Christ is risen!
Recently, as I've been meditating on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, a thought has occurred to me. I have spent the past couple of weekends watching videos on the Shroud of Turin. This amazing artifact is, potentially, a physical witness not only to the death of Christ, but also to the moment of His Resurrection. I say "potentially" because the scientific studies conducted on the Shroud are not completely conclusive. I personally believe that the evidence supports the belief that the Shroud is actually Jesus' burial cloth. I encourage you to check out some videos about it. The entire subject is very fascinating.
As I've been studying the subject of the Shroud and meditating on the image the Shroud contains, I came to a realization. In the Christian East there is a strong understanding that mankind was made in God's image and likeness, keeping in mind that there is a distinction between "image" and "likeness." After the fall mankind lost its likeness to God, and the image of God in man was distorted. Now, it is understood that being made in the image of God means that man was fashioned after the pattern of the Logos/Word of God, Jesus. We were originally created as a reflection of Christ. Think of it this way. We often apply the saying of St. John the Baptist, "He must increase and I must decrease," to our spiritual lives. Christ Jesus must increase in us, and our fallen sinful nature must decrease, because only when Christ lives in us are we truly living as we were created to be. In the beginning, mankind was called to be transparent to Christ, to show forth the glory of God in creation simply by living after the manner and pattern in which they were created. As Christ the Logos is pure "yes" to the Father, mankind too was called to be a pure "yes" to the Father after the pattern of Christ. But at the fall man said "no," and so we lost our likeness to God and distorted the image of the Logos within us.
Jesus came to restore our likeness to God and renew the image of God in us. How does He go about doing this? By assuming our own humanity, taking it upon himself even in its fallen state. Jesus became like us in all things but sin, as the Scriptures say. This means that, while He did not sin, He did take on our fallen nature. St. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that Christ became sin, not in the sense that He sinned Himself, but in the sense that He assumed what is ours so that He might redeem it and elevate it. There is a beautiful prayer in the Maronite tradition:
"You have united, O Lord, your divinity with our humanity, and our humanity with your divinity; your life with our mortality, and our mortality with your life. You have assumed what is ours, and you have given us what is yours for the life and salvation of our souls."
What am I trying to get at here? Well, as I meditated on the image of the Shroud I came to realize that through His passion and death Christ became the physical image of our fallen spiritual condition. If you want a sense of what it means that the image of God is distorted in us by sin, then look no further than Christ's passion! If you want a sense of what the tyranny of sin looks like, then look at how the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Roman soldiers treated Jesus during His passion. If you want to have a sense of what the oppression of sin looks like, then look at how Jesus was beaten to a pulp and then forced to carry a cross beam that weighed nearly 200 pounds.
I believe that we have become so accustomed to hearing about the crucifixion of Jesus that it has, in a very real sense, lost its "shock value," so to speak. Similarly we have become so accustomed to hearing about sin that we are missing the horrifying reality of sin in our own lives. When we forget the horrifying reality of sin in our lives, and when the Cross no longer shakes us to our very core, then we cannot possibly hope to grasp and experience the immense love of God for us, and the great hope that is the glory of the Resurrection! Without grasping the love of God for us, and without the hope of the Resurrection, we very easily forget our dignity as men and women created in God's own image and likeness. Without the hope of the Resurrection, we cannot be fully alive so as to show forth the glory of God once more to all creation. This is why Holy Week and the Paschal Season are so central to the life of the Church! May the hope of the risen Christ be with us all.
Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!
