March 29, 2014 Excerpt from “A Cosmic Cross” by Paul Tillich

Published in Bread and Wine:  Readings for Lent and Easter (Orbis Books)

In the stories of the crucifixion the agony and the death of Jesus are connected with a group of events in nature:  Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn in two; the earth is shaken and the bodies of the saints rise out of their graves.  Nature, with trembling, participates in the decisive event of history.  The sun veils its head; the temples makes the gesture of mourning; the foundations of the earth are moved; the tombs are opened.  Nature is in an uproar because something is happening which concerns the universe…

Trembling and shaking, the earth participated in the agony of the man on the cross and in the despair of all those who had seen in him the beginning of a new eon.  Trembling and shaking, the earth proved that it is not the motherly ground on which we can safely build our houses and cities, our cultures and religious systems.  Trembling and shaking, the earth pointed to another ground on which the earth itself rests:  the self-surrendering love on which all earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility and which they cannot conquer.  Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her.  Only insofar as it has a deeper ground can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the cross is rooted can it last.

And the earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceased to be the lasting cave of death.  Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death, as the story of the resurrection before the resurrection indicates.  No longer is the universe subjected to the law of death out of birth.  It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of him who represented eternal life.  The tombs were opened and bodies were raised when one man in whom God was present without limit committed his spirit into his Father’s hands.  Since this moment the universe is no longer what it was; nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be anymore, what we were before.