Easter 2004

This Gospel about the holy women going to anoint the body of Christ in the tomb has a spontaneity and freshness about it that can match any page of a daily news report. It is a story of puzzlement and surprises. Every line has something striking about it: the early hour, the rolled away stone, the absent body, the two men in glowing clothes, the disbelief of the women’s report to the apostles, and the race of Saint Peter to see the tomb for himself, going away from it “amazed.” It’s the retelling of an event that was vivid in the mind of its narrator, St. Luke.

Easter always carries with it a newness, a freshness that doesn’t diminish with the years. Like Good Friday–in its own way–Easter is eternally relevant and ever youthful. It’s not as though the story hasn’t been heard before, but that it has a rejuvenating power that pours its life’s blood into the whole Church, like a yearly dialysis treatment.

Every year we relive the events of Christ’s death and resurrection. To an outsider it might seem as though Christians go about doing the same things year after year. And, in a sense, that is right. (It reminds me about a comment I heard about a non-Catholic woman who came to Mass here for the first time. “Now, that was interesting,” she remarked. “I wonder what they’re going to do next Sunday.”) Our feasts are the same and the yearly variations that we bring to them are, no matter their level of novelty, only superficial: a different decor, a variation in the strategy of the ceremonial perhaps, some new music and fresh flowers.

Easter is never about getting things back to where they were before, just as the Resurrection was not our Lord’s resuming His bodily life as it had been before his Passion. Nor is it a mere liturgical calibration to set everything aright once again. There are new graces given this year that were not bestowed before. There is a hidden, under-the-surface reality that gives the Easter festival its inner life. This is because the risen Christ is omnipresent to His Church.

If we didn’t have the annual celebration of Easter, I fear that we might forget its ever-present significance. Certainly, success in one’s spiritual life is a matter of good timing, of seizing the moment of grace when it’s offered. Running parallel with the linear movement of every human life on earth towards its eternal future, there is an abiding, unchanging, immobile, fixed but enlivening Presence who offers every man who entrusts himself to Him the hope of a glorious future.

This is a day radiant with divinity, a day that brings the risen Lord very near to us. What was for our Lord a real personal triumph is today shared with His Church, but in hope. The disciples of the Lord scarcely had adequate time to express their anguish over the Lord’s death–only one full day, a Saturday–when the news broke out from these holy women early on a Sunday morning. Angels, who made only scant appearance during the traumatic hours of the Passion suddenly have an imposing role. They announce a turning point in human history. Death’s universal stranglehold on the human race has been defeated. The long winter has passed, the freshness of life is in the air. It is a new springtime for the world, the first, in fact, since paradise had been lost to humanity.

What I hope for the people of this parish is that there will be a real revitalization of faith and hope in their homes. I, for one, am tired by the defeating claims of those who continue their sterile, stale and hopeless vision of the Catholic Church. These are they who seem to live in a perpetual Good Friday of the culture of death. It appears that they have had their day. These are the anti-Catholic Catholics who have been damaging and dispiriting the Church for already too long a time now. They have wanted a more democratic Church without the divinely appointed hierarchy and with full freedom to do as they please. They have been successful, stirring the crowds to join them in their protests and their pretense. We have seen their rotten fruits in recent times with a declining faith in its members and with a faithless clergy to serve them. This is a death surely, but, unlike the one we celebrated in the Church yesterday, it is not redemptive, but barren and despairing. It is, to paraphrase this Gospel, ‘looking among the dead for the Living One.’ I, for one, want to register my protest: I’m for Christ, the risen Lord, the faithful one, the Alpha and Omega, Jesus Christ, yesterday and today the same, the one who is alive and who infuses supernatural life into His Church.

I don’t know how long it will take, but it seems that a renewal of the Church has begun, that it is under way. Our Holy Father, who believes in it and has predicted it, hopes that he will yet live to see it. But when it comes, no matter when, I will not be surprised. This is the same Lord I have always known, who has been present and unchanging, faithful and true, abiding in His Catholic Church through all the ages.

I mentioned on Good Friday that it is a day that is too much for just one day, that it’s mysteries are renewed daily. The same could be said about Easter. The eternal vigor of Jesus risen means to me that my hopes for a renewed Church and a holy clergy will not be disappointed. It is this very liveliness of Christ in His Church that makes this hope possible.

You need not look any further than the Catholic Church to find the presence of the living Christ. He is here putting all His enemies under His feet and making all things new. In Him I trust, and I know that I shall not be disappointed.