The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once described children as “literal-minded toughs.” Contrary to the common view that they have very active imaginations, children tend to take the world at face value, rarely looking beneath the surface. The recognition that one thing may be a sign of something else — much less that something material may be a sign of something spiritual — does not come easy to children.
While this has probably always been true of children, in the modern world, that recognition does not come easy to us older folks, either. We live our lives almost entirely on the surface. Social media influencers and public relations professionals speak of “image” and “optics” because they know that most of us believe, consciously or unconsciously, that “what you see is what you get.”
One of the chief delights I experience whenever I read the Fathers of the Church is the recognition that they saw the world quite differently. For them, everything is a symbol. Moses and Noah and David and Job are all symbols of Christ. The ark is a symbol of the church, as is Israel and Mary, who is also a symbol of the temple and the tabernacle.
The earthly Jerusalem is a holy place because it is a symbol of the heavenly Jerusalem. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is a symbol of his passing from death into life — a symbol foretold by the symbols of the sacrifice of the lamb at Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea and the entrance of the chosen people into the Promised Land.
We tend to think of those who lived centuries or millennia before us as benighted souls, nowhere near as intelligent as we are, yet the Fathers of the Church, and the men and women to whom they were delivering their sermons on Scripture, held all of these symbols in their minds.
Untouched by the scientific revolution which, for us, has made everything a mere object by stripping nature of any symbolic meaning, they understood that the colt upon which Jesus entered Jerusalem was, indeed, a colt, but it was also a symbol of the Gentiles who, after Christ’s resurrection, would carry him to the very ends of the earth.
The cross was an instrument of torture but also a symbol of victory, because through it Christ — and all of those united to him through baptism, itself a symbol of death and resurrection — had passed through death into life.
The wind that accompanied the Spirit of God who descended upon the apostles at Pentecost was, in moving as it willed, a symbol of the new life of grace, no longer bound by the chains of the Law.
The men and women who rose from their graves and walked about Jerusalem in the wake of Christ’s crucifixion were, like Lazarus, real people who had been truly resurrected, but also signs of the resurrection of our bodies at the end of time and our spiritual resurrection, right here and right now, if we become the adopted sons and daughters of God by joining ourselves to the only begotten Son of God through our participation in the Paschal Mystery of the Easter Triduum.
“We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song!” St. John Paul II famously proclaimed, and we are so because of that Paschal Mystery. There is no Resurrection without the cross, no entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem without Jesus’ entry into the earthly Jerusalem. There is no everlasting joy, or even a foretaste of that joy in this life, without our suffering, which, if we approach it in faith, becomes a symbol of his way of the cross.
As we leave the 40 days of Lent behind us and once again boldly shout “Alleluia!” in the joy of Christ’s Resurrection, may we make a conscious effort this Easter season to set aside our childish literal-mindedness and search for the symbols in our lives that allow us a glimpse beyond the veil of this material world to the kingdom that is both yet to come and, in Christ, already here.
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