Muslim reflections on the paschal mystery

“Know that God revives the earth when it is dead. We have explained the signs to you so that you can reason,” says the Quran (Al-Hadid 57,17).

The revived earth is the earth, but it is also us, our souls, and even our bodies, since in Islam, just as in Christianity, there is also resurrection of the body: “Look then at the effects of God's mercy, how He restores life to the earth after its death. It is He who revives the dead and He is Omnipotent. (Al-Roum 30, 50).

Everything dies and is reborn, everything is resurrected. Not only after bodily death, but in every movement of self-transcendence through a death of something in us and the birth of something greater, always in us.

In a theological rapprochement, whether subtle or far-fetched, could we see the meaning of the paschal mystery in every human experience of death and internal resurrection, with every person who lets a part of themselves die in order to receive a more living life? ?

You have to go through death to be resurrected in God

Sufism commands: die before you die. We must go through death to be resurrected in God, or let God come and live fully in us. It's called the fanaextinction, and is followed by the state of baqa, superexistence, or the subsistence of being by God. At that moment, it is no longer the person who acts but God who acts through him, just as the hadith describes: “I become his hearing by which he hears, his sight by which he sees, his hand by which he catches and his foot by which he walks” (the “I” in this hadith referring to God). And before the big one fanathe great extinction, our spiritual life lives several small fana baqa successive.

At the same time, the Quran seems to tell us that we are all connected, as if we were one soul, especially in death and resurrection: “Your creation and resurrection are like those of one soul. God hears all and sees all” (Luqman 31:28).

Does this mean that every human death and resurrection is that of all, in the sense of “every soul that rises elevates the world” ?

Now if we are so united, if each of us is a land that God revives, we have to become aware of this relationship. We cannot rise without being aware of all, without loving all souls, without defending the dignity of all, without working for the liberation of all, as Jesus freed the prophets and patriarchs from hell on Holy Saturday.

We are all earth, and all earth is holy, and all earth is to be liberated.