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First, you might wish to go to the bottom of this article and read the “Closing Aspiration.” The Aspiration provides the prayerful spirit and intent in which this paper is sent to you.
What if you could bring all the events of Holy Week into this very moment, into this very week, alone and in worship with others? What if you could feel the events lived out inside your very body? What if you could allow the Passion and Resurrection of Christ to be an adventure you would never, thankfully, get over, and which would change your life forever? What if, through observing this Week and the Easter Season, you would feel more joyful, at peace, and free? What if, among others worshipping, the sense of temporal sequence could dissolve into the bliss of the Eternal? Well, to all the “what if,” such is possible.
The Christ Story itself is transforming, not because it is magical, but because it is inspired to speak to the Truth already longing to be lived inside each of us. That is, the Christ Story is about what is already possible, the eternally existing pattern of Life. The Christ Story actualizes in time and continues to bring into lived realization what is the original intent and design for human life and Creation. This Story, essentially, says, “Life and history are meant to take a Christo-form.” Likewise, your life and my life are whole to the extent that they are being transformed into a Christo-form, or Christ-Likeness.
We cannot, in the present age, speak of such matters apart from the concept “energy.” And, we cannot overlook that such a focus is true to the truth of God as “Spirit” and the human as a spiritual expression of Spirit. Therefore, I turn to Bruno Barnhart, a Camaldolese monk, who does a wonderful work, in Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity, on seeking to demonstrate how the Christ Event continues to shape a Christo-form world, having, he contends, being unleashed through the events of Jesus’ life. This does not mean this movement was not, however, operative before Jesus’ earthly life.
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The incarnation of Christ, indeed, is a decisive transitional moment in that unfolding that was prior to Jesus. This is why the Church speaks of the Preexistence of Christ, but not the Preexistence of Jesus. Many Christians, indeed most, seem not to notice this important and historical theological distinction. One leads to a Christology, which is historically orthodox, the other to a Jesusology, which is not true to the historical Christian faith. Christ manifested as Jesus of Nazareth; that is the Incarnation. The Incarnation manifested the essential union between what is perceived as “spirit” and “flesh,” “human” and “God.” The causative relation, however, must be kept in place: temporally, causatively, spirit precedes flesh, God precedes human; likewise, Christ precedes Jesus. After the union, we can speak of inspirited matter, a deified human, and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. That is, Incarnation is both a manifestation and a unitive-uniting event.
Therefore, likewise, we inquire, “In what sense is Holy Week and Easter energetic, incarnational, causative, and unitive for us?” We, as creatures in time, trust that these sacred celebrations have a sacramental causation. If we rightly engage them and are engaged by them, we will be transformed in the process. All speech of Eternity does not annul that Eternity is manifesting in and as time for us on this human journey. Sacred Story is one means that Eternity effects causatively in time and through the images of time and historical happening.
Barnhart contends for this importance and centrality of historical events, which actually happened, as essential to Spirit working through the Christ Event. He observes, “The divine energy is present successively in several ways: ‘objectively’ in a given historical event, then as if contained within the gospel narrative, and finally in the listener’s or the reader’s experience.” Therefore, a whole approach to the Christian life, as well as the events of Holy Week and Easter, will take seriously those three aspects: historical event, Gospel narrative, personally experienced significance. For a Christian not to take seriously that a real, historical event, of some nature, is behind the Gospel narrative of the Resurrection, would be as odd as asking a Buddhist not to believe that Siddhartha underwent something historically commensurate with the story of his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.
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