The Personal Mystery of
Pascha
Written by M.C. Steenberg.
'The life of believers
contains in itself the mystery of Easter'.{footnote}Leo the Great of Rome, Homily 71.1.{/footnote}
So says St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome in the first half of the fifth century,
in his Paschal homily at the Vigil of Holy Saturday. His words are captivating
and inspiring, yet somehow mysterious, intimating a reality that we do not
fully comprehend. Pascha exists in us, is alive in us, is realised in our very
lives as Christian believers. Here is the mystery behind the Mystery.
Somewhere, entwined with the thrall of our everyday existence, is the wonder of
the Resurrection. The Paschal reality, says Leo, subsists in our own humble
beings.
Can this be so? Can the
greatest of all mysteries, the arch-wonder and the heart of the supreme Feast
dwell in so frail a thing as our weak humanity? If the Christian community is
awake to its own state of existence, the purity, unity, and ultimate sanctity
of the Resurrection seem but a distant goal and a far cry from the reality of
our present life. We are wont more readily to identify with the sentiment of
Methodius of Olympus, who austerely portended, 'What a ship is to the land,
that our present life is to that which is immortal'{footnote}Methodius of
Olympus, On the Resurrection,
fragment I.{/footnote}—the waywardness of our sinful existence is as unstable
and ill-grounded before the divine life as the storm-tossed ocean before the
land. It seems that especially before the holiness of Pascha,
with its bright joy and radiant imagery of the victorious Lord, do we see with
greater clarity our own great distance from His perfection. Can it be we who
'contain in ourselves' the mystery of Easter? Can it be our ship-like
existence, tossed about from one storm to the next, that somehow shows forth
the great rock of stability that is the risen Christ?
Not all men have thought
so. It has been written by authors innumerable that Easter is of all things the
furthest from human reality, the one great spiritual external by which the carnal
person may be lifted out of his 'human' subsistence and into that of the
divine. Just as the sea can never be the dry land, so can sinful humanity never
be of the same mould as that perfect stability that was made wholly manifest at
the Resurrection. How great the influence this view has had on the modern
world, how much of modern Christian spirituality is founded upon its basic
premise.
Yet it is not the voice of
the Church, not the voice of the Fathers. From its earliest days, the Church
has proclaimed the unfathomable mystery of Pascha not as an addition to or
cover for weak humanity, but as a fundamental change in the very nature of what
it means to be human—a new reality brought to life in a new
man, and thence among all humankind through our rebirth in Christ. Yes,
fallen humanity still exists, and still exists as fallen; but since the moment
of the Resurrection this fallen humanity has existed in a manner never before
known in the cosmos. Fallen humanity exists in deep, interior union with the
God whom sin could not conquer, whom fallenness could not hold, whom death
itself could not defeat. The Resurrection of Christ was not simply a reality
'for Him', but a reality for us through the fullness of His human nature. By
His death and Resurrection, the very character of human existence was given new
life.
Of this defining moment
for the whole of mankind, Augustine of Hippo once wrote: 'On the third day He
rose again from the dead, the first-begotten for brethren destined to come
after Him, whom He has called into adoption as sons of God, whom also He has
deemed it meet to make His own joint-partners and
joint-heirs'.{footnote}Augustine of Hippo, Treatise on Faith and the
Creed 5.12.{/footnote} It is in Christ's Resurrection that human
adoption into sonship with God is fulfilled, and this adoption was wrought
precisely so that the true life of Christ might become the real and essential
life of man. The Resurrection of the Son is the sign of the ultimate maturation,
the full realisation of human nature. Wrote the emperor Constantine, equal to
the Apostles: 'No sooner had the radiance of the Saviour's presence appeared,
than justice took the place of wrong, a calm succeeded the confusion of the
storm, and the predictions of the prophets were all
fulfilled'.{footnote}Constantine the Great, Oration
to the Assembly of the Saints, ch. 1, in Eusebius Pamphilus' Life
of the Blessed Emperor Constantine.{/footnote}
There is a beautiful,
remarkably beautiful, depth to the inner reality which the Fathers connect to
the Resurrection. Methodius likened the life of man to the voyage of a boat
tossed about on a troubled sea; but we are reminded that we voyage through this
life with Christ—Christ who walked on the sea, for whom the waters were as
stable as dry land. We may be bound up in our sin, cast off like the prodigal
who was not worthy even to be called a servant; but Christ's Incarnation and
Resurrection were wrought for our adoption unto God not as slaves, but as sons
and daughters. Methodius knew that, in the risen Christ, the ship of human
existence had found a new pilot. 'Whence also the Word descended into our
world, and was incarnate of our body, in order that, having fashioned it into a
more divine image, He might raise it incorrupt, although it has been dissolved
by time'.{footnote}Methodius, On the
Resurrection, fragment II.{/footnote}
And so we return to that
small phrase of St Leo of Rome: 'The life of believers contains in itself the
mystery of Easter'. Whence this mystery that we proclaim? In the Resurrection
of the Son of God. How is it proclaimed in us? By the new life we are given as
sons and daughters of the Father, brethren and friends of the Incarnate Word
through the working of His Spirit—by the fact that, through the dark reality of
our sinfulness, our brokenness and our disunity, through all these things God
works in us a union with Himself that brings the ill to good health and the
dead to life. The very fact that our sin has not swallowed us, that death has
not claimed us rightly as its captive foe, is a wonderful sign that something
greater lives in us. That we live in spite of our sin reveals the Paschal
reality that a power greater than death reigns in our bodies and a grace more
powerful than evil has hold on our lives. The life of the faithful is the
mystery of the Resurrection, for without the Resurrection, we would have no
life at all. Daily existence in the face of sin, in the face of human
fallenness, is nothing less than the miracle of Pascha continued.
For this reason, then, the
reality of Pascha must be alive in our hearts and minds each day, not solely at
the moment of this great Feast of feasts. The life of the Christian faithful is
a Paschal life, a life of daily resurrection, a life of daily mystery. Though
this mystery is celebrated most potently in the heart of that night which Fr
Alexander Schmemann called 'brighter than the day', it is a mystery that is to
be lived at every hour, at every moment, in every place and circumstance.
Nowhere are we reminded of this charge more directly than in the words of our
same Father Leo:
'These thoughts, dearly
beloved, must be kept in mind not only for the Easter festival, but also for
the sanctification of the whole life, and to this our present exercise ought to
be directed, that what has delighted the souls of the faithful by the
experience of a short observance may pass into a habit and remain unalterably,
and if any fault creep in, it may be destroyed by speedy repentance. And
because the cure of old-standing diseases is slow and difficult, remedies
should be applied early, when the wounds are fresh, so that rising ever anew
from all downfalls, we may deserve to attain to the incorruptible Resurrection
of our glorified flesh in Christ Jesus our Lord, who lives and reigns with the
Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.'{footnote}Leo the Great of
Rome, Homily 71.6.{/footnote}
(Text by M.C. Steenberg, 2002)
