So, we are still in the Easter season. There is something profoundly ambiguous about the Resurrection that has dogged the Jesus movement from its earliest days. I believe it is useful to observe these three readings in relation to this particular form of ambiguity. What is this ambiguity? The Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead (and this surfaced very late in Judaism) thought that if God raised anybody from the dead then this was the beginning of the end of the whole human enterprise. Or more accurately, that without a doubt, this was the sign that God was going to close down the whole human experiment and then he/she was going to ensure that evil was definitively conquered in order to realize heaven, or the Kingdom of God, etc. Thus, there was a feeling of finality, an end point reached, when people came to believe that God had raised this man from the dead. And if you read the New Testament you will see that belief in Jesus' Resurrection is the cause of one of the great struggles there. The clearest example of this struggle occurs in Paul's first letter to the church of the Thessalonians.As Jesus had not come back, the end had not definitively happened, and some of Jesus' followers had already begun to die. Hence, the rest of the followers were really worried.

Furthermore all of the Gospels wrestle with this problem: namely, that if this is the end, then why has the end not happened? This is the ambiguity. Thus, in one respect you have this end point reached in the resurrection of Jesus, and yet in another, the world seems to continue as if nothing special has happened. This is the problem that dogged the whole early Christian movement and I would like to propose that it has dogged all of us since that time as well.

There is a clue in this passage from The Acts of the Apostles, this strange text from The Book of Revelation, and, by implication, in this passage from John, Each one illustrates that this sense of finality is a misunderstanding. That is, we are shown that the living of the Christian life is a continuing struggle, one which echoes the persecution of Paul and Barnabas.

If the end had happened, then this struggle and these acts of persecution would never have occurred. The references in The Book of Revelation to all of those people who have washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb are examples of this struggle. Next, this business of snatching things from the Father suggests that there is going to be a constant tension between what is Gods' and the powers of evil as then attempt to steal this from the Hand of God. So, this is the problem.

It is very easy to understand why people thought that the proclamation of Jesus rising from the dead signified the finality of human existence. We all love the past. We all love finality. It is a fact that we always love the past too long, too much. This is very easy to understand in that because the past is finished it is no longer threatening; it is safe. We are secure in the past and this is the reason so many of us attempt to live out much of our lives as a prolongation of the past. There is this bit of farm folk-wisdom that I heard when I was in my first parish. A guy approached me and said, "There are some people who have twenty years of experience and there are other people who have one year of experience twenty times over". This statement expresses our love for the past very well.

But when we talk about completion, the completion exists only in the case of Jesus. But what the proclamation and belief in the Resurrection says to us, or ought to say to us, is never finished. And, of course, this is what has dogged the Church for a variety of historical and philosophical reasons that we need not go into. There is no question that all of the Christian Churches, particularly the Roman Church, have said (as one of the great Fathers said, and which we were told over and over while going through the seminary): "Let nothing be innovated except what has been handed on". Hence, the life of the Church is to be a prolongation of this past moment. And if we look at the history of the Church, as well as the history of us as individuals, this has dogged and beset the Church because the Church, as all institutions, loves the past too much as well. Again this is because the past, as past is safe and so we are in charge of the past. Thus, we immerse ourselves in the past as institutions, and as individuals. But all we have to do is look at the history of the Church to see the massive changes, the reversals, which of course we never admit to. For example, we, as an institution, would like to believe that we did not have anything to do with the destruction of European Jewry; perhaps a few little odds and ends slipped through, but not us as an institution. Slavery is all right. Usury is acceptable. Women really are inferior to men. All of these injustices have been positions taken by the Church. Then, recall the proposition that nobody outside of the Roman Church is saved. It was not until the Vatican Council in 1968 that this was reversed.

What I am getting at should be fairly clear: that to believe in the Resurrection means that God is always pulling us forward into an unknown future, kicking and screaming, most of the time. And yet if we listen to these texts we would hear this other voice, this alternate, authentic voice saying, as God said to Abraham, "I will take you from this land, that you know and are familiar with, to a place that you do not know". And anybody who seriously tries to live what we call "the spiritual life" knows that this is absolutely the case. God is the God who resolutely calls us forward into the future and this is the meaning of the Resurrection.

So what is possible for the Church? Many things are possible as long as we do not foreclose on God, as long as we do not decide that Jesus' resurrection signifies the end of the world and we do not decide to simply sit in a kind of waiting room until God shuts down the whole operation. The truth lies in replicating in our own lives, as Paul will say over and over, the struggle that brought Jesus to where he was brought - - the Cross, and then into the arms of God.

But refusing to live out our lives as a prolongation of the past is enormously counter-intuitive and counter-factual. If we look at the whole religious history of the human race, God or the gods are always the gods of the golden age and the past is always considered hallowed and superior to all subsequent time. Everything that occurs afterwards is considered a decline from this golden age. But as Christians we owe our understanding of the divine to great people like Teilard de Chardin who said, "God is constantly calling us to more," to an unknown future, to a shape both as individuals and institutions that we cannot even imagine. Therefore, we, particularly we Roman Catholics who have this enormous baggage of history, need to somehow relativize this in certain crucial ways. And again, we do not even know what those ways are yet. But the only thing that will make those ways become apparent is precisely our profound belief that in raising Jesus from the dead God has opened an absolute future for us which by definition is unknown.