Alpha & Omega

This was originally posted in the Easter 2010 Edition of the EPISCORIFIC E-ZINE

Recently I saw a most remarkable film, HUBBLE 3D, at the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s IMAX theatre. It was the story of the Hubble itself intermixed with actual images, in 3D, that Hubble has picked up from deep space. The pictures of nebulae, supernovas, and birthing planetary systems are so amazing to behold, that your mind almost will not let you believe that what you are seeing is real. It is a consciousness-expanding, life-changing experience, and I encourage everyone to go see the film.

As I watched the movie, with Easter fast approaching, I was struck by how truly UNIVERSAL (in the most ultimate sense of that word) the themes of death and rebirth, of resurrection, are. One of the things that convinces me in this religiously pluralistic world that Christianity itself is particularly relevant and has an important handle on the truth when it comes to the nature of God, is the centrality of these issues to the faith.

In one particularly moving scene in HUBBLE 3D (this one image alone is worth the price of admission), a super-massive star which is burning itself out creates ‘cocoons’ of living solar systems within the gas of the Orion Nebula. In yet another, a supernova produces a dance of color and light almost too beautiful to behold. Astronomers believe that our solar system itself was formed from the remnants of a supernova, the last gasp of a dying star. They know this because of the presence of iron in our world. The element iron is probably forged in the heart of a dying star. The redness of your blood, caused by the presence of iron, is likely the result of a star that died out in our galactic neighborhood some 10 billion years ago. You are, in part, made of that very star, it lives in you and me and everyone else. What a thought! As we see in the film, even a black hole, that cosmic image of total destruction and nothingness, is often in fact the locus that causes the formation of, and continually energizes, many galaxies, including our own, creating out of stellar death a dance of beauty and creativity.

Now the ancient writers of the Gospels knew none of this. But what they did know was that they had seen their all-important leader die, and all they knew and hoped for wiped away, only to have it return again, when they encountered their leader again in a whole new way. They realized in that moment that they had encountered something of cosmic, indeed Divine, proportions, something significant in an ultimate sense. That sense of a Divine encounter in the Risen Jesus gave rise to the image of the Cosmic Christ, found primarily in Revelations. Here Jesus is called “The Lamb Slain from the Foundation of the World” (Revelations 13:8), who because of His slaying is worthy to open the seals of God (Revelations 5:12), and destroys evil of cosmic proportion (Revelations 17:13-15).

Astronomers looking out on the cosmos have indeed shown us a universe of being overcoming non-being, of rebirth overcoming death. In that discovery, I see the very truth of Good Friday and Easter, and it gives me confidence that in those events something of the very nature and power of God has indeed been found. The Hope and Truth of Easter is simply that the end of every story leads to the beginning of a new one. And to that I say, Amen.