Vigils Reading

THE RESURRECTION OF ALL FLESH

From “The Eternal Year” by Fr Karl Rahner2

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We children of the earth may love the earth; we must love her, even when

she terrifies us and makes us tremble with her misery and her destiny of death.

For ever since Christ, through his death and resurrection, penetrated the earth

for all time, her misery has become provisional and a mere test of our faith in

her innermost mystery, which is the risen One himself. Our experience does not

tell us that he is the mysterious meaning of her misery; by no means! It is our

faith that tells us this. The faith that offers blessed consolation to all that we

experience in life, the faith that can love the earth because she is, or is in the

process of becoming, the “body” of the risen One.

We do not need to leave her, for the life of God dwells in her. When we

want both the God of infinity (how can we help wanting him?) and the familiar

earth, as it is and as it shall become, when we want both for our eternally free

homeland, there is one path to both! For in the resurrection of the Lord, God

has shown that he has accepted the earth for all time… The flesh is the hinge of

salvation.

The hereafter to every exigency of sin and death is not somewhere in the

life hereafter; it has come down to us and lives in the innermost reality of our

flesh. The most sublime religiosity of seclusion from the world would not fetch

the God of our life and the salvation of this earth from the distance of his

eternity; and it would not even reach him in his world. But he himself has come

to us. And he has transformed what we are and what we still want to consider

as the gloomy, earthly dwelling place of our “spiritual nature”: he has

transformed the flesh. Ever since that event, mother earth bears nothing but

transformed children. For his resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection

of all flesh.

One thing, of course, is necessary for this event – which we can never undo

– to become the blessedness of our existence: he must burst forth from the grave

of our hearts. He must rise from the core of our being, where he is as power and

promise. He is there, and yet something remains to be done. He is there, yet it

is still Holy Saturday, and it will continue to be Holy Saturday until the last day,

until that day that will be the cosmic Easter. And this rising takes place beneath

the freedom of our faith. It is taking place as an event of living faith that draws

us into the colossal eruption of all earthly reality into its own glorification, the

splendid transfiguration that has already begun with the resurrection of Christ.

2 The Eternal Year, Helicon Press: Baltimore MD 1964. pp.93-95.5