The Jesuit Priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once tried to combine the languages of science and religion.
He wanted to teach us to see that God IS everywhere, and like many religious innovators, he was opposed, but he embraced this.
While he was doing research in China, because Rome had denied him permission to lecture or publish, he found himself without the means to celebrate communion.
And this is what he wrote:
“I have neither bread nor wine nor altar, so I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”
Like Jesus, Chardin lived a full life, by living an anticipation of his death.
He once noted: “I should like to die on the day of the Resurrection.”
And then, interestingly, he did. He had a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1955.
His posthumous work on the universe as a living host has been praised, by many, Pope included.
13 years later, Martin Luther King was also pre-occupying himself with death’s effect on life.
His illegal but pacifist demonstrations were opposed with a legal violence, which he embraced, and the day before he was assassinated, he was supporting a refuse collectors strike to help end racial segregation, when he addressed the rally with this:
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain and I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
Now of course we have a black US president, but 12 years after Martin Luther King was shot, it was Jimmy Carter who was president.
And Archbishop Oscar Romero was asking him to halt US assistance for El Salvador’s ruling military junta. He also appealed to the fighters to refuse their illegal orders:
"The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the voice of the man commanding you to kill, remember instead the voice of God. Thou Shalt Not Kill. In the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I command you, stop the repression."
But even more interestingly, echoing both Chardin and King before him, he said this:
"I have frequently been threatened with death, but I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death, but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people."
The next day he was shot saying Mass.
12 years later the fear had lessened sufficiently for the civil war, if not the crime, to end.
Now.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero were all motivated by Jesus of Nazareth, but more than that, they, like Jesus, had a preoccupation with death, not the usual one of fear and shame and repression, but the best, healthiest kind of preoccupation with death.
One which brings great appreciation of life, in the resurrection, where love and death co-incide.
Our lives may or may not be as dramatic as their lives, but whatever we are training for now, we will accomplish in the hour of our death.
By exposing ourselves to the resurrection, a place where death and love coincide, we can break open prisons.
By sharing Christ’s passage through death into life, we can give ourselves to this present moment and hold nothing back, in love and detachment.
Jesus breathes this spirit on his followers, followers like Chardin and King and Romero, and us, and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Like Narnia’s Aslan in the witch's frozen kingdom, the fundamental stuff of Jesus' spiritual consciousness breathes on us prisoners of death: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
I say this twice to emphasise that the ancient Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, does not mean: ‘I know you did wrong but I’ll overlook it.’
What it does mean is I let go.
I let go. I live a full life.
And the tense John uses, apheontai, suggests he also means: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are already forgiven.’
Forgiveness has already taken place in resurrection, which we realise now by letting go of the interpretations and evaluations and judgements we have projected onto people.
It is these judgements which separate us from God – and this is what sin is, our self-imposed separation from the greatest reality.
So we are included in the gospel which has a risen Jesus telling Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” because at the time John was writing, this meant us.
We had not yet seen.
We were then those future believers.
Like Chardin, and King, and Romero, but in our way not theirs, we must go on a journey to the present moment, where love and death co-incide.
Because the risen Jesus is described not as a fact, but as a sign. “Jesus did many other SIGNS in the presence of his disciples”, it says.
As a sign, Jesus’ rising points a way for us to accept and follow, and to make into a fact.
Just believing it is like trying to enjoy a holiday by looking at the brochure.
Like Chardin and King and Romero, if we are willing, through believing we may have life in his name.
We all must die, but full life comes in being preoccupied with death in the right way, which turns shame and fear into love and joy, joy who enters through our walls and our locked doors, and enables us to look back in retrospect, and, as Chardin was always trying to teach us, see God everywhere.
