Christ's Death And Resurrection Both Convey Essential Truths
Catholics of my generation and older remember the days when funeral Masses were celebrated with the priest wearing black vestments, the casket surrounded by six “orange” candles, and the “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) was chanted as the sequence before the Gospel by the children’s choir.
The “Dies Irae” originated in the 13th century, although its major inspiration can be found in the Latin translation of the prophet Zephaniah (1:15-16): “That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds, a day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities and against the high bulwarks.”
It is a poem without hope set to a musical score describing the Day of Judgment, the last trumpet summoning the souls before God’s throne, where the saved will be delivered and the unsaved cast into hell fire (the Anglican Church incorporated an English version of this sequence into its funeral liturgies).
The last time the “Dies Irae” appears is in the Roman Missal of 1962, before the revisions of Vatican II. It is still chanted in churches where the Tridentine Liturgy Funeral Mass is celebrated. The bishops of Vatican II felt that the funeral liturgy needed to be reformed; thus, they eliminated the sequence from the Funeral Liturgies. Their reasoning was to rid the funeral liturgy of texts containing an overly negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages. Thus they removed the “Dies Irae” and other hymns overemphasizing judgment, fear and despair. These were replaced with chants urging Christians to hope in our own resurrection promised us in Christ Jesus.
Our Stations of the Cross also testify that, for the past 500-600 years, the 14th and final station was the burial of Jesus. We simply forgot that his death was not the end of Jesus – nor is our death the end of us. What a blessing today that many remodeled churches have added a 15th station: Jesus’ resurrection. We can deny neither his death nor his resurrection. Neither can we deny suffering and death in our lives; but we also recognize the great hope to which we are called – “life on high in Christ Jesus.” This is our final goal in life. Without that hope, what sustains us during times of struggle, difficulty and tragedy?
The emphasis on the death of Christ grew out of a social climate of the Middle Ages when 30 to 60 percent of the European population died from the Black Plague between 1348 and 1350. Before that time, we find stationary crosses adorning our Churches and processional crosses adorned with precious jewels proclaiming Christ’s victory over death.
The processional cross in the Cathedral Church in Aachen, Germany (the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne), is one of the most unique crosses I have ever seen. On one side, the crucified Christ is delicately etched in pure silver. On the opposite side, the cross is adorned with jewels and in the center of the cross is a cameo of the Emperor Caesar Augustus. This might strike us as strange at first – why not a cameo of Jesus? Jesus was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus, at a time supposedly when peace reigned throughout the Roman Empire. When Christians (we were all one Church at that time) saw the cameo of the Emperor, they were immediately reminded of the true “Prince of Peace” who gives us a peace this world can never give us (Christians have a tendency to “baptize” cultural symbols making them “Christian”).
With so much suffering and death during the Middle Ages, Christians needed to place before them an image of Christ who understood their suffering and pain. They believed that the Black Plague was a punishment from God (people today when facing a terminal illness often express the same feelings; they say, “Father, we’ve lived a good life, why is God punishing us?”). If sickness and death are punishments for our individual sins, then Jesus must have been the worst sinner. But the Church’s constant teaching has always been that, although Jesus was tempted like us in all things, he never sinned (plus he told the Pharisees that the reason for the man born blind from birth was neither the result of his sins or his parents). These are just natural human feelings that well up within us when faced with our mortality.
Therefore, Christians began to carve and display images of the crucified Christ on their crosses (once adorned with precious stones to show the victory of the cross). Sometimes these images were grotesque with flesh and blood torn from the bones of Jesus. They wanted a God who could empathize with their misery. Unfortunately in so doing, by overemphasizing the human suffering of Jesus, Christians lost sight of Jesus’ resurrection – something the Catholic Church has inherited for over 800 years.
You will notice in many of our churches that our processional and stationary crucifixes now have an image of the crucified and risen Christ as an attempt to convey both truths of our faith. Christ died; but he also rose again. That is our hope as the former memorial acclamation proclaimed so beautifully in the Mass, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
We can never separate the cross from resurrection. They go hand-in-hand. We know that our lives, even as Christians, will never be free of suffering and pain; however, these are never the final word. The Risen Christ is.
Next week, I want to explore where we can find the risen Christ even in the midst of human suffering, such as the Boston Marathon bombing and other tragedies that affect our lives -- for Christ has revealed his presence in our darkest hour by his willingness as he hung on the tree of death.
