The Entombment

“...Then think of [that Body’s] more recent history, which you may read in those cruel scars that disfigure it. Those are the eyes that wept over the ingratitude of Jerusalem, from that brow the sweat started out in Gethsemani; that cheek still blushes, you might think, from the shame of the traitor’s kiss. The wrists are still swollen, where they were bound when he was led away; the back is scarred with long weals, the piteous talley of his scourging; the forehead has bled where the thorns pricked it; the shoulders are bruised from the heavy burden they bore; the knees where they collapsed on the ground outside the city gate. More prominent still, and more unsightly, the torn flesh of hands and feet where the nails went through them, the deep cleft in the side. ‘No beauty, as we gaze on him, to win our hearts’—in that broken frame we hardly recognize the appearance of a Man; and this is God.

Think, now, of what that Body was to him who wore it yesterday—the material complement of a soul completely sanctified; the smile with which he forgave the sinner traced its lines round that mouth; the sighs he uttered over man’s unbelief filled those lungs; those brows were contracted with indignation at the senseless pride of the Pharisees. The material source, too, of the mortifications which his soul encountered; it was that body which hungered when he fasted in the wilderness; those are the feet which tired on the roads of Galilee when he went about doing good, those are the eyelids which ached when he denied himself sleep, that is the throat that was parched with thirst by the side of Jacob’s well. The material accomplice, even, of his marvellous works. The woman who had an issue of blood did but touch the hem of the garments it wore, and virtue went out of that body to heal her infirmity; this hand touched how many fevered brows, lifted up how many cripples and gave them strength to walk; from those lips went forth the word of healing which lightened so many sorrows, reversed so many tragedies, the word which, only yesterday it seems, pierced through the stone that lay against the tomb of Lazarus, and bade the dead man come forth.... Now, that voice in its turn is silent with the silence of the tomb; that hand is motionless; that body wants, not only the theandric virtue which once radiated from it, but the power to stir its own muscles.

His Spirit, that he breathed out on the Cross, resigning it into his Father’s hands, still pursues the same beneficent course. Translated into a world of disembodied spirits, the spirits of the just who died before Calvary, it has brought to them the light and refreshment they longed for; instead of being imprisoned like other human souls, it has disprisoned the others, and summoned them to share its own reward. But the Body that was its partner lies here according to the wont of human bodies; nothing, at least to the outward eye, distinguishes its lot from theirs. Our faith, we thought, had been taxed enough, recognizing the eternal Godhead under the form of a little Child on his mother’s breast, or a poor labouring Man in a Galilean workshop, or a Prisoner condemned by legal sentence and hung on a Cross to die. But see, here is one more demand faith makes of us; we have to recognize eternal God under the form of a dead Body, ripe for the tomb.

For remember, this is God. Is, not was; we are not to speak as if the separation of soul from body in our Lord’s human Nature meant that half of that Nature, its material part, ceased even for a moment to be the vehicle of the divinity with which the Incarnation had wedded it. The Hypostatic Union is not something which links the God-head to the rest of our Lord’s Humanity through the medium of his Soul; it is a complete union between God and Man, which does not cease even when soul is separated from the body; God laid in the sepulchre is God still. Soul and body are integral parts of a single whole; and in the Incarnate every part of that whole was, and remains, Divine.

Thou wilt not suffer thy Holy One, said King David, to see corruption; in our Lord’s sepulchre the victory of our nature over death was manifested and achieved. The preservation of his Sacred Body from that law by which our bodies return to the dust whence they came, and are commingled with it, was the earnest of our own resurrection at the last day. Matter is not, after all, something in itself ignoble, something that clogs and imprisons us; it, too, is part of us, and will one day be part of us again, though now glorified and etherialized in such a measure that our minds cannot conceive it. Both spirit and body in man must, at last, triumph over death, since spirit and body are both divinized in the Incarnation.

...Yes, a body like ours, but not doomed, as ours are, to see corruption. And yet, how did our Lord treat his body? You would think, to watch the way we Christians order our lives, that it was the other way about. We are so concerned with cosseting the body and pampering it, spend so much care, even, on the outward appearance of it, give in so easily to its complaints if it is tired out or indisposed—this body which is corruptible and is passing on its way into corruption, itself and all its activities native to a world of dust. Our Lord hungered and thirsted, watched and laboured, had nowhere to lay his head; he didn’t spare that body of his, that was to rest but two days in the sepulchre; and how do we treat ours, that will part company with us from the hour of death till the general Resurrection?

Our bodies will lie motionless, one day, in the arms (please God) of the Church, that kindly mother who has a place and a plan for everything. Meanwhile, what of our souls? What is more terrifying than the thought of a soul, one’s own, a naked soul, ushered, all unacclimatized, into the airs of eternity? We are daunted by what seems the complete discontinuity of the experience. And yet, there cannot be absolute discontinuity; that moment after death will have some relation to the moment which went before. We must look, then, at the last moment of our Lord’s life, so that it may be a model for the last moment of ours. ‘Father’, he says, ‘into thy hands I commend my spirit’. The metaphor of the verb is that of the man who puts his money into a bank. The man who puts his money into a bank makes, to that extent, an act of confidence in the bank’s solvency and honesty; so that the phrase which our Lord uses at the moment of death, for our example, will be an act of confidence in God, his omnipotence, his infinite goodness. When a man is told, on his death-bed, to resign himself to the death God wills for him, that does not mean shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘Well, there is no getting out of this, so I may as well make up my mind to go through with it’. To resign yourself at the hour of death is to make a supreme act of confidence in God; to protest your conviction that the form of death he wills for you, the moment of death he wills for you, is the best form, is the best moment; you are going to leave everything absolutely to him, you are prepared to let your spirit go into his hands; relax all effort, and let him do everything. In so far as you have resigned yourself to death, your soul will find itself, after death, securely in his hands; it will be the expected that happens to it. But that act of resignation will not be easy to make on your death-bed—if you have a death-bed—unless you have some practice in it beforehand. Perhaps sometimes—perhaps when we are making a retreat?—it would be a good thing to rehearse beforehand that act of resignation.

Our Lord was judged by men, and condemned to death. His enemies, as if to declare the irrevocability of the sentence, put a stone over the door of his tomb and sealed it; nothing more could happen now. But man’s judgements are not irrevocable; and the very parade of legal precision which the chief priests adopted did but serve to vindicate the truth of his Resurrection. When God judges man, his judgements are irrevocable; and we know that immediately after death your soul and mine will be judged and their destiny will be sealed, irrevocably, for all eternity. They will be as powerless, then, to merit or to affect their own destiny as our dead bodies will be powerless to move in their coffins. In that most solemn moment of all our existence, that moment for which we were created, our judgement, what shall we be thinking about? Our sins? Our confessions, whether they were entire? Our contrition, whether it was genuine? The opportunities we had of doing something for God, and let them slip? The graces we wasted through our infidelity? And on the other side, the little we did do for God, the graces we corresponded with, and made something of them?

Perhaps. Indeed, if the sentence is to go against us, and we are to be exiled for all eternity from the presence of God, it is natural to suppose that such thoughts will occupy our mind to the exclusion, for the moment, of everything else. ... What we did, and what we might have done; how little more of effort, of courage, of independence it would have needed to make us do the right thing instead of the wrong thing, take the right turning instead of the wrong turning, here and here and here. Yes, if the sentence is to go against us, if we are to be lost. But let us not consider that possibility, just now. If we are to be amongst the elect, shall we really be thinking, in that moment when judgement is passed on us, of what we did or did not do, of what we might or might not have done? Surely not. Surely what will be before our eyes will be a Body newly taken down from a Cross, a Body wounded for our sins, bruised for our iniquities. We shall look upon him whom we have pierced, for it will be he, none other, who judges us; and we shall see, in that moment, not how we betrayed, how we denied, how we crucified him, but how his death saved us, how his scars healed us, how from that pierced side the fountains of sacramental grace flowed, absolution to justify us, Holy Communion to sanctify us. And that Face, which we have so often seen in our imagination looking at us, as it looked at Peter, in reproval of our sins, will show gentle and gay to us, and we shall know that nothing henceforth can ever separate us from him.”

~Ronald Knox