I often listen to the musical score from The Passion, and the one piece I love most is the final song, “Resurrection.” It is unlike any other piece I have ever heard. With its dramatic swell of loud drumbeats, it brings an explosive quality to the end of the Passion. For me, it conjures to mind an image of horses galloping full speed to the ends of the earth. Truth itself burst through the world like a pack of dynamite, and nothing would ever be the same again. The Resurrection of Christ sealed the transformation of history. We were no longer to be mired in the swamp of lies and mistrust, but now at last could walk upon the ground of absolute truth.
In light of this reality, St. Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians in today’s reading strikes a powerful chord. He reminds them that the message he preaches to them is not “yes and no.” He does not offer them a wisdom woven with contradictory notes, but rather a great resounding yes: “for Christ Jesus was never yes and no, but yes is his nature.”
Contradiction in a Fallen World
Have we not all struggled with the ‘yes and no’ nature of the world we live in? Contradictions and incongruities abound in our fallen world. As soon as we encounter one quality or thing, we find its opposite knitted tightly with it. Most painfully, we find within ourselves a constant tangle of paradox: for as soon as we will or desire one thing, the distortion of that wish mingles with it. Our yes to anything inevitably gives way to a no. Where can we find the true yes? The solid certainty upon which our words might draw truth?
Shakespeare’s villain Iago expresses this painful contradiction of the human heart memorably: “I am not what I am.” Even if we do not descend to his darkness, the fact remains that on our own, we are doomed to self-perjury. How can we really mean anything when our own thoughts invoke their contradiction?
Yes is His Nature
This is where the salvific power of Christ permeates our deepest reality. As St. Paul tells us, “Yes is his nature.” Christ’s Resurrection flings open the gateway to the absolute yes of God. No longer must we wrangle with the knotty contradictions of a diseased world—the emptiness of a world condemned to death—but now we receive in Christ the pure, resounding yes of God’s eternal nature. We who have been grafted by faith into the risen Christ no longer stumble upon illusions but find anchor in the ground of his Truth.
Simple as it seems, this reality of the indestructible yes of God utterly changes the world. Because of the Resurrection, our lives have meaning; and our words become true. One could say that Christianity is the proclamation of the great unbreakable Yes that undergirds reality.
Salt and Light
Through this lens, today’s Gospel passage takes on fresh power. Jesus declares to the crowds that they who believe in him are “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” What is salt but an essential ingredient that enhances the flavor of food? And what is light but the element of reality that makes it real to us? A world without light is no longer a world we can know but one shrouded in darkness. Light brings us into contact with the “what-ness” of reality, the created world which God declared good. The more closely we abide in Christ, the more we partake of that light and then radiate that to the rest of the world. All the darkness of false ideologies, all the despair of nihilism evaporates in face of this positive truth of God.
Christ, risen from the dead, declares to us the yes our restless hearts seek. We find in the Resurrection the pounding, throbbing is-ness of the Heart of God: Yes, yes, and everlastingly yes!
