From the Acts of the Apostles: They killed him finally, nailing him on a tree, only to have God raise him up on the third day.
What we celebrate here today is indeed that Mystery that lies at the very heart of our faith. Without Christ’s resurrection, our faith, St. Paul tells us, is in vain. Christmas would be meaningless, the sacraments could not exist except as mere reminders of something that happened in the past, the whole Faith falls apart if Christ did not rise from the dead. But that is precisely what we come here to do: to affirm and celebrate our Faith. And that faith can never be a mere product of intellectual investigation, can never be a product of gathering information or data. In the account of the Resurrection in the gospel according to St. John, Peter and John run to the tomb, look inside, saw what they saw—and they believed. Surely what they saw—no body, the linen cloths folded—could have another explanation: someone stole Jesus’ body; someone moved the body. But they saw and they believed.
Now there is something important about their belief that we often overlook. They believed that Jesus was alive in the context of seeing him suffer and die. His real death on the cross is the starting point for their belief in his Resurrection. It is not as if they came to the conclusion that he was now alive because he never died: their conclusion of faith was precisely that he had died and was now alive, and that this new life of his in a mysterious but real way came from his death. And so his death is not only the starting point for the Resurrection; it is linked in an absolute way to its meaning. For what lies at the heart of both events, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, is the love of God: God loved us so much that he gave his only begotten Son to die for us, to die for us so that we might be freed from that sin that brings death, eternal death. And the love of God on that cross was so strong that the reality of death, the death of him who knew no sin but took on the sins of the world: that love was so strong that it broke through the power of death, trampling down the gates of hell, and freeing man from the bonds of sin and death.
And so Easter means nothing without Good Friday. The Resurrection means nothing without the reality of death. And this becomes a problem in a society that tries by so many means to deny the reality of death. Those who do not believe in anything other themselves explain death away as merely a part of the cycle of nature, that man is no different from a leaf that dies, or an animal that dies. Death is just a name for a natural phenomenon that requires no explanation. But this reduction of man to mere nature flies in the face of what we know to be true: that man, despite being part of the natural world, reaches beyond it in a deep and mysterious way that cannot be denied.
But there are so many religious people who in their own way deny death, who talk about merely “falling asleep”, as if death is a momentary nap after which you awake to find yourself in another place. How many funerals have we gone to, especially in Catholic churches, where we hear that the dead person is now in heaven dancing an Irish jig or eating pasta or some other ethnic thing. As if everyone who is Catholic goes to heaven as a matter of fact. Quite apart from the bad Catholic theology here, this is part of the trivialization of death that leads to a denial of its reality, and when the reality of death is denied we end up with what St. Pope John Paul II called, quite rightly, the culture of death. And the Church participates in fostering this culture of death whenever a crucifix is replaced by a so-called risen Christ, whenever there is false preaching about automatic entrance into heaven, whenever the Church jumps on the bandwagon of closure and other psychobabble talk.
This parish has heard from its priests so many times that one of the greatest tasks facing the Church today is the rebuilding of Catholic culture. But Catholic culture is not some sort of hothouse religiosity. It has little to do with Hollywood images of Catholics in the 1950s; most of that is mere sentimentality. Catholic culture never hides itself in a ghetto, but rather fully engages the world in which it finds itself. No longer does the Catholic Church exist as the basis for Western culture as it did for much of the last two millennia. The phenomena of militant secularism and the loss of faith form the world in which we live in the West. It is this world that must be engaged by the Church. And it will never engage it by retreating to ghettos, whether they be parish ghettos or school ghettos or family ghettos. While it is absolutely true that the faith must be nourished and passed on in parishes and schools and in the family, these places must never be closed in on themselves. Catholic culture, founded on the Catholic faith (which by the way is not a set of rules but is a way of life), must fully engage the world, never fearing to take on the world but also never fearing to love the world. It is a culture in which life is celebrated in all of its manifestations, where life is respected from the womb to the grave, a culture that affirms and rejoices in the human spirit, a culture that fosters and nourishes the soaring of the intellect and genius of mankind, a culture in which beauty is admired and cultivated, especially in the arts, a culture in which sitting down at a wonderful meal with friends is an icon of heaven, a culture whose soul doth magnify the Lord of Life, and in so doing, becomes a culture of life.
But this culture of life does not deny death. We know that death is still with us. Easter has not eliminated death. My brother died a month ago. I know this as a painful fact. It is not as if Jesus’ Resurrection eliminated death or made it less real. This is what Peter and John knew when they peered into that tomb and saw it empty and the body wrapping neatly folded. They knew that something stupendous had occurred, something that had not even been a possibility in their minds, because they took death seriously as something that could destroy. What they saw and believed filled them with an inexpressible joy precisely because they knew the reality and finality of death—and not death in general, but the death of the Jesus they knew and loved. And in a flash, peering into that tomb, they remembered his appearance on the mount of the Transfiguration They remembered his words that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” They remembered his words, “This is my body given up for you”. They remembered Him in the deepest sense, and in that flash of insight, they knew he was alive. And what alive means is not their memory of him in their minds and hearts. If that is what the resurrection is about, forget about it. They knew that he was alive in the fullest sense: body and soul, yes, bearing the wounds of his crucifixion, but aline!.
We live in a world full of death. Not only have we seen death and continue to see death. We see daily atrocities committed by man against man abroad and in our own country. Disease continues to make waste of human life. The jitteriness of our age, this new age of anxiety, infects our culture, ourselves, as we look over our shoulder to check if we are being stalked. We live in a world that in so many ways is indeed a valley of tears; we know down deep that Vergil was right when he spoke about that deep, embedded reality of human existence as lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. This does not deny happiness or goodness or beauty. But we know the wrenching power of death to take someone we love and we ask: is there a basis for hope, a hope that does not depend on man’s ability, that does not depend on some sort of imaginary progress, because we must admit if we are honest, that these are all dead ends?
And what we say today, what we affirm, what we sing with our alleluias is this: that there is hope, and this hope is founded on the reality of a God whose love is stronger than death, tomb, but we have heard what the apostles and Mary Magdalene saw: we have heard and we have believed, and by that Faith, we have a sure hope, in St Paul’s words, that we too, joined to Christ, in his body the Church, will be resurrected with him into eternal life.
That is our only hope. And that sure hope is founded on the one who died for us so that we might live. And it is from this death that the culture of life springs into the joy of Easter. And so the crucifix rises above the Easter lilies, rises as his death rises into life, as our death will rise into his life. And the pledge we have that this is true is what we do together today to celebrate Easter: we come here to re-present his Sacrifice on the Cross on this altar, and from this altar receive the very Body and Blood of the risen Lord, whose Body and Blood fills us with his life, preparing us for our own death that will be our entrance into eternal life.
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praiseWithout delayes,Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewiseWith him mayst rise:I got me flowers to straw thy way;I got me boughs off many a tree:But thou wast up by break of day,And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.The Sunne arising in the East,Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;If they should offer to contestWith thy arising, they presume.Can there be any day but this,Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?We count three hundred, but we misse:There is but one, and that one ever.
