United in Death and Resurrection

Greetings,

Still thinking about death and life as we move to the Passion of Jesus.  Remember the last comments, and then read what Walter Burghardt has to say.

“What did it mean for Christ to die?  The depths of his death we theologians [that is all of us who try to understand God and our relationship to God] are still struggling to plumb.  For it was not only an unrepeatable man that died on Calvary; it was the God-man.  What happened?  Karl Rahner put it powerfully:

‘Jesus surrendered himself in his death unconditionally to the absolute mystery that he called his Father, into whose hands he committed his existence, when in the night of this death and God-forsakenness he was deprived of everything that is otherwise regarded as the content of a human existence.’ [This means that] ‘in the concreteness of his death it becomes only too clear that everything fell away from him, and in this trackless dark there prevailed silently only the mystery that in itself and in its freedom has no name and to which he nevertheless calmly surrendered himself as to eternal love and not to the hell of futility.’” The world never ends in the pits: “He who came out of God’s glory did not merely descend into our human life, but also fell into the abyss of our death, and his dying began when he began to live and came to an end on the cross when he bowed his head and died.” 

It is also true for us that our dying begins when we begin to live (our birth) and that our dying can come to an end on his cross, when he bowed his head and died for us.  We have the opportunity to be united with him in his death and resurrection. 

Yours & His,

DED