Tag Archives: Resurrection

Can These Bones Live?

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From left to right: three figures represent Ezekiel being set down by God`s hand among the Dry Bones, hearing God and witnessing the beginning of the resurrection. Over a split mountain, littered with destroyed buildings and body parts, are two additional hands of God.
(Dura Europas Synagogue fresco in the National Museum of Syria, Damascus)

“Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37)

Ezekiel heard the dry bones rattle, saw them come together to form skeletons, saw the sinews and tendons grow and stretch. He saw the flesh that spread to cover them. And then he prophesied to the wind and called it to come, to fill the lungs of the dead. He saw the dead raised, the People of God restored, reconstituted, made whole. More than simple resuscitation—which only delayed death—he saw the dead resurrected. If they were resurrected, never to die again, that meant that Death itself was dead.

St. Ambrose of Milan—and most contemporary Biblical scholars as well, but my money is always with St. Ambrose—understood Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones (which occurred around 600 BC, just after the People of Israel had been taken to Babylon in exile) to mean two things: one, that Israel would be restored to their homeland. All the people who felt lost, hopeless would be revived and brought home, to where they belonged. It was a promise to the People as a whole, that although they were as good as dead in Babylon, God would eventually –on his own timetable—bring them home and give them life again in the Promised Land.

Secondly, the resurrection of the dry bones, says St. Ambrose, is also about the Resurrection of us all—each and every one of us—that will occur at the End of Days. (Many Jewish teachers had also come to understand the dry bones in this way, about 100 years before Christ.) Israel restored and the human race raised. Not resuscitated. Resurrected.

And we do not have to wait for the End of Days to experience resurrection and come home. Because Death is already dead and is already losing its power. The dead are being raised every day. “But Death is not dead yet and the dead are not being raised every day,” reasonable people pointed out to St. Ambrose. But death is dead. Just as a farmer catches a chicken and cuts off its head, only to have the corpse get up and run around the farmyard, spouting blood and making a mess and scaring the kids before it finally collapses, Christ cut the head off Death when he who is Life itself died. Death—like that chicken—can still run around and make a mess and scare people but it is already dead and it will finally collapse altogether—just like that already dead chicken—when Christ comes again in glory.

How do we experience Resurrection in advance? The dead are raised and come home every time someone is baptized. The dead are raised and come home every time we approach the altar to receive the Body of Christ—bread as dead and dry as those bones Ezekiel saw but which becomes the living and life-giving Body of Christ. The dead are raised and come home every time we actively disconnect from the things and behaviors which we use to hide from God and ourselves and our neighbors, the things and behaviors that tie us down to the fallen aspect of the world.

To live in Babylon is to live in the cemetery which is the fallen world and Jesus famously healed the possessed and destitute who lived in the cemeteries. But using Ezekiel’s voice, God promises Israel that he would deliver them from Babylon and bring them into the Promised Land; in Psalm 116, we sing, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.” We understand the land of the living is the Promised Land. The living. Those raised from the dead. In a famous Byzantine church mosaic, we see Christ Himself identified as “the land of the living.” Because the land of the living is Christ himself, we see the land of the living anywhere Christ is—Heaven. The Church.

Daughters of God

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At left, Mercy and Truth as women, veiled with wimples, labelled MISERICORD and VERITE, stand facing, grasping each others hands. At right, two women kiss, Justice, wearing hat, holding sword with right hand, and Mercy, wearing hat, and holding casket with both hands. They flank Gabriel, back-turned, raising scepter with left hand, kneeling, looking up toward Trinity in arc of Heaven. (Book of hours (Ms. Pierpont Morgan Library. M.73) (Paris, France, ca. 1475.)

“Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring up from the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” (Psalm 85:10-11)

These four virtues–mercy, truth, righteousness, and peace–are often referred to as “the four daughters of God.” The virtues come to be seen as personifications, four celestial women, similar to angels or archangels. The most important contributors to the development and circulation of the motif were the twelfth-century monks Hugh of St Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux. (Christian thought might have have been inspired by an earlier eleventh-century Jewish Midrash, in which Truth, Justice, Mercy and Peace were the four standards of the Throne of God.)

The four daughters might sometimes be thought to be gathered around Christ on the Cross as they–all four–are manifest in differing ways by the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The verse, “Truth shall spring up from the earth and righteousness … look down from heaven” might also be associated with the Nativity of Christ and his–Truth’s–springing up on the earth and being laid in a manger while Righteousness–the other persons of the Holy Trinity–look down on the scene in Bethlehem. The association of the four daughters with the Incarnation is underscored because they also appear in two sermons by St. Guerric of Igny on Luke 2 “for February 2:

“In this gathering [of the Virgin Mary, Christ, St. Joseph with SS. Simeon and Anna] finally mercy and truth have met … the merciful redemption of Jesus and the truthful witness of the old man and woman. In this meeting, justice and peace kissed when the justice of the devout old man and woman and the peace of him who reconciles the world were united in the kiss of their affections and in spiritual joy.” (Sermon 16.6)

“Rightly then are compassion and truth or faith joined together, since in all our ways–unless compassion and truth meet–it is to be feared that sins will be increased rather than purified…. [There is no forgiveness] if compassion is lacking faith or faith, compassion.” (Sermon 18.5)

The motif of the four daughters of God was influential in European thought. In 1274-76, Magnus VI of Norway introduced the first “national” law-code for Norway and makes prominent use of the allegorical four daughters of God: Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace. These daughters have the important role of expressing the idea—which was innovative in the Norwegian legal system at the time—of equality before the law.

The motif changed and developed in later medieval literature, but the usual form was a debate between the daughters (sometimes in the presence of God):

about the wisdom of creating humanity and about the propriety of strict justice or mercy for the fallen human race. Justice and Truth appear for the prosecution, representing the old Law, while Mercy speaks for the defense, and Peace presides over their reconciliation when Mercy prevails. *Michael Murphy, ‘Four Daughters of God’, in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. by David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 290-91. )

This psalm is also often suggested in traditional prayer books as a preparation for receiving Holy Communion. The communicant prepares to join the fellowship of the daughters of God by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ.

“Go, Tell My Brethren”

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“The myrrhbearing women, at the break of dawn, drew near to the tomb of the Life-giver. There they found an angel sitting upon the stone. He greeted them with these words: ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead? Why do you mourn the incorrupt amid corruption? Go, proclaim the GOSPEL to his disciples.” (Paschal Matins) (Detail from a larger 18th cent. Resurrection icon; photo by S. Morris)

“How filled with bliss were these women who, taught by the angel’s account, were found worthy to announce the triumph of the resurrection to the world and to proclaim that the sovereignty of death, to which Eve became subject when she was seduced by the serpent’s speech, had been utterly destroyed! How much more blissful will be the souls of both men and women equally, when, aided by heavenly grace, they have merited to triumph over death and enter into the joy of a blessed resurrection, while the condemned have been struck with trepidation and well-deserved punishment on the day of judgment!” (excerpt from Homily II.7, St. Bede, Homilies on the Gospels, vol. 2, translated by Martin and Hurst)

The knowledge of the gospel, the “good news,” depends on the preaching of the women who came to the tomb and discovered that Christ had risen. The angel at the tomb sent them back to preach the good news to the male apostles who were still hiding after the Crucifixion, frightened and alone. If the women had said nothing, no one would have ever heard that Christ had destroyed Death. Their participation in the divine plan of salvation was critical. All subsequent Christian experience depends on them having gone to the tomb and then telling everyone what had happened there.

We see a contrast between Eve and the Virgin Mary, the second Eve–just as Christ is the Second Adam–insofar that Eve was confronted by a (fallen) angel and chose to defy God, bringing Death into the world while the Virgin Mary was confronted by an angel (Gabriel) and chose to cooperate with God to bring true Life into the world. (Read more about this in St. Irenaeus of Lyons.) We can also see a contrast between the Myrrhbearing Women and Eve insofar that Eve hid from God in a garden and was given an apron of fig leaves to hide her nakedness while the Myrrhbearing Women stepped forward to meet the Risen Christ in a garden and were able to “put on Christ” (Galations 3:27) to remove their sinfulness.

St. Bede says something similar in another homily, where he contrasts the several Myrrhbearing Women to the one woman (Eve): “You see that several [women], instructed by the angels, proclaim that the death which one woman, seduced by the devil, had brought upon the world was now destroyed. One woman, coming [out of the garden] opened a path [that led away] from heavenly joys; many, coming back from their present exile, gave the information that the gate had now been unbarred for regaining the heavenly fatherland.” (Homily II/10, p. 94)

The stars of Orion’s belt in the night sky are sometimes called “the Three Marys” or “the Myrrhbearing Women;” these same stars are sometimes called “the Magi,” and identified with the Wise Men who came to visit the Christ Child. This association demonstrates the similar roles of the Myrrhbearing Women and the Magi in the Easter/Christmas stories as they were Outsiders (women and pagan philosophers) who were responsible for proclaiming the good news, the gospel, of Christ to the world.