Midweek Morning Meditation

 

Source: athoniteusa.com

Christ is Risen!  Indeed He is Risen!

As we celebrate the Leavetaking of Pascha this morning, we can read this excellent summary of how we understand the Resurrection of the Lord from Fr. Thomas Hopko. The Gospel, the Church, Christianity can only stand and be worthy of our undivided commitment if indeed Jesus Christ has been bodily raised from the dead.

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According to Orthodox doctrine there is no competition of “lives” between God and Jesus, and no competition of “powers.” The power of God and the power of Jesus, the life of God and the life of Jesus, are one and the same power and life. To say that God has raised Christ, and that Christ has been raised by his own power is to say essentially the same thing. “For as the Father has life in himself,” says Christ, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (Jn 5.26). “I and the Father are one”(Jn 10.30).

The Scriptural stress that God has raised up Jesus only emphasizes once more that Christ has given His life, that He has laid it down fully, that He has offered it whole and without reservation to God—Who then gave it back in His resurrection from the dead.

The Orthodox Church believes in Christ’s real death and His actual resurrection. Resurrection, however, does not simply mean bodily resuscitation. Neither the Gospel nor the Church teaches that Jesus was lying dead and then was biologically revived and walked around in the same way that He did before He was killed. In a word, the Gospel does not say that the angel moved the stone from the tomb in order to let Jesus out. The angel moved the stone to reveal that Jesus was not there (Mk 16; Mt 28).

In His resurrection Jesus is in a new and glorious form. He appears in different places immediately. He is difficult to recognize (Lk 24.16; Jn 20.14). He eats and drinks to show that He is not a ghost (Lk 24.30, 39). He allows himself to be touched (Jn 20.27, 21.9). And yet He appears in the midst of disciples, “the doors being shut” (Jn 20.19, 26). And he “vanishes out of their sight” (Lk 24.31). Christ indeed is risen, but His resurrected humanity is full of life and divinity. It is humanity in the new form of the eternal life of the Kingdom of God.

Fr. Thomas Hopko - The Orthodox Faith, Vol. I Doctrine