How to See God in a Seemingly Godless World: Easter Reflections
As the Church celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and the end of the Lenten season, we find ourselves walking with the risen Christ to Emmaus each year and receiving a fresh perspective on the Crucifixion. A heartbreaking verse from John’s Gospel highlights the reality of the Christian life and the call from beyond ourselves to revisit the moment divinity transfigured space and time. Mary Magdalene, upon investigating the open tomb on Easter, “turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus” (Jn 20:14), prompting us to wonder how often we look right at the face of God without knowing it.
The God who has “cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly” (Lk 1:52) is always unrecognizable to the spirit of the world. As the Psalmist writes, “They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.” (Ps 115:5). How, then, are we who are born of this world able to see God? If we are without eyes, how might we recognize Our Lord when he is right before us as he was Mary Magdalene?
Mother Church, in her wisdom, invites us to re-read the Resurrection narratives throughout the Easter Octave and walk in the shoes of the infant Church. After mistaking him for a gardener, her eyes are opened when He calls her by name. “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rab-boni!’” (Jn 20:16-17). Later, Jesus walked to a village named Emmaus with two disciples, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Lk 24:16). It was only in the breaking of bread that “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Lk 24:31).
As the Apostles gathered behind locked doors in the upper room, “Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side” (Jn 20:19-20). The doubting Thomas doubted no longer after Christ invited him to “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side” (Jn 20:27). Our Lord appears again at the Sea of Tiberias when Jesus asked his disciples to go fishing, and their nets were filled with 153 large fish (Jn 21). In Mark’s account of the road to Emmaus, he remarks that “he appeared in another form to two of them” (Mk 16:12). And finally, Saint Luke recalls in his Acts of the Apostles, “God raised up Jesus on the third day and granted that he be seen, not by all, but only by such witnesses as had been chosen beforehand by God – by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” – Acts 10:40-41
The highlighted portions emphasize the ways we come to recognize the risen Christ amid our doubts, our fears, and our sinfulness. Christ appears at will behind the locked doors of those whom He chooses, shows us his wounds, and invites us to touch them. After calling us by name and breaking bread, our eyes are opened and He sends us out fishing. He stands before us in another form, which we know to be the sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist. But beyond the more obvious form, how else does He appear? Even after seeing Him once, the disciples still fail to immediately recognize Him each subsequent time.
Our Lord’s Resurrection reveals something spectacular about the relationship between God and man. Man, in all his efforts, cannot find God. Our heart’s greatest longing is to see God, and yet there is nothing we can do by our own energies to find Him. More incredibly, it is God who finds man, taking the burden of re-establishing communion with Heaven off our shoulders. When Saint Peter gave his classic profession of faith at Caesarea Philippi that, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16), Jesus responded, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Peter did not come to this conclusion through rational deduction, but because God willed to be known by Peter. In contrast, when Christ asked, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” (emphasis added), the disciples answered, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Mt. 16:13-14). Man’s rupture with God in sin was mended by the God-man, Jesus Christ. God can only be known by man through the Incarnation of His Son.
The excitement of the Resurrection is that in His new, resurrected body we read about in the above passages of Scripture, Jesus reveals to us the definitive form man and his worship of God will take in the fulfillment of time. The aforementioned qualities of Christ are a window into the eschaton and not only a preview of what is to come, but what is actually present in the person of Christ. Then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the late Pope Benedict XVI, writes in his 1977 book Eschatology, “Heaven, therefore, must first and foremost be determined christologically. It is not an extra-historical place into which one goes. Heaven’s existence depends upon the fact that Jesus Christ, as God, is man, and makes space for human existence in the existence of God himself… Heaven, as our becoming one with Christ, takes on the nature of adoration.” He continues, “[Heaven is] that definitive completion of human existence which comes about through the perfect love towards which faith tends. Such a fulfillment is not, for the Christian, some music of the future. Rather is it sheer description of what happens in the encounter with Christ, itself already present in its fundamental elements.” (Eschatology, pg. 233-234).
So then, the eschaton is already fully present on earth in the person of Christ. Our faith can be summarized as one of encounter with the living God, who appears to us. The most perfect expression of man’s encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ, Ratzinger writes, is the Sacred Liturgy. “The Parousia is the highest intensification and fulfillment of the Liturgy. And the Liturgy is Parousia, a Parousia-like event taking place in our midst… In touching the risen Jesus, the Church makes contact with the Parousia of the Lord” (Eschatology, pg. 203) (Parousia, for those unacquainted, is the Second Coming of Christ, the fulfillment of time).
The words of consecration do not merely remember the Jesus of the past, but make fully present before us the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord so, like the disciples He first appeared to, we too might see His flesh and touch His wounds. In 155 AD, Saint Justin Martyr wrote in his First Apology, “We do not consume the eucharistic bread and wine as if it were ordinary food and drink, for we have been taught that as Jesus Christ our Savior became a man of flesh and blood by the power of the Word of God, so also the food that our flesh and blood assimilates for its nourishment becomes the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus by the power of his own words contained in the prayer of thanksgiving.”
In receiving the Eucharist, then, Ratzinger writes in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith that “God’s holiness enters in among us” (Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, pg. 107). The purpose for this, he says, is because “In the Eucharist we receive the Body of the Lord and, thus, become one body with him” (pg. 102). Describing the Sacrament’s missionary identity, he continues, “The Church is built up in the Eucharist; indeed, the Church is the Eucharist. To receive Communion means becoming the Church, because it means becoming one body with him (Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, pg. 103).
The Eucharist being the source and summit of the Christian life, the Church summarizes his thoughts in her Catechism. “The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it (CCC 1324). The mission of the Church and the several parts which make up her body is to become Eucharist. The Eucharist is inherently missionary, and in our reception of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are not only called by name, as Mary Magdalene was in the tomb, but our flesh becomes the new means by which Our Lord’s risen body takes form and goes out to meet His children. The less obvious forms Our Lord assumes, then, are his enfleshment of the men and women around us who give us this day our daily bread. This is why, like the disciples on their way to Emmaus, we fail to immediately see Jesus when he appears. Like Thomas, the Resurrection remains scandalous to us.
It is inconceivable to us that God would come to us in the brokenness of humanity. But if He did it once, what is to stop Him from doing it daily? If he came to Thomas with wounds, why would He not come to us the same way in the woundedness of our brothers? That is how we can be certain that we are seeing Jesus. The world is not godless because it is broken. Rather, her wounds are the proof of Christ’s resurrection. When he shows us His wounds, we know it is really Him. Anticipating how difficult it would be for us to believe He is really risen, Jesus left us a rubric to find Him when he appears:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Mt 5:3-12).
Great indeed is the reward in Heaven, and the reward itself is participation in the life of God. Cardinal Ratzinger beautifully describes Heaven as such: “The ‘exaltation’ of Christ, the entry of his humanity into the life of the triune God through the resurrection, does not imply his departure from this world… Heaven means participation in this new mode of Christ’s existence and thus the fulfillment of what baptism began in us. This is why heaven escapes spatial determination. It lies neither inside nor outside the space of our world, even though it must not be detached from the cosmos as some mere ‘state’. Heaven means, much more, that power over the world which characterizes the new space of the body of Christ, the communion of saints. Heaven is not, then, ‘above’ in a spatial but in an essential way” (Eschatology, pg. 237).
We see God, then, when God sees and enters into us. To see Him, then, is to remain open to this grace. Pray, brothers and sisters, that when Christ appears to us with His wounds, all may answer as Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28).