Easter evening "The disciples had locked the doors of the place where they were. Jesus came and stood among them." (John 20:19) The most common understanding is that resurrection made it possible for Jesus to walk through doors. It makes more sense to me that resurrection made it possible for Jesus to move through dimensions.
Now in all of this, the common way and the dimensional way, remember that we are dealing with Mystery and trying to find a metaphor that best helps us get some grasp of what happened. We cannot nail down Mystery.
Science fiction helps us think about existing in various dimensions. A character in some other dimension suddenly becomes visible in our dimensions of length, height, and depth. Celtic spirituality imagines the other world as "woven into and through this world." Those in either world can sometimes be easily accessible to those in the other.
Both the science fiction notion and the Celtic notion have influenced my search for a metaphor for resurrection. Resurrection takes Jesus out of this world. He is now beyond time and space. What would prevent him from moving from beyond this world into the locked room with the disciples?
If he can suddenly appear in a locked room, couldn't he also have disappeared from the tomb with its entrance blocked by the large stone. I like to think that the stone is rolled back, not so Jesus can get out, but so that disciples can see that Jesus is not still in there.
What makes this metaphor so appealing to me is that it makes the presence of the Risen Christ within us very real.
No comments:
Post a Comment