Easter Thursday

THE BEGINNING OF GLORY

By Fr Karl Rahner5

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If someone had already lit the fuse for a tremendous explosion, but was

still waiting for the explosion which will follow with dreadful certainty, they

certainly would not say that the lighting of the fuse was an event of the past.

The beginning of an event which is still in course of development but is moving

inexorably and irresistibly towards its culmination, is not past but is a kind of

present, and already contains its future; it is a movement which continues by

comprising past and present in a…real unity. These concepts must be clear if

we are to attempt to say something meaningful about our Lord’s resurrection.

Easter is not the celebration of a past event. The alleluia is not for what

was; Easter proclaims a beginning which has already decided the remotest

future. The resurrection means that the beginning of glory has already started.

And what began in that way is in process of fulfilment. Does it take long? It

lasts thousands of years because at least that short space of time is needed for

an incalculable plenitude of reality and history to force itself through the brief

death-agony of a gigantic transformation (which we call natural history and

world history) to its glorious fulfilment. Everything is in movement. Nothing

has an abiding place here.

We are gradually finding out, at least in outline, that nature has its own

orientated history, that nature is in movement, that it develops and unfolds in

time and by an incomprehensible self-transcendence behind which there stands

the creative power of God, attains every higher level of reality. We are gradually

realizing that human history has its purposeful course and is not merely the

eternal return of the identical… that the nations are summoned in a certain

sequence and have each their definite historical mission; that history in its

totality has its pattern and an irreversible direction.

But what is the goal of this whole movement in nature, history and spirit?

Is everything advancing towards a collapse, to meaninglessness and

nothingness? Are we only going to lose our way? Is what happens ultimately

only the demonstration of the emptiness and hollowness of all things, which are

unmasked in the course of the history of nature and the world? Are all the

comedies and tragedies of this history mere play-acting which can only

deludedly be taken seriously while they are still going on and are not yet played

out?

We Christians say that this whole history of nature and humankind has a

meaning, a blessed and transfigured, all-embracing meaning, no longer mixed

with meaninglessness and darkness, a meaning which is infinite reality and

unity comprising all possibilities and glory in one. And when we invoke the

absolute meaning in this way, we call it God. God as he is in himself is the goal

of all history. He himself is at hand. All the streams of change in us flow

towards him; they are not lost in the bottomless void of nothingness and

meaninglessness. But when we say this, when we declare infinity to be the

meaning of the finite, eternity the meaning of time and God himself (by grace)

to be the purport of his creature, we are not speaking simply of a distant, not

yet wholly realized ideal, which we hope vaguely may be realized one day but

which for the moment and for an incalculable time is still a distant future

existing only in thought. No, we say Easter, resurrection. That means, it has

already begun, the definitive future has already started.

5 Everyday Faith. Karl Rahner. Herder & Herder 1968, pp. 71-72.11