love me more than these? The challenge quickens him, fills up the measure of his generous heart to overflowing. The plenitude, fullness of governance of the Church is bestowed on him. Feed my lambs, feed my sheep. Later in Acts, the ordained number of the college of disciples will be restored to its completion; and meanwhile the Holy Spirit who is the fullness of Jesus and the Father has been breathed into the disciples. They are told to go and preach to all nations, attended by signs that will attest to the fullness of the new dispensation. It is the fullness of time. Jesus himself explained all that to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and again, in the same 24th Chapter of Luke he says: “‘Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Fullness of understanding, fullness of time. And there is the promise of the full outpouring of the Spirit on the Church at Pentecost. “I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24:49) Emptiness has become the servant of fullness or simply one of its names. This whole aspect of Easter is mirrored in our monastic life, so simple and denuded in many ways, yet in that very dépouillement, filled with the fullness of the life of Christ; the simultaneity again of emptiness and radiance. As we proceed towards Pentecost, the theme of fullness begins to take precedence. The Easter collects abound in the sense of implicit fulfilment and victory and one of the Feria IV of Week 4 expresses this explicitly. It can be our conclusion: “O God, life of the faithful, glory of the humble, blessedness of the just, graciously hear the prayers of your suppliants, so that those who thirst for the promises of your bountiful goodness, may be filled forever with your abundance.”
