(Landscape with Stars, Henri-Edmond Cross, 1905 - 1908)
We didn’t always understand the stars. Didn’t know that some were worlds in motion. Couldn’t comprehend their deep-field depths. But they always wheeled their wonder above our heads, as Robert Louis Stevenson said:
And high overhead and all moving about, There were thousands of millions of stars.
We who walk its shores, fields, and cities know Earth is more than just a shimmering star. But from space’s perspective, we inhabit one moving light among myriads of lights, from a distance, intangible.
Stevenson’s poem captures this intangibility as reflection:
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all, And the star of the sailor, and Mars, These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall Would be half full of water and stars.
The intangible stars in the pail point to the tangible stars in our sky. In the same way, faith can seem like a shimmering intangibility. But while we see Jesus from a distance of time that renders him as immaterial as the stars in the pail, those of another generation beheld him in the flesh.
Whatever the stars are composed of – their flesh and blood – it’s different from the composition of the stars in the pail, their reflections. Christ, who lived, died for our sins, and resurrected, is no longer present with us, he is now surrounded by intangibilities. Howard Nemerov, in his poem, “Writing,” speaks of skaters’ marks on ice:
Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
The writing, the “delicate hesitations” of the skaters’ marks, melts into water, once inscribed across the ice but now no longer visible. When history removes Jesus from the realm of “what we beheld and our hands handled” (1 John 1:1), and when witnesses to his miracles and extraordinary claims are no longer with us, it doesn’t mean he never existed or accomplished the miracles or made the claims.
These claims of Christ’s resurrection have been believed or disbelieved but not disproved. Over 500 people attested to seeing Jesus after the resurrection. Paul tells us: “he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living” (1 Corinthians 15:6). By the time Paul wrote this letter sometime in the mid-50s A.D., these 500 had been telling people for about 25 years their first-person accounts of having seen Jesus after he rose from the dead. Any one of these eyewitnesses could have been questioned and their claims disproved at the time if they had been false. Paul was so certain that Jesus rose from the dead that he stacks not just his belief, but the entire validity of Christianity on the reality of the resurrection telling us if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then our faith is in vain and we are of all people most to be pitied.
Even world-changing events fade into history’s currents. Once etched in ice, they are now, as Nemerov says, “scored across the open water.”
The body of the risen Christ is no longer present with us. But historical accounts point to his tangibility. Just like Stevenson’s stars shining in the water that point to physical stars and reflect their glory.
Jaynie, I love them all so far. But this one, is my favorite up to now. It seems to make the resurrection come to life (no pun intended) with all familiar things (stars, ice, bucket of water). I love it.