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I say ‘Happy Easter’ because the Church is still journeying through the season of Easter, fifty days of celebrating and meditating on what Christ’s resurrection means for our hurting and broken world.
Very often, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the images and hymns that depict Christ’s resurrection use the language of God’s victory over the forces of both darkness and death. And yes, those two things are frequently paired. One folksy hymn goes, “Up from the grave he rose / a mighty triumph over his foes / arose a victor over the dark domain / Christ lives forever with his saints to reign.”
In song and image, then, we oftentimes hear of the resurrected Christ as a heavenly King and all-powerful Ruler, a victor and conqueror who has forever vanquished darkness and death, and who now austerely rules while seated upon his heavenly throne.
These are undoubtedly ancient and powerful ways of talking about God and the Resurrection. Just look at the Psalm for today as well as the excerpt from the Book of Revelation. This imagery is undoubtedly there.
And yet lately I have found myself interrogating and wrestling with these images of victory. Fresh off of the shooting in Buffalo, with the war in Ukraine raging on, and having just tipped over 1 million COVID-19 deaths in this country, what does it mean to say that God has been victorious? What does it mean to say that God has forever conquered the forces of darkness and death? And as Anglicans called to interrogate our imperial and colonial past, what are we to make of these images of Christ as King, victor, and imperial ruler seated atop a throne?
These are very difficult questions that any person calling themselves Christian in the 21st century has to wrestle with. And unfortunately for you, I’m not really building up to a solution or even possibly a very a solid point here. The only thing I can offer is that I have found some solace and meaning in reflecting on other ancient images of Christ’s Resurrection, images that predate the fateful merging of Christianity and Empire.
In the late second and third century – that is, well before Constantine declared Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire – early Christians depicted Christ’s Resurrection in their art using three surprising motifs. These early visual icons of God’s resurrection can be seen over and over again in some of the earliest churches and most predominantly in the Roman catacombs.*
The first and most prevalent way of depicting Christ’s Resurrection was of Christ as Jonah in the belly of the whale. Jonah in the Belly of the Whale. Here, then, resurrection has something to do with a reluctant prophet getting swallowed up and spit out by a dangerous beast. It’s about being quite literally surrounded and overwhelmed and becoming clear about one’s purpose in the process, only to be spit right back out into what remained for Jonah a very dangerous situation.
A second early icon of Resurrection refers to that story in the Book of Daniel about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which I’m sure you all know by heart. It’s the one about three friends thrown into a fiery furnace by the King of Babylon. These images show three friends calmly singing and praising God even as flames encircled them. Miraculously, like Jonah they remain unharmed. And so here too Christ’s Resurrection must have something to do with being faithful even in the midst of danger, as well as the promise of miraculous survival.
A third icon of resurrection was that of Noah emerging bleary-eyed from the depths of the ark, surprisingly still alive despite his entire world having been destroyed by rising waters. In one fresco, he looks absolutely shocked both by the state of the world and the miracle of his own survival. God’s rainbow and a dove with an olive branch are painted in the corner.
These are surprising images which together offer us a sense of how early Christians were thinking about what Christ’s resurrection meant. None of them are particularly victorious. Miraculous, certainly, but not victorious. None of them align God with royalty and empire. In fact, quite the opposite. These images of resurrection dwell on struggle and survival. They are about being true to God amidst rising waters, encircling flames, and they are about being faithful even when trapped inside the belly of the beast.
Which finally brings me to today’s Gospel. Today’s Gospel passage includes some of Jesus’s most familiar words to the disciples. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” These words are so familiar to Christians that we occasionally miss the fraught context in which they were first uttered.
But if you zoom out just a bit, you can see a bigger picture. You’ll see that like Jonah swallowed by the whale, Jesus’s life is about to be overcome by external circumstances. Like the three friends thrown into a fiery furnace, Jesus is being encircled by danger.
Judas, who will go on to betray Jesus, has just been dismissed from the table. Jesus’s horrific death by crucifixion is closing in. And yet instead of talking about revenge, or even of resistance, Jesus teaches that remaining faithful to God means loving one another, even to the point of laying down one’s life for one’s friends.
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* https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2019/1/11/rethinking-early-christian-art
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