The Dispatch: More from CWR...

Easter, Creation, and holiness

The paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and ascension is the axial point of the entire drama of Creation: the decisive, definitive turning point that reveals why there is “Creation” at all.

The Edicule, the traditional site of Jesus' burial and resurrection, is seen at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (CNS photo/Debbie Hill)

What came first: Creation, or God’s covenants with the People of Israel and the New Israel, the Church?

The question may seem odd, even silly. Chronologically, it’s obvious that the divine act of creation preceded the divine acts of covenant-making: no creation, no “People” with whom God could enter a covenant relationship. But our sense of time is not God’s. For as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, all that we know as “time” is an eternal present to God.

In Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, Pope Benedict XVI explains that God’s covenant relationship with his chosen people in both the Old and New Testaments is not an add-on, a divine afterthought — or, as it’s more often understood, a fix for something that had gone wrong. Rather, Benedict writes, God’s covenantal bond with his people — the Jewish people and the people of the Church — is the very reason why God “created” in the first place:

According to rabbinic theology, the idea of the covenant — the idea of establishing a holy people to be an interlocutor for God in union with him — is prior to the idea of the creation of the world and supplies its inner motive. The cosmos was created, not that there be manifold things in heaven and earth, but that there be space for the ‘covenant,’ for the loving ‘yes’ between God and his human respondent.

Throughout the Lenten itinerary of conversion we have lived for six weeks, the Church has asked us to reflect on God’s thirst for us. Thus, the paradigmatic Lenten gospel reading of Jesus and the woman at the well on the Third Sunday of Lent points to prayer as a “gift of God” (John 4:10): Prayer is our divinely-empowered response to God’s burning desire for our holiness. Other paradigmatic Lenten Sunday gospels strike a similar note: The cure of the man born blind (who is empowered to see Jesus as the Light of the World [John 9, 5, 38]) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (which follows Martha’s act of faith in John 11:27). God creates or “speaks” the world into being through his “Word” (John 1:3) and redeems the world through the Word incarnate (John 1:14) to share the divine holiness. God yearns, God “thirsts,” for the holiness of the human creatures he has created, so that he might be in covenant relationship with them.

The Redemption wrought in Christ is not, therefore, some sort of addendum to Creation. The paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and ascension is the axial point of the entire drama of Creation: the decisive, definitive turning point that reveals why there is “Creation” at all. Thus, the answer that Christian faith, which is Easter faith, gives to a question philosophy has pondered for millennia — Why is there something rather than nothing? — is, in a word, holiness. The Thrice-Holy God created so that the holiness shared among Father, Son and Holy Spirit might be shared ad extra: in a world brought into being to experience the eternal giving-and-receiving of love that is God’s inner-trinitarian life.

Like many others, I have been mesmerized by the extraordinarily beautiful pictures of the cosmos made available by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope; I recently bought a print reproducing a small portion of what astronomers know as Messier 16, the “Eagle Nebula” (which the more lyrically inclined call the “Pillars of Creation”). Some might consider this vast factory of new stars, 5,700 light-years away, as a benign accident rather than what biblical religion calls a “creation.” Those who think that way tend to think of human beings the same way: We’re accidents produced by billions of years by fortuitous cosmic biochemistry.

Easter faith invites us to think differently — and more deeply.

Easter faith and the optic on reality it creates suggests that the burden of proof lies with those who imagine that everything from the Eagle Nebula to the mysterious workings of human cognition and human altruism is just accidental.

Easter faith — the faith that the Incarnate Word overcame death and was raised to a new and superabundant form of life — confesses we live in a cosmos that is purposeful because it is Christocentric: “In him all things were created….and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

Easter faith summons us to think of ourselves as creatures capable of eternal life, for that is what Christ promised to those who embrace his cause (John 3:15, 17:3). And in friendship with him, the Risen One, we can experience that life, that holiness, here and now.


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About George Weigel 519 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

14 Comments

  1. Impressive. If I understood it I would be ready to join a guru on a mountaintop.

    The point about God and time has some merit, but doesn’t explain him to me. The Bible does, which it is supposed to. Some of it even in chronological order.

    Speaking of the Word of God, I notice some useful points in it related to this season.
    The word Easter doesn’t appear (except for a KJV mistake at Acts 12:4, where it replaced Passover).
    The Passover meal that Jesus enjoyed with his close disciples is specifically commanded to us as a memorial to his sacrifice. “Do this in temembrance of me.” Cf. 1 Cor 11:23-26.
    Looking at how Easter has been kept over the centuries, one may wonder if it’s right to ignore such a glorious day, as implied here. In fact, once Jesus completed his sacrificial act (“It is finished”), then his resurrection was a foregone comclusion. That is, if Yahweh can be counted on to keep his promises. If not, then we’re all doomed.
    Much more interesting to me is the account of the replacement of one covenant with another, better one when Christ ascended. (Heb 9 & 10) Heavy stuff, needing a lawyer to sort it all out. So Yahweh supplied us with Paul. 🤓

    There’s more. The dating of the Passover in Christendom was still comtroversial in Bede’s day, ca. 700 C.E.

    No bunny rabbits were harmed in the making of this post.

      • I didn’t harm no rabbis neither!
        And I don’t call no one my padre neither!
        [Mt 23:9, moderators. Not “needlessly combative or inflammatory] 😀

      • Ok, ok. I’m outvoted. AD it is. 😭

        😀

        Say, did you ever read him? Good dose of Church _and_ English history together, at no extra cost.
        Seems like a nice guy.

        • No Doug, I can’t say that I’ve read St. Bede’s writings, I’ve only read about him, but I’m sure that’s a good recommendation.
          God bless!

      • Here and there Bede touches on the Easter dating problem. He knows of the Quartodecimans and treats them sympathetically, but says (correctly) that the Church question was all but decided by his day, in favor of Rome’s “finding” of the ‘Easter on Sunday’ scheme. (I think he said that the Antioch congregation was a holdout.)
        I believe I contradicted that successfully in my OP.
        *Correction*. The Bible, which is God’s word not man’s, contradicted that successfully.

  2. The Thrice-Holy God created so that the holiness shared among Father, Son and Holy Spirit might be shared ad extra: in a world brought into being to experience the eternal giving-and-receiving of love that is God’s inner-trinitarian life (G Weigel).
    Saint Thomas Aquinas postulated God cannot be caused to act. His response to the mystery of creation is that if it were possible to attribute a cause it would be love. Still it remains a mystery because the human intellect cannot comprehend the incomprehensible God who is pure act, act entirely dynamic and singular. That the Trinitarian community of persons revealed by the one God suggests as Weigel notes transcendence of time. We may concur with Weigel in this, and that God’s creation of cosmos and Man out of nothing transcends time in respect to God’s act and in respect to Man is realized in time. The Word made flesh who suffers, dies, and resurrects has eternal resonance.

  3. ugh…er….ugly perhaps: “…that is what Christ promised to those who embrace ‘his cause'”??….the Well-Beloved of the Father does not have a cause, did not come for a cause or ask or send us for a cause, truly a man erudition, can we have the real WORD???…or how about just ’embrace Him’?? Holy Week mercies and graces!!

  4. Very interesting, the rabbinic thoughts…how do they explain a ‘prior-ness’ with the eternal now?? How does one Thought in God precede, or is prior to, another, if all is in the eternal now, present – must they not all be simultaneous, at the same eternal now, having neither a procession of being prior or mid/post prior and so on? Interesting….

  5. About the Incarnation and the pascal mystery as: “…definitive turning point that reveals why there is “Creation” at all.” We have something old and something new, and not confined to a charitably fraternal, but too-often ambiguous “pluralism” of religions:

    FIRST, the Old Testament is unique, ” He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his rules. He has done this for no other nation; they do not know his laws” (Psalm 147:20).

    The Old Testament is a fostered and “inspired” collection of books gathered over a millennium. Likewise, the New Testament: “The New Testament, too, is a collection of different books, which can be understood only as a whole and in terms of this whole [….] The Old and the New Testaments—refer to each other in such a way that the New Testament is the interpretive key to the Old” (Benedict XVI, “What is Christianity,” Ignatius, 2023, p. 49).

    Very unlike the Qur’an which excludes the word and meaning of “Father,” and instead is believed to have been “dictated” by an inscrutable Allah to a single and self-validating individual. And, a text which replaces not the Old and New Testaments, but the Incarnation: “the word made book,” replacing “the Word made flesh.”

    And, SECOND, about creation itself:

    “The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of WHY Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, not the why. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (Hans Ur von Balthasar, “My Work in Retrospect,” Ignatius Press, 1993).

    • Peter, thanks. I can understand most of what you wrote. Mr Weigel, not so much. No matter; his various bios keep calling him an “intellectual”, so i get to bow out of his discussions if i please. 😀 And i can defer to Paul also. Php 3:4 ff., esp v. 8., although i don’t have Paul’s CV.

      You will note the lower case i, because Google’s keyboard stopped making it I automatically, and i got sick of changing it. Other glitches too. For the money Sergey has pulled put of Alphabet over the years he should at least make sure of his “updates”. 🤬

      Got carried away. As Ahnold said, “I’ll be Bach.”

  6. I’m Bach – i mean back.
    Your para 2 & 3 i agree with.
    Para 3 – I didn’t know of your Q’uran comments; i can assume their accuracy, though. Muhammad would have recoiled from “made flesh”. He saw Jesus as a prophet, the penultimate before himself. (Jesus, as you know, said the Holy Spirit would succeed him; ties into your Trinity doctrine.}

    Got a kick out of that “single and self-validating individual.” Yep, and that led to “The Satanic Verses”, often pitting Muslims against each other down to this day.
    An issue for some is Muhammad’s illiteracy, and the existence of their Book only in men’s memories for some time. A non-issue IMO. He was a business associate of his wife’s in her caravan operation. And much information in those days was memorized.
    That the verses existed and had to be repudiated is true. Myself, i feel sorry for those folks.

    As to the creation, I’ll respond to that next. It’s one of my favorite topics.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*