Christ the Eternal Beginning

Last updated on: May 25, 2018 at 6:54 am by Matthew Tan

Christ the Eternal Beginning 2018-05-25T06:54:15+10:00 Matthew Tan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Source: Pixabay.com

At the end of the movie Knight of Cups, the final moment is marked by Rick, the film’s protagonist, who says “Begin”.

I just got back from a retreat run by the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation (CL), where Fr John O’Connor of Food for Faith, built on the spiritual exercises of CL’s leader, Fr Julian Carron. The exercises centered on a line taken from Isaiah (43:19), where God through the prophet says: See, I do a new thing…do you not perceive it? It is a line that the one seated on the throne would later declare in a similar form at the dawning of the new heaven and earth (Rev 21:5), before identifying himself with both beginning and end, the alpha and omega (21:6).

While retreat focused on the theme of perception, the coupling of Jesus with newness was what struck me. It affirmed a pointed made by Pope Francis in his 2018 Easter Vigil homily, in which he spoke of a “crushing routine that robs memory, silences hope, and leads to thinking that ‘this is the way things have always been done'”.

I wrote in another piece about how the life of sin can, as James Alison argued, be identified as a compulsion towards repetitiveness. This repetitiveness can be a vain repetition of action to get a happiness that can never be found, or a repetition of thinking that presumes that happiness will never be found. By contrast, Christ breaks into the routine as a newness.

Scripture has the above passages to couple Christ with the new, but a more fundamental coupling can be seen in the prologue of the Gospel of John, where John not only recapitulates history back to its very beginnings, but also couples those beginnings with the Word of God, that would later become flesh and then enter into our history. The Divine Word of God was thus the locus of creation’s beginning.

Taking up from the ancient fathers, St. Bonaventure would go one further when he stated that since it is through the Divine Word that all creation has its beginning, the ongoing existence of every creature is due to the Divine Word leaving an imprint of itself into the DNA of all things, animate and inanimate. What can be drawn from Bonaventure is that the logos of beginning is built into all of creation.

Against the logic of routine, every atom in creation reverberates with the possibility of what Alain Badiou calls “pure beginning”. Every moment in history (this includes our individual histories too), taking up these atoms of creation, is a potential unfolding of a new beginning promised by God. What is more, even moments in history that declare the final end to the hope in new things like an existential tombstone, those moments still bear the imprint of Christ the incarnate Word, and thus the presence of Christ who makes new all things, even the ones that bear the hallmark of “crushing routine” and finality.

This is why Pope Francis can say in his homily that the tomb stone, the supposed guarantor of the finality of death, can nonetheless become the first witness to the new thing of the defeat of death, the defeat of finality. But the cold stone witnesses not the defeat per se, but to the risen Christ, the risen alpha.

The question that arises for us now is whether we, in the circumstances of our own histories, can look at the seeming fixity of those circumstances and recognise that behind their declaration of finality, works Christ and with Christ, the hope of an unfolding of a beginning in your own life.

To paraphrase an essay by Creston Davis and Aaron Riches in the book Theology and the Political, the practice of the Christian life, as a practice of ongoing fidelity to Christ as pure beginning, is inseparable from declaring the empire of finality dead.

Previous Post

May 18, 2018

Christians, Let Us Type One Another

Next Post

June 25, 2018 What a Magpie Taught Me About the Spiritual Life

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category architecture art Augustine Belloc Benedict XVI bible blogs books bourgeois Christianity Campion College Chesterton Christianisation Church and Culture Church Fathers citizen conference conservative consumer culture cybernetics Desert Fathers discipleship distributism drinking ecclesiology economics education environment Evagrius of Pontus formation Foucault George Weigel Girard Graham Ward http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post interfaith Jacques Ellul John Chrysostom Julia Kristeva Latin liturgy mall marriage monasticism Music Narrative news philosophy polis politics pop culture postmodern city postsecular prayer prostestant quote Quotes Radical Orthodoxy resources Rome Rule of St. Benedict saint Saints secular sociology theological anthropology theology transcendance Uncategorized videos William Cavanaugh

Select a Month December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 October 2009 February 2008 December 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back at Sodom?

Select your answer to see how you score.

She was struck by lightning She turned into a pillar of salt She was swallowed by the earth She went blind