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Three women, perfumed oils in hand, came to a tomb early one morning to anoint a dead body. They came to the tomb with heavy hearts; they left with hearts on fire. They came slowly, cautiously; they left running, casting caution to the wind. They came to the tomb in search of Jesus of Nazareth; they ran from the tomb with news of Christ the Lord. They came convinced that all was over; they left knowing that all was new. My friends, the message of Easter is just that: all is new. Easter is God’s way of saying that all is new. It is a daring thing to say -- preposterous, really. It flies in the face of all we know to be true, in the face of human experience and common sense. For common sense and human experience only know the ancient, cynical wisdom that there is “nothing new under the sun.” But Easter says that everything is new now that Jesus is new, now that Jesus is risen. Easter says that God is building new heavens and a new earth and that it all started in the dark despair of a dead and mangled body, mourned by a few brave souls and hastily planted in a borrowed tomb. This Easter – maybe more than others – we need to hear this message and be renewed by it. For one thing, it’s been a challenging year in our parish with a lot of deaths. In fact, since we last celebrated Easter, our deacon, Joe Curtis, unexpectedly went home to God, and so did two other beloved staff members, Linda Condes and Joan McDonell. And there have been other deaths, of course: those wholesale and headline deaths in Haiti and Chile that shocked the world, the war-related deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in our own cities, the cold-blooded killings of police officers. And then there have been the deaths many of you have had to deal with in your own families this past year. Most recently, our Church, internationally now, is suffering a kind of death with more and more revelations of clergy abuse and hierarchical cover-up, and more and more calls -- some of them pretty shrill and strident but not surprising – calls not only from outside the Church but inside, for radical conversion and structural renewal. It’s for reasons like these that we need to celebrate Easter this year. We do. We need a renewal of hope. With those courageous, faithful women, we need to find the stone rolled back and the tomb empty. With Peter and John, we need to bend down and see the linen wrappings, and to hear from the two men in dazzling white that question of all questions: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here! He is risen!” Some people spend their lives looking for the living among the dead. They simply cannot believe the good news of Christ’s triumph over death. Are you among them? I doubt you would be here this morning if you were. And yet it is possible to go through the motions of the Christian faith quite dutifully without believing – really believing -- in the good news of the resurrection, without believing that, because of the resurrection, everything is new. Easter is our invitation, our opportunity, to become new again. This will mean different things depending on who we are and where we are on our journey of life and faith. If old patterns of sin hold us in their grip and we feel discouraged and helpless, we need to believe that things can change, thanks to the risen Christ who is our forgiveness and our hope. If old age embitters or illness frightens, we need to look to Christ, the risen one, and know that for us as for him, death will not have the final word. If our cherished hopes and dreams for our children have come to naught and they have left us with a heavy weight of sorrow and disappointment, we need to see in Christ risen the assurance that, although our children may run away from God, God never runs away from them. If the Church we love seems to have betrayed us because of the sins of its leaders – bishops, priests, religious -- sins of abuse, of blindness, deafness, cowardice, sins of institutional self-protection, we need to hear the risen Jesus gently call us by name as he did the weeping Mary Magdalene, and know that he is with us in our pain and sorrow and failings and will lead us out. And if our whole world seems to have lost its way, caught up as it is in the grip of hatred, fear, and violence, we need to hear the angel’s words to the women: “Do not be frightened. He is risen!” The contemporary spiritual writer, Father Ron Rolheiser, once wrote that the real issue of faith for us today is not so much believing in God, or in the resurrection of Christ, or the resurrection of our bodies after death. The real issue is believing that God can bring about resurrection and newness into our lives right now; that God can raise us from the dark, hopeless tombs within which we so often find ourselves trapped right now. I think he’s right. And there’s no magic formula for coming to that kind of belief. But there is the risen Christ, and he is in our midst, and in the Eucharist he comes to us with all his power, all his hope, and all his life. And he says to us today, as he said to those brave, bewildered women on Easter morning, “Peace! Do not be afraid. I have risen. I am with you!” Father Michael G. Ryan |
The
Resurrection of the Lord