It is amazing how many Christians fail to see Easter as the greening event par excellence in biblical history. Even the Green Bible that has each sections of the Hebrew and Christian marked in green for environmental issues, but it does not mark out today’s gospel in green. Why do Christians miss the obvious, for me at least, dimension of ecological spirituality and themes in the resurrection story of Magdalene discovering the risen Christ in the garden?
Maybe it is my Catholic heritage that opens my eyes to environmental significance of the story. In Catholic Easter vigil, the paschal candle is dipped into the baptismal waters, signifying ancient symbolism of fertility and new life. For Christians, symbols of fertility and rebirth aptly signify the risen Christ, the new life of Easter. Christ is born to new life as we all hope and dream for ourselves.
There are so many clues that point to themes around earth, life, gardens, risen from the tomb, the dead cross and the green garden. The resurrection garden stands in contrast to the Garden of Gethsemane and even the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes the new life that God intended for us from the beginning.
If your green imagination is challenged, think about C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the Chronicles of Narnia. The long winter of the Witch’s reign is broken under the warmth of Christ’s springtime. The springtime here signifies new life, new growth, and the restoration of nature by the death and resurrection of the Aslan/Christ figure. Seeds sprout, fruit trees blossom with colors, lilies and flowers in bloom, birds chirping and life filled with hope. All these herald life; they point to God as creator and Spirit. It is time of birth and renewal.
Unlike many Christians who continually throw the Earth into God’s trash bin for a heavenly salvation for themselves alone, I see glimpses of hope in Easter: so marvelously inclusive and extravagant.
And let me tell you that many folks who fight for the Earth and all life are either there with Jesus on the cross Good Friday or with Jesus’ corpse in the tomb. They are so aware of the polluted rivers, the toxic waste dumps that harm us and other life, the extinction of millions of plant and animal species, the radioactive spills into the Pacific Ocean, the thousands of coal plants pumping unceasing carbon and toxic pollution into the air to warm our climate. I can’t help associating the unbreathable atmosphere in Beijing where millions of people have to wear masks against the heavily polluted atmosphere with the experience the asphyxiation that Jesus did on the cross. Humans tortured Christ and other humans through asphyxiation. Or Jesus being slaughtered at the time of thousands lambs for Passover celebrations. He suffered as animals suffered merciless killings or the extinctions of species. Global warming is and its ravages will continue to be a reality that we and our descendants have to live with for generations.
It is hard to maintain hope when you stand before the cross of the crucified Jesus and not think that the Roman Empire and religious fundamentalists have won; or lay in the dark tomb with Jesus’ corpse, realizing the body has been scarred and remains lifeless. This is where many environmental activists are today. They have been shocked out of hope by human degradation of the Earth and all life on the planet. Many mourn the passion of the Earth. Our mission given to us this is Easter to be people of hope and to share that hope with those Earth caregivers who still at the foot of the cross and mourn in the tomb. It is easy to fall into such thinking for myself when I look at the on-going news reports of the growing climate change and unusual severe weather events.
The tomb represents our groundedness with the Earth. It is the primal matrix of the soil from which we evolved. In Genesis, we were named adamah, earth creature because we came from the soil. We were bound to the soil. Dr. Daniel Hillel, a soil physicist, notes that humanity is associated with the soil:
The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words “humility” and “humble” also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise man”). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in “curator.” (“Teach us to care” was T.S. Eliot’s poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one.
Jesus, like of all us, is tethered to the earth, and through our embodiment, we are tethered with Jesus in the tomb when we die. But we know that we join God’s Christ, alive and part of the mystical body of Christ. We know that existed in the biosphere, he breathed oxygen as we do, he ate food as we do, and many other actions we commonly do.
And the resurrection is the promise that all life has a future in God, not just us. God is calling us and all creation to communion with God’s self, in ways for us inconceivable. Yet God communicates that history is not predetermined but an open future.
Easter, then, is God’s victory over it all. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the decisive for all of us—the world, all life, the Earth, and the universe. What happens to Christ raised from the tomb will happen to all—transformed into resurrection life. Easter reveals the fullness of the matrix of all life with God; it is the web of grace that links all life, human and other life and the Earth together. That web is God’s Spirit, the Spirit that pulsed new life and energy into the risen Christ.
Creation is all interconnected bodily together through the Spirit. Creation is not just the beginning of the universe, it is the on-going evolution of cosmic and biologically processes, the coming of the incarnate Christ—now dead but risen to the new life intended for all—and the Spirit the navigator subverting all human distortions and destructiveness of life. That last point I hold on for dear life as I engage in Earthcare and fighting for the Earth and all life. It is too easy to become overwhelmed emotionally, loose hope when you see on daily basis human arrogance and human denial, exploiting the Earth recklessly, contaminating the waters and ground water, polluting the atmosphere, raping the mountain tops by harvesting coal, undoing the EPA just trying to protecting human well-being from human created diseases and cancers, greed and short term profit over the expense of all others.
Human violence, self-centeredness and callous disregard for other life, and exploitation of the Earth and the community of life will not be the last word. The crucial issue of God’s incarnation, death and resurrection, reveals the seamless web of interrelationship of all life. At the intersections of this seamless web of interrelated life is God’s incarnated Child. The incarnate risen Christ weaves the web of interdependent life into his body. And the divine community of life and unconditional grace will have the last word. Resurrection, Life, Greenness!
We are all interconnected and interrelated. We are all siblings, human and other life. We are together in the body of Christ. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Irish priest and writer, envisions:
When you weep, we weep When a tree is felled prematurely, an animal in pain because of crazy experimentation, a teenager rebelling authority, a couple at their wit’s end trying to make a relationship work, an African woman burying the last of her seven children because of AIDS, a Peruvian farmer seeing his last piece of land swiped by a transnational corporation, we too feel the pain, the helplessness, the rage the cruel injustice.
What becomes stressed by Easter is that God’s ultimate act of compassion is Christ, his life and death, and then the resurrection. All the efforts of God at creating; incarnating, interrelating with us, all life, and creation; reconciling and sustaining and spiriting us to new birth and new love—all this is the outpouring of God’s unconditional love for all creation. It links us together in solidarity with all others. This the web of grace within we were created and within which Christ’s resurrection strengthens us together with the universe. God became human and materials so that humanity, all life, and the universe would become divine.
God will be victorious over human violence, greed, and selfishness. God will have the last word. I hold onto to this hope with all my faith and commitment though I see such human foolishness and arrogance.
The Resurrection of Christ is also about the transformation of the universe. Jesus’ resurrection is the hope that defies all hopelessness—even the hopelessness of Earth caregivers and activists. God proclaims that the relational matrix of the divine community of life outpouring an unconditional love and invitation to participate in that flow of love. On Easter, God announces radical inclusiveness. Nothing that we imagine as inclusive is inclusive enough for God. There will be no more outcasts: not any human, no other life, nor the Earth herself. Everything falls into God’s matric of interrelating graces. All creation! We now belong to the reign of God’s inclusiveness. God cares, and invites to care for all and to proclaim the hope of a new belong for all. We all belong to God.
God will not abandon creation and all life, but will continue to be presence to creation and all life and weave them continuous into a matrix of interconnected grace.
Christ’s resurrection was a wakeup call to his disciples, birthing a movement of compassion, forgiveness, peace-making, love, non-violence, radical inclusiveness, and extravagant love. It a wakeup call to God’s green grace that flows from the heart of divine love, birth in creation, thriving in evolutionary chaos and organizing life into more complexity, incarnating God’s self, and re-embodying in ourselves and all life, listening to the invitation of love at the end of this journey of all towards God.
Alleluia, God will triumph over all: climate deniers, fundamentalists, human exploiters, politicians committed to undo any efforts to stop climate change. God will be victorious.