March 23, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK
Acts 10:34-43 + Psalm 118 + Colossians 3: 1-4 + Matthew 28: 1-10
After forty years of preaching Easter Homilies, I am beginning to get the idea. Easter is not a day or a season. It is a perspective, a lens through which one can view the world and history. Those who think of Easter as a day or season, think of Easter in terms of “how” and “what”. “What happened in that tomb behind the stone?” “How did that stone get moved?” “What did he look like if Mary didn’t recognize him?” “How did he get around if he showed up in so many places?” This king of thinking needs evidence. For these people proving the resurrection is a big issue. It is also a losing proposition since an empty tomb is only an empty tomb and you can make anything out of it you want. Since the eyewitnesses are gone and all we have left is their testimony, we can’t ask any more questions.
When you begin to consider Easter in another way, there is a different set of issues. The “what” and “how” questions become irrelevant. “What does it mean?” is the big question, and “What happens to me because of it?” is another. Those other questions about how and what happened are silly and trivial by comparison.
If Jesus has risen from the dead, the question to ask is: “What does that mean, and what is happening to me because of it.” We know from the Gospel accounts what it meant for those who had been with him. It meant that their sorrow was turned in joy, that their fear was challenged, and that if they stayed together, lived together, and remembered what Jesus had taught them, their lives would see and do greater things than they could ever have dreamed of. Their testimony tells us that their sorrow lasted less than a day. In forty days time (a Biblical, symbolic number) their fear vanished, and that timid, unfaithful, confused, doubt filled group of unlikely leaders emerged with a courage, a spirit, and an understanding of what had happened that caught the attention of a whole city and soon the whole earth. Pentecost.
If you are interested in shifting from Easter as a calendar date to Easter as a way of seeing, believing, and understanding things, you have to begin asking those other questions and the last and biggest is “What happens to me because Christ rose from the dead?”
We Christian people, especially we Catholic people with our crucifixes and Good Friday cannot just focus on the fact that Christ died for us. That does not finish the story. More important than his suffering and death is the fact that he rose for us and sent us the Spirit. This is why I say: Easter is a lens – it gives us the whole picture with which we may then explore the whole Paschal mystery.
That whole picture then is not just Good Friday, not just Easter but also the Forty Days, the Ascension, and Pentecost. Look through the lens, and here is what you see: Good Friday=loss. Easter=reception of new life. Forty Days=grieving the old and adjusting to the new. Ascension=letting go of the old without clinging. Pentecost=reception of a new spirit for the new life that one is already living. That is the paschal mystery, all of it from Good Friday till Pentecost.
Looking through that lens, we can understand that there are two kinds of death: “terminal” and “paschal.” The first one ends life and all possibilities. They are both real; but the second one ends one kind of life and begins another. The image of a grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying to produce new life is the way Jesus taught us about this truth.
There are two kinds of life: resuscitated life and resurrected life. The first is that restoration that occurs when someone is clinically dead and then brought back. Perhaps the story of Lazarus is an example. Resurrected life is not this. It is no restoration of one’s old life, but the reception of a radically new life. Lazarus got his old life back with sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus did not get his old life back. Easter is about paschal death and resurrected life. For living mature Christian people everything depends on getting this right.
Christ spoke of many daily deaths and of many risings. These are the reality of the Paschal Mystery and the secret to life and ultimate happiness.
We die so often, but rarely do we recognize it and integrate into the paschal mystery. We die to our youth. You get up one morning and look in the mirror and no matter what cosmetics you employ, or what surgeon you see, or diet you begin, something is gone. You can either grieve that loss for the rest of your life, or you can recognize that even without youth your life is good, full, and joyful.
We die to our wholeness. People who have been abused, raped, betrayed in love, wake up someday and realize that something has died inside them. They can either become bitter, angry, and filled with rage and hate, or rise in the Paschal mystery.
We die sometimes to our dreams. We hear about this in the Gospel as those disciples walked to Emmaus and said: “We had hoped that….” We have all experienced that death, that collapse of our dreams about how things might be for us and it can leave us empty and useless, or we can rise in the Paschal mystery.
The honeymoon of our lives dies, and the excitement, the passion, the interest that was there at first, in marriage, in parenting, in a new vocation begins to look like hard work. We either collapse or grow weary, or we find in the Paschal mystery something richer, deeper and fuller in spirit.
In our culture we experience and celebrate Easter with springtime and eggs, bunnies and lilies. In our faith we experience and celebrate Easter as the Paschal Mystery that takes us from death to new life leading us through times of confusion, doubt, and grieving to the time of letting go, and the moment of embracing a spirit filled new life. This is the Paschal Mystery. It is where Jesus would lead us. Look at the lives of those who first followed him. They are as much the point of the Easter Gospel as Jesus. Consider what happened to them because of this mystery, and believe not just that Christ rose from the dead; but that it can happen to you as well. We do not just die a thousand deaths without rising to new and fuller lives. This is the promise God has made to us, and that promise is being kept.