Easter homily #1

Following the tradition of Bob Schneider, I will post this week a few
passages on Easter that I have found helpful. This is the first. I will be
visiting family over the holiday itself and won't post late this week, so
there won't be that many of these.

*****

If cosmic history is no more than the temporary flourishing of remarkable
fruitfulness followed by its subsequent decay and disappearance, then I
think Macbeth was right and it is indeed a tale told by an idiot.

Yet there is a deep intuition of hope within the human spirit which revolts
against such a nihilistic conclusion. The atheist philosopher, Max
Horkheimer, expressed a profound longing when he said that the murderer
should not triumph over his innocent victim. But if mortality is the final
fate of all, then the murderer has a temporary triumph, though he gains but
a little of what he has totally denied to his victim. Only God, it seems to
me, can take from death the last word. If the human intution of hope--that
all will be well, that the world makes ultimate sense--is not a vain
delusion, then God must exist. I would go beyond the Kantian assertion that
belief in God, and in an afterlife, is necessary in order to confirm the
moral order of the world, to the claim that the integrity of personal
experience itself, based as it is on the significance and value of
individual men and women and the ultimate and total intelligibility of the
universe, requires that there be an eternal ground of hope who is the giver
and preserver of human individuality--the God, as Jesus said, of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, 'the God, not of the dead, but of the living' (Mk 12:27)
-- and the eternally faithful Carer for creation.

Is such a hope a coherent possibility? Here I can only sketch some
considerations which I have sought to develop more fully elsewhere. If we
regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible
and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and
brain encourage us to do, then the soul will have to be understood in an
Aristotelian sense as the 'form', or information-bearing pattern, of the
body. Though this pattern is dissolved at death, it seems perfectly
rational to believe that it will be remembered by God and reconstituted in a
divine act of resurrection. The 'matter' of the world to come, which will
be the carrier of this reembodiment, will be the transformed matter of the
present universe, itself redeemed by God beyond *its* cosmic death. That
resurrected universe is not a second attempt by the Creator to produce a
world *ex nihilo* but it is the transmutation of the present world in an act
of new creation *ex vetere*. God will then truly be 'all in all' (1 Cor
15:28) in a totally sacramental universe whose divine-infused 'matter' will
be delivered from the transience and decay inherent in present physical
process. Such mysterious and exiting beliefs depend for their motivation
not only on the faithfulness of God, but also on Christ's resurrection,
understood as the seminal event from which the new creation grows, and
indeed also on the detail of the empty tomb, with its implication that the
Lord's risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body, just
as the world to come will be the transformation of this present mortal
world.

-- John Polkinghorne, "Belief in God in an Age of Science," 21-23
Received on Mon Apr 10 09:22:19 2006