Ecofeminist Ivonne Gebara sees the resurrection through the prayer life of oppressed women. These women struggle and suffer for daily bread and often go hungry. Their faith gives them the hope to struggle on. This is a resurrection of continual rebirth and transformation. And I quote, “[Jesus ]is the symbol of the vulnerability of love, which in order to remain alive ends up being murdered, killed . . . and which then rises again in those who love him.”
John the evangelist often seems to present a Jesus who isn’t very vulnerable at all. In today’s Gospel John puts these words into Jesus’ mouth: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” It is later explained that Jesus is referring to his body as a temple. This strikes me as very curious for a number of reasons.
For one in both Mark and Matthew this statement is not something Jesus says, but is specifically said to be false witness against Jesus. Here is Mark’s version:
Some took the stand and testified falsely against him, alleging, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with hands and within three days I will build another not made with hands.’” While this is no doubt an allusion to the forming of the Church, I suspect what makes this testimony false is the claim that Jesus himself will do this. I remind you that in several epistles Paul explicitly states that God (The God of Abraham, the first person of the Trinity) raised up Christ Jesus.
This distinction is important to me. Jesus is said to have brought the dead back to life. Lazarus is the most well-known example. If one reads John as Jesus saying, “I’ll just raise myself from the dead.” It cheapens resurrection and eliminates any distinction between resurrection and revivification. It would almost lead to the conclusion that Lazarus was the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead.
Even worse though, such a reading can undermine the incarnation! The whole of creation is sanctified because Jesus is fully of creation. God has come down to our level. This is why we can have an intimate relationship with the creator of the entire universe. A universe created by in and through Trinitarian love. And for a time part of that Trinity was within a fully human mind heart and body, echoes of which are still retained by the Christ.
Jesus was fully human, despite His divine personage. I once again quote Gebara, Jesus comes “from this earth, this body, this flesh, from the evolutionary process that is present both yesterday and today in this Sacred Body within which love resides. It continues in him beyond that, and it is turned into passion for life, into mercy and justice.”
“Within which love resides.” Right here on Earth. This Love gives us the unreasonable hope to carry on. We planted seeds on Ash Wednesday to symbolically illustrate Jesus’s saying “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Not every seed that’s planted grows. We have no guarantee that ours will sprout. We can’t make it happen ourselves. My will is helpless in this situation. We are vulnerable. Yet without that vulnerability, there is no rebirth or transformation.
