Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

DEATH AND NEW LIFE IN CHRIST
By Fr Johannes Pinsk5

The tragedy and paradox of all cosmic life is that it is itself consumed in the process of living. Through living it dies. This paradox however, is entirely absent from the new kind of life that is founded upon the resurrection. Here the organism is no longer subject to wear and tear, and the struggle for existence is at an end. Christ died once; he has risen from the dead, and now will die no more. This, surely, is the most stirring event in human history, so far exceeding our experience and imagining that we can scarcely conceive of it as a human fiction. Who could have invented such a thing, faced with the constant spectacle of the decline and death of the human organism? The history of religious thought shows that unaided reason has never resigned itself to the idea of bodily resurrection. It has always repugned it as completely untenable. That a human body should really have risen from the dead is, therefore, no invention of the human mind. It is a superhuman reality, and alone the object of the Easter faith of Christendom.

But that is not all. Christ’s resurrection is no isolated event. This new life is not confined to him. It is not restricted to his own humanity. He becomes the Head and Father of a new humanity, joined to him in the reality of the new life, which resides not merely in the intellect and will, but in the whole being. In principle, Christ’s resurrection has already achieved the transformation of the whole of humanity into this new life. Such the mystery of our Easter faith. The Eastern liturgy expresses it with wonderful assurance in a passage taken from an Easter sermon of St John Chrysostom and read out on the first day of Easter: “Christ is risen; no dead are left in the grave.” This faith of ours is not to be refuted by pointing to the countless millions of the dead who lie buried in the earth and in the sea. No one denies this. Indeed, we are only too conscious of it.

What is it, then, that our faith affirms? Not that there are no dead bodies left in the earth, but that these bodies are not truly dead. To be truly dead means to be dissolved forever, utterly annihilated. But when the disruptive forces of the world have done their worst, there remains, in virtue of Christ’s resurrection, some mysterious, indestructible, vital energy within the body — wherever it is buried — which will never finally and utterly forsake it, but which one day will raise it up again in glory. Only in such faith as this can we say in all honesty: death is truly conquered; no one is really dead. Such faith has its roots in St Paul’s teaching that we are all risen with Christ, and enthroned with him above the heavens.

5
From Meditations on the Church, introduction by Bishop John Wright, New York, 1967, pp. 63 B 64.