Christ is risen!  Truly, He is risen!

We have come through the desolation of Good Friday to the consolation of Easter.  We have tried to enter into the mystery of how God was at work in this story, the mystery of how God is at work in our story.

The Word of God helps us to grasp the unthinkable.  The history of God’s chosen people is the history of the unthinkable, from enslavement in Egypt, to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of God, only to rise and return.  From the holocaust during the Second World War to the present day, it is a history of God’s People dying and rising, not just once but several times.

In the New Testament, from the Incarnation to the Resurrection, we find again the story of the unthinkable.  That God should become a creature, a human being–unbelievable!  That this God-man should suffer and die in shame on a cross–unthinkable.  That this same God-man should return, alive and transformed–unimaginable!

Closer to home, there is our own Jesuit experience of death and resurrection.  This year we are celebrating the 200th Anniversary of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus.  The year 1540 saw a new kind of religious order, one scandalously named for Jesus: unthinkable.  The year 1773 saw the order’s suppression by Pope Clement XIV: unimaginable.  The year 1814 saw this same Company or Society of Jesus restored: unbelievable. This of course, is resuscitation, not resurrection, more Lazaraus than Jesus.

Still closer to home, we find ourselves living in a another time of crisis: the growing threat to the Earth itself, the risk of destruction of a beautiful part of the creation which we celebrated tonight: unthinkable.  Unthinkable, but not unimaginable.  It has already been imagined for us in the story of the Flood, chapters 6 – 9 in Genesis.

Biblical thought does not make place for secondary causes: anything that happens, good or evil, must be caused directly by God and so the Flood is God’s doing. The story of the Flood may be mythical; it may be historical; but it’s also symbolic: it symbolizes the violence that inundates the Earth, violence on the Earth and violence to the Earth.  It is not God but human beings who destroy the Earth; it is God who saves–who saves not just a human family but also birds and animals.

In light of the looming planetary crisis, what does it mean to say that Jesus will save us?  Saint Paul tells us that God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, and will give us all things with him (Romans 8:32).  We are promised a share in the risen life in Christ! This doesn’t mean, however, that God will save us from the consequences of human folly.

What, then does the Resurrection of Jesus teach us?  It teaches us that God can and will do the unthinkable.  It teaches us to hope against hope, even when we cannot imagine what this might be.  It teaches us that, even in the face of unspeakable horror, we can be certain that God has not abandoned us.  On the cross, Jesus felt that he had been abandoned, but if, in his heart, he was praying the rest of Psalm 22, he was saying, “Yet you are holy…In you our ancestors trusted, and you delivered them.”  The Resurrection teaches us to believe in the unbelievable, to trust in the unthinkable, to hope in the unimaginable.