We Shall All Be Changed
When you study or pray before the Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection,
you see something quite different from Western depictions. Eastern icons
picture the Risen Christ standing astride the darkness and the tombs, pulling
souls out of hell. Chains and locks fly in all directions across the frame. This is
good news worthy of the name. I first felt this leap in my heart when a young
Austrian priest came up to me after I had led a male initiation rite near
Salzburg. He handed me such an icon as a gift, and said with great enthusiasm,
“This is what you are teaching, whether you fully realize it or not.” The joy and
peace I saw on both the priest’s face and the images on the icon showed me
what is surely the true message of the Resurrection. As I have said before, but it
bears repeating, John Dominic Crossan demonstrates convincingly through art
that “the West lost and the East kept the original Easter vision.”*14 If that is true,
it is a real game changer. In my opinion, we tried to breathe the full air of the
Gospel with only the Western church lung, and it left us with a very incomplete
and not really victorious message.
“I am telling you something that has been a secret,” Paul writes in 1
Corinthians (15:51). “We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.”
And he even says “all” twice, but our perversity just does not allow us to see
that. Most Western Christian paintings of the resurrection show a man stepping
out of a tomb with a white banner in his hand, but in my many trips to
churches and art museums around the world, I have yet to see any written
words on that banner. I always wonder, Why the empty space? Perhaps it is
because we ourselves were still unsure about the message of resurrection. We
had imagined that resurrection was just about Jesus, and then found ourselves
unable to prove it, nor could we always find this abundant life within ourselves.
But now you have been told about the Eternal Christ, who never dies—and
who never dies in you! Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about
history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered,
and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element
that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is
about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The “Christ journey” is
indeed another name for every thing.