So he came and proclaimed the good news: peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near by. (Ephesians 2:17)
THE STRUGGLE IS over, and silence covers the darkness of the void. Widening ripples extend over the waters of oblivion. Sleep born of exhaustion and resignation to the night that must fall after day closes envelops mankind. "While daylight lasts we must carry on the work of him who sent me; night comes, when no one can work. While I am in the world I am the light of the world." (John 9: 4-5) Jesus said that when He was flesh of our flesh, but now He is no longer of our substance. Even the polarities of good and evil have been reconciled in a stillness where no new knowledge can be added. Sleep comes to all living forms as God's supreme gift of mercy, that the anxiety and the struggle for existence may be assuaged for a brief moment, and the creature may return to the region whence he originally came and whither he is ultimately to return.
Jonah slept in a corner of a ship before he was to face the consequences of his disobedience to the call of God. Jesus slept in a boat before He was to awaken and still the angry wind and sea, so that a dead calm prevailed. In the story of Jonah, nothing less than the prophet's self-sacrifice to the sea will ensure that the storm abates. In the life of Jesus, His very presence calms the elements, but it does not calm men, for the One whom we call the Prince of Peace told His disciples that He had not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. He had come to set members of a family against each other, so that each roof would be divided against itself. It is evident that nature is restored to peace and harmony far more readily than is man, who has been given dominion over nature.
Before peace can come to mankind, each person must know exactly who he is and what he stands for. This was what Jesus effected in the lives of all who came into contact with Him. The traditionally good were shown to harbour a cesspit of unclean desires within them; the pariahs of society discovered a well of aspiration and love deeply hidden beneath a shoddy, lust-ridden exterior. Thus the sinful tax-gatherer who had faced his inner corruption and fought the inner battle before God went home acquitted of his sins - and the home he went to was not merely his earthly abode, but also his heavenly destination; he had found peace. The self-righteous religionist found no peace, and was intent on destroying the One who threatened the uneasy equilibrium on which his life was poised. The sword that Jesus brought with Him expose the polarities of good and evil unequivocally but also in a light not previously dreamed of by the conventional moralist.
It was inevitable too that He should, in the end, fall victim to that sword. Thus the Divine Man is the enemy of the worldly good men, and in His death and descent, He is aligned with and united to the outcast and the sinner. But are the traditionally good, the upholders of moral rectitude and the observers of religious rites, now to be cast into hell, and the sinners of yesterday to be raised up to heaven? The sentimentalist in us might affirm this judgement, but if we were to abide by it, we would simply be returning to another form of the fundamental polarity between darkness and light, between evil and good. The participants may have changed sides, but the action continues. The one quality lacking in this approach is forgiveness, an attitude deficient also in our own generation as much in those who fight for social justice as in those who repress their fellow human beings because of fear. It is not difficult to forgive those who have sinned, because they are weak; the weak are lovable and it is a joyous event when they are brought back into the family fold. It is more difficult to forgive the strong, those whose moral rectitude and legal propriety are beyond reproach, but whose lack of imagination and rigidity of attitude have separated them from their brethren and isolated them in a web of pride that prevents them receiving love. "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing."
The foolishness of God does not come to reinstate the old principle of goodness and to attest the triumph of righteousness, but to bring together the shattered seeds of humanity in a community beyond good and evil, and where righteousness has been transfigured in love: This is the great difference between the prophetic call of the old dispensation which led the people back to God, and the proclamation of the new dispensation which sets in each soul the seal of God incarnate, a divinity previously hidden but now at last moving to its own manifestation.
We have seen that crucifixion means the manifest triumph of evil that kills the power of good in an earthly setting. The Spirit, previously merely incarnate in matter, has now buried Himself so inextricably in it that He appears to have been obliterated by it. Darkness has overcome the power of light, as it did during the final three hours of the Crucifixion. Then all is silent. On the third day He rose from the dead, and showed Himself in a new form to His brethren, none of whom recognised Him immediately. He was changed, and had the appearance of a stranger. Indeed, He always was a stranger. When Peter, in his agony, three times denied knowing the man, he was speaking a greater truth than he understood. Though Christ had dwelt some three years in the midst of the disciples, he was still a stranger among them. How could a person with such great powers of mind, soul and spirit, be other than a stranger to the very ordinary cross-section of humanity that the disciples represented! When He re-appeared, it was as if He were the gardener outside the tomb or a fellow traveller on the road to Emmaus. And furthermore He was these people and all others also in addition to being His glorified self. For in Him it is now possible for each member of the human race to attain, in his own life, what He showed in the practice of the common life.
Resurrection is the other side of desolation; it is the reconciliation of all discordant elements into a new creation whose nature is peace. The risen Christ speaks of peace in the voice of peace. He tells Mary of Magdala not to cling to Him, not to touch Him any more, for He is no longer the mortal Jesus incarcerated by the attitudes and judgements of her world, which was His world also. The past is indeed over, the sword has been destroyed, and the way of confrontation has been transfigured in an all-embracing love that includes all opposites and binds them in a whole which does each full justice and yet transforms them into the fullness of their integrity.
In His life Jesus demonstrated both the miraculous powers and transcendent wisdom of the Word of God and the humiliation and suffering of the least of men. He had in His life reconciled these two final polarities. By identifying Himself with the common criminal up to the fact of death on the Cross, He identified Himself with the Father in a more perfect way than at any previous point in His ministry. "In the days of his earthly life he offered up prayers and petitions, with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to deliver him from the grave. Because of his humble submission his prayer was heard: son though he was, he learned obedience in the school of suffering, and, once perfected, became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, named by God high priest in the succession of Melchizedek." (Hebrews 5: 7-10)
In this reconciliation there is a change in both the elements of Jesus. The tortured body has been freed from the physical law of decay, death and corruption to the spiritual law of eternal life. It has transcended the limits cast by time and space, and has attained the spiritual qualities of omnipresence and omnipotence; it can never be destroyed, and is among all who are gathered together in His name (which means all those who have sacrificed the lower nature of selfish concern for the greater love of the brethren). The soul, assuredly always one with the Father in dedication and intent, is now fully one with Him in the identity, of love: this full flow of love is the seal of the perfection Jesus attained through obedience in the school of suffering. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer holding men's misdeeds against them." (2 Corinthians 5:19) And Jesus, in His fully human stature, is raised to the perfect knowledge of love.
Spiritual warfare is never won decisively either in the world of matter or the psychical realms of discarnate spirits. The end of Jesus' life is failure, at least in terms of overcoming the powers of darkness by deliberate confrontation. The victory of uncreated light over darkness is attained by the broken Christ, when He has only His complete failure to confront. The power of God's love emerges fully at this moment, and Jesus can accept all conditions of men and all manner of circumstances, the good and the bad, as His companions. Judgement and condemnation are finally superseded by an acceptance of things as they are, and at once the love that is in the dying Christ can break through into the lives of all who are willing to accept Him for what He is - both God's representative on earth and a loathsome criminal - and let that love start the process of their own healing. Gone is the Jesus who castigated the lawyers and Pharisees so fiercely during His ministry (Matthew 23) and drove out the traders from the Temple precincts (Mark I l: 15-19) - and thereby set in motion a hostility between future generations of His followers and those from whose stock He Himself was born, a hostility which only after two thousand years of terrible hatred and frequent persecution is being finally healed as both sides learn something of the reality that He came to know during the last hours of His earthly life and when He had descended into Hell. There He went so that He could set in motion the liberation of souls imprisoned in hatred, resentment, and fear by proclaiming the gospel of reconciliation: that God accepts people as they are, and by, in turn, accepting God's supreme invitation to share His table, they may leave their prison and enter the liberty of the eternal realm whose nature is love.
It is fortunate that the Church has never held absolutely to any one theory of the Atonement. The doctrine is crucial to an understanding of the purpose of the Incarnation, but its full import is beyond intellectual analysis; it has to be realised in the life of each believer. In essence it means that when one "knows" Christ, one is set free from the thralldom of sin and its wages of death. When God comes to us in a form that knows us through participating in the full, fearsome business of being a man, and by coming to us, shows His full acceptance of us as we now stand - we can accept the love that flows from Him - His very energy as it were - and be changed by it. This change sets in motion a complete awakening of the person which culminates in his own deification, the crucial stage of which is mystical transfiguration. Once Christ is known, the claims of the personal self recede into the background of our lives, and the work for the coming of the Kingdom takes priority.
It must be said, however, that this encounter with the humiliated, risen, triumphant Christ (the three are one) is not a once-for-all event. We grow progressively into the knowledge of His love. Thus the young Christian tends to be full of judgement against the sins of the world. He soon begins to doubt the integrity of many ordained ministers of the faith who may show what he regards as a dangerous ambivalence towards the dark side of humanity. To him black and white are eternally separate with a great gulf set between them, and he will have no difficulty in finding texts from the Gospel to substantiate this point of view. But as he grows in the knowledge of the love of God and in the knowledge of the chaos that prevails inside himself, so he will be able to identify Christ not only with the transcendent God, but also with suffering humanity. As he is able to take this great step downwards, so God will lift him upward, and he too will become an instrument for raising the world from sinful self-abandon to the abandonment of the self, to the service of others and to God. The Christ of the Resurrection was indeed a changed person. I believe, as I have already said, that His body was, while the same in essence as He had used when He was alive in the flesh, also completely different; the risen Christ, though identical in person with the crucified Jesus, is also different from Him. His physical appearance was so changed that His friends did not recognise Him until He had made some gesture that brought with it a deeper identification. The change, presaged at the time of transfiguration when the body became transparent to the light of God, was completed in the spiritual transformation of the resurrection body.
Of even greater import, however, is the spiritual radiance that emanates from the risen Christ. He is now fully at peace, eternally so; indeed, He is the "peace of God that passes all understanding". "Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give," (John 14: 27) is a text from Jesus' farewell discourses, but it applies much more perfectly to the blessing that the risen Christ said when He broke bread with the apostles on the way to Emmaus. He comes to them unobtrusively as a stranger on the road, imperceptibly enters the conversation until He commands it, then lifts up the hearts of the broken, bereft apostles. But only when He stays to break bread with them and says the blessing, do they know Him. Then He vanishes from their sight. (Luke 24:13-32) A new Christ had appeared in the person of the man Jesus: at peace, glowing with suffused joy, beyond the polarities of good and evil, no longer condemning even the actions and attitudes of the hypocrites of religion. He has forgiven all those who have betrayed Him, not so much in recorded words as in the deep underlying compassion.
Jesus instructs the same disciple who denied knowing Him on three occasions to feed the lambs and sheep of the new dispensation. But first He enquires gently but perceptively whether Peter's affection has returned. Poor Peter, the true representative of Everyman, breaks down as he confronts the enormity of his own betrayal of his Master. Jesus, however, utters no word of reproach. Instead He speaks of the service Peter is to offer in the future and the martyrdom he is destined to suffer in the name of Him whom he now fervently affirms. Peter himself had undergone a lesser resurrection and had emerged a changed, but by no means perfect man. His future life as an apostle of Christ was to wear away the ambivalence in his own nature between self-defence on the one hand and total commitment to his fellow men on the other, so that the image of God within his own soul could become cleansed and radiant.
The resurrected Christ blesses the world in love, a love that knows no bounds. In union with Him, He is as a garment in the folds of which Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female have moved beyond the divisions set by men and nature, and are now one person. (Galatians 3: 27-28) In the same way, the light and the darkness, the good and the evil of this world, are taken up into Him and are transformed into a new light, which is beyond the creation and the very outflowing energy of the Godhead. The triumph of love means the transfiguration of the whole created universe so that it follows the way of ascent shown by the body of Jesus. And this transfiguration must include all beings, those whom the world calls bad no less than the acclaimed good, the unjust as well as the just. What the world calls good is the pattern of divine creation in the divided realm of time and space, while evil is the tendency to revert to past attitudes of isolation, separation, and destruction that have their end in the primal chaos before the Word of God summoned the world out of the void. Were it not for the constant interplay of these two elements, nothing would ever happen, and there would be a state of inertia in which the creation would sleep, in an unending heaven of dull complacency. That would be a real hell.
Neither the evil nor the good of this world has a primary, substantive reality; while the one creates and fashions new works in a transient world, the other denies, degrades, and disintegrates. Both are aspects of the energy man acquired from God, when he came to a knowledge of his own separative existence at that period of development known theologically as "the Fall". This primal energy, which is of the Holy Spirit, was then bestowed on man for the exercise and development of his own free will; when used selfishly and apart from the greater life of the world, it becomes perverted and demonic, contaminating the psychic atmosphere. The same energy used constructively and selflessly, however, produces a blessing of warmth, encouragement and enlightenment in the psychic realm, which leaves its record in the lives of future generations of sentient beings.
Both aspects of this energy are deeply placed in the soul of man; in psychological terms, they represent the shadow and the higher, spiritual self respectively. In many people the shadow side seems to dominate over the inner Christ of the higher self to such an extent that one may be tempted to despair of their redemption from the darkness to the light. And yet these same people can show themselves capable, in exceptional circumstances, of a gesture of such self-sacrifice, even on behalf of a stranger, that Christ Himself could hardly surpass it in nobility and love. Conversely, how many of those who fondly believe they are on the spiritual path and speak knowledgeably about deep and difficult matters, betray themselves day by day when they fail to show love and understanding in the course of some minor situation in their own lives!
It seems that evil and suffering are as integral to life on earth as are beauty and goodness. All working together create the environment in which the sentient creature - who, in our world, is man, for he alone appears to have the moral and intellectual capacity to distinguish between good and evil - can attain to his full stature. Mankind knows the measure of this stature: its saints in all the great religious traditions and especially the known and yet woefully unknown Jesus Christ, Who combined in His one person the perfection of the Godhead and the lowliness of the criminal on the scaffold. In Him good and evil find a common place of refuge, and, by submitting to the evil of the world, He changes both the face of evil and of good. From being perpetually opposed to one another, in irreconcilable enmity, they now flow together in a new stream. The energy of the Holy Spirit given to man by God, so that he might work out his own salvation through the experience of life and the experiment of relationships (not only with people but with the entire creation) is now re-united in purpose. The evil impulse is won by love to a new understanding of reality, while the good impulse is perfected by love to accept the evil as part of itself, and to move beyond judgement to mercy, beyond the demands of righteousness to self-transcending forgiveness.
"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city's street. On either side of the river stood a tree of life, which yields twelve crops of fruit, one for each month of the year; the leaves of the tree serve for the healing of the nations. Each accursed thing shall disappear. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be there, and his servants shall worship him; they shall see him face to face, and bear his name on their foreheads. There shall be no more night, nor will they need the light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will give them light; and they shall reign for evermore." (Revelation 22: 1-5)
The glorious Holy City, the New Jerusalem seen in the vision of the writer of the Book of Revelation, needs no temple, for its temple is the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb. It needs no sun or moon to shine upon it, for God's glory (His emergent light) gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The one discordant note is the exclusion of anything unclean or of anyone whose ways are false or foul (Revelation 21: 22-27). In fact the City of God must, by the very nature of His love for all His creation, be able to accept the unclean as well as the clean, and find room even for the false and the foul. But in the transfiguring light of the Lamb, who brought together the world's evil and its good into a new relationship, both are changed and raised to the glory of God, so that in truth "each accursed thing shall disappear." As the mystics have known, there is a spark of God in even the most degraded object. He who can have sufficient love to bless that object, liberates the spark from within it and ensures its glorification. There is nothing beyond redemption in creation; there is only that which has not yet been made holy. This is man's supreme duty and privilege. It is the heart of the ministry of healing.
The great mystics knew well when they said that God was beyond good and evil. Both of these polarities are subject to the world of change, decay, death and rebirth. God transcends polarities; in Him all contradictions coincide; in Him there is no duality. We come to Him when we are freed from the law of change by leaving behind the desire for judgement of others and entering the unitary way of love. This love, however, can come to us in its fullness only when we have trodden the path of sacrifice and have been crucified on the cross of material inertia and spiritual aspiration. When we have been shriven of the last vestige of personal clinging so that our very self has been presented as a sacrifice on the altar of truth, only then can we pass beyond the bondage of material illusion and know the truth that has set us free. Only then can we really know ourselves, for we will have seen God, and know that union with Him is reality. So it follows that no one can know God until he has died; every little death of one's present preconceptions and certainties is a birth into a greater authenticity of being. The death of personality inevitably precedes the resurrection of the person into a new creation, at one with all things and with them in union with God.
The resurrection of the person cannot proceed as an isolated event. It has cosmic dimensions. The release of the whole created universe from the law of change and death to the eternal glory of "uncreated nature" - the plan of perfection in the divine mind which existed before the creature disrupted it by the selfish use of his God-given free will - is to be restored at the end of time when the creature has attained the stature of Christ. Cosmic redemption is the final purpose of the divine life in man.
The Creation story tells of the original harmony that prevailed between the animal kingdom and man, both of whom fed on plant life. (Genesis 1: 29-30) Enmity between the animals and man commences when man deserts the unitive life for a separative existence based on a divisive, selfish knowledge which is centred on a polarisation of good and evil - with man inevitably being attracted along the lesser path that leads to destruction. (Genesis 3:15) The break in relationship between man and animal life is complete when God invokes His new covenant with Noah by which "the fear and dread of man shall fall upon all wild animals on earth, on al1 birds of heaven, on everything that moves upon the ground and all fish in the sea; all are given into his hands." (Genesis 9:2)
We need not accept the literal historical accuracy of this account to be aware of the deep mythological truth that underlies it. Not only is man the great enemy of the animal kingdom (and indeed of the natural order by his selfish appropriation of its resources), but nature is in enmity against itself, the one creature fighting the other for its existence and sustenance. In contemporary society man has at last come to understand the inadequacy of his past stewardship of natural resources, and the work of conservation is now seen to be a most pressing priority for the future life of mankind on this planet. But even this welcome acknowledgment of responsibility for the conservation of nature's resources has strong undertones of selfishness. The concern is primarily for human survival; concern for nature itself is a very secondary factor, if indeed it exists at all.
St Paul, in one of his greatest flashes of illumination, saw matters in a very different light. "The sufferings at present endured are not to be compared with the splendour, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for mankind. The created universe waits with eager expectation for God's sons to be revealed. It was made the victim of frustration, not by its own choice, but because of him who made it so; yet always there was hope, because the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendour of the children of God." (Romans 8:18-21) He goes on, in this great cosmic insight, to say that the universe at present groans as if in the pangs of childbirth, as those baptised in Christ, to whom the Spirit is given as first fruits of the harvest to come, also groan inwardly while they wait for God to make them His sons and set their whole body free. For they have been saved, although only in hope. Its fulfilment, when they actually see its establishment, is not with them yet; they have to wait for this, and in doing so, they show their endurance.
Indeed, only when man "has left self behind, taken up his cross and come on the life that is Christ" will he realise his salvation and move towards deification - becoming a realised son of God. He must no longer care for his own safety, for then he is lost. But if he will let himself be lost for Christ's sake and the good news of redemption, that man is safe. This basic teaching of Christ (in Mark 8: 34-36) is also the universal teaching of all the great religious traditions, and the path is a common one trodden by all their saints. It is the way of purification, directed by illumination, and consummated in union with God. And in unity with God, neither the animals nor the plants, nor indeed any atom of created matter is excluded. If one particle of substance is withheld, there is no salvation for even the holiest saint.
Isaiah, in his greatest messianic prophecy, describes how the gifts of the Spirit of God will rest on the Anointed One; wisdom and understanding, counsel and power, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. When He has come, peace and harmony will prevail once more between the animal kingdom and man; "They shal1 not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for as the waters fill the sea, so shall the land be filled with the knowledge of the Lord." (Isaiah 1l: I-9) The Anointed One has come in the form of many great saints and prophets of old, supremely, the Christian would affirm, in the person of the Lord Jesus. But this prophecy will not be fulfilled until all human beings have been anointed by their own free choice and dedication to the will of God.
The great souls of the past have shown us the way, and in Christ are indeed the very way. But they cannot do the work for us. It is we whose duty and joy it is to assume their mantle and bring to completion what they have started.
The last recorded words of the Resurrected Christ were:
"Follow me".