Sunday, April 4, 2010

Easter - The Feast



(The Cross Beside The Baltic, Caspar David Friedrich)

An empty cross, the image of confluence, here all things meet, but to see the empty cross is to chain ourselves in the Platonic cave, it is only a shadow pointing to the true sense, it points us to Christ and the wounds he still bears, these wounds are the true manifestation that the cross merely alludes to, by his wounds we are healed, and by his life we have life, he is the fulfilment of all joy, joy as the shadow of the cross, the shadow of a shadow.

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”


(Luke 24:44-49)



(Quartet op 132 3rd movement, Beethoven)

And thus Easter is not a commemoration of an event, but-every year-the fulfillment of time itself, of our real time. For we still live in the same three dimensions of time: in the world of nature, in the world of history, in the world of expectation. And in each one of them man is in a secret search for joy, that is, for an ultimate meaning and perfection, for an ultimate fufillment which he does not find. Time always points to a feast, to a joy, which by itself it cannot give or realize. So needful of meaning, time becomes the very form and image of meaninglessness.


(For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann)

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