It is only in the revelation which God makes of himself on the basis of his Word that we learn to understand and to say after him that the God-Man can surrender himself to God-abandonment, without resigning his own reality as God, because, as God, he is as interior to the world he has made as he is superior to it.

That a dead man should begin to live again is not, in the world of the Bible, an entirely unique occurrence. But it is not, in any case, what the Resurrection of Jesus expresses. The meaning of the Resurrection lies, rather, in Jesus’ passage to a form of existence which has left death behind it once for all, and so has gone beyond, once for all, the limitations of this aeon in God.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

Jesus does not present himself as the supreme instance of something universally intelligible, under whose concept the way of the disciples might also be subsumed. Rather does he call others on a way which is at first without analogy, a way which can only be elucidated through him, so that he might make available of himself, that is, on the basis of his finished work on the Cross, access to his own person.

It is only in the revelation which God makes of himself on the basis of his Word that we learn to understand and to say after him that the God-Man can surrender himself to God-abandonment, without resigning his own reality as God, because, as God, he is as interior to the world he has made as he is superior to it.

That a dead man should begin to live again is not, in the world of the Bible, an entirely unique occurrence. But it is not, in any case, what the Resurrection of Jesus expresses. The meaning of the Resurrection lies, rather, in Jesus’ passage to a form of existence which has left death behind it once for all, and so has gone beyond, once for all, the limitations of this aeon in God.

In rising from the dead, Christ leaves behind him Hades, that is, the state in which humanity is cut off from access to God. But, by virtue of his deepest Trinitarian experience, he takes ‘Hell’ with him, as the expression of his power to dispose, as judge, the everlasting salvation or the everlasting loss of man.

That Jesus was really dead, because he really became a man as we are, a son of Adam, and that therefore, despite what one can sometimes read in certain theological works, he did not use the so-called ‘brief’ time of his death for all manner of ‘activities’ in the world beyond - this is the first point we must consider. In that same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead. One must allow to this ‘solidarity’ an amplitude and an ambiguity, even, which seems precisely to exclude a communication on his part as a subject. Each human being lies in his own tomb. And with his condition, seen here from the viewpoint of the separated body, Jesus is at first truly solidary.