Sunday, April 12, 2020
Homily Easter 1A: The resurrection fills the emptiness of our beliefs, prayer and works
Homily for 1st Sunday of Easter Year 2020
Acts 10:34,36-43; Colossians 3:1-4 or 1 Corinthians 5:6-8; John 20:1-18
Introduction
Today we finish a journey that we began on Ash Wednesday. On that day, I said Mass at two area parishes. In both churches I noticed that there were more people than usually came to church on Sunday. And so I thanked them for coming to church on a workday, but also challenged them to not merely get the ashes but also to live out what they mean, by repenting and believing in the gospel as the words for imposing the ashes said. I then told them that I looked forward to seeing them back in church on Easter Sunday, like a date; and warned that if they stood me up, I would hunt them down in their homes.
Despite missing our date, I will not be doing that. For there is a good reason why both churches and virtually all churches are virtually empty today.
Scripture and Tradition
Our empty churches this Easter can perhaps serve to remind us of another empty abode of the Lord, the empty tomb. For that is exactly what the women found on Sunday morning when they went to attend to the body of their Lord and Master. “They have taken the Lord from the tomb," Mary of Magdala anxiously told the disciples "and we don’t know where they put him.”
The emptiness of the tomb at first baffled the women and the disciples. When she said "and we don’t know where they put him” perhaps Mary of Magdala thought that those bad bad men who had killed Jesus had now discarded his body, in a final act of indignity. For entirely different reasons, the religious authorities would in turn say that his disciples had taken his body away.
But as the women and the disciples would soon find out, the tomb was empty because God had acted in a singular and spectacular way. This was an emptiness filled with extraordinary meaning. As the angel told the women in last night's gospel and in virtually all the resurrection narratives, the tomb was empty because Jesus "has been raised just as he said." This is the truth conveyed by the traditional Easter greeting, still used by our Orthodox brethren, "Christ is risen," to which one responds "he is risen indeed."
But what did rising from the dead mean? It took the women and the disciples a while to fully understand the meaning of the resurrection. And if truth be told, today, even with the benefit of 2000 years of reflecting on these things, we sometimes misunderstand what the resurrection means.
- Some think that what happened to Jesus was resuscitation, being brought back to this life, like Lazarus or the widow of Nain's son. But as we know these people died again; and yet Jesus does not die again.
- Others think that what happened to Jesus was reincarnation, his returning as another person, a notion earlier on entertained by some disciples who thought that Jesus was John the Baptist, Elijah or Moses.
- Others still think that what happened to Jesus was that his soul merely went to heaven, or became immortal as the Judaism of the late Old Testament as well as the Greeks believed.
But these modes of thinking do not capture the fullness and complexity of the resurrection. For resuscitation would simply bring back the old unchanged Jesus, while reincarnation would bring an unrecognizable Jesus; and yet Christ is truly risen, he is risen indeed. And while immortality of the soul has much to commend it, it ignores the body of the crucified Jesus, the body we receive in the Eucharist, the glorious body no longer limited by space and time, but a body nevertheless. This is the new reality of the resurrection.
That is why when the disciples began to preach the gospel, they didn't tell resurrection event using terms like "once upon a time" or "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away." They boldly taught that Jesus of Nazareth, their friend and master, was alive in a new way; that they had seen and eaten with him and that he had sent them to be his witnesses to the ends of the world.
Christian Application
My friends, we too have been tasked with continuing to witness to the great event of the Lord's resurrection, especially because as St. Paul put it very well, "if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith" (1 Cor. 15: 14). Only the resurrection can fill our emptiness.
At any time, the good news of the resurrection fills our emptiness. But in these exceptional times the resurrection of Jesus should fill the exceptional emptiness we feel now in a particular way: the emptiness in homes brought about by death and bereavement, by sickness and pain; the emptiness of bank accounts brought about by the closure of businesses and the loss of jobs; and of course the emptiness of our churches brought about by the need to protect the lives of our parishioners, in case we are angels of death.
Just like the resurrection of Jesus filled the emptiness of the women and the disciples, not by ignoring it but by filling it with meaning, the resurrection of Jesus does not sweep aside the emptiness of our current sufferings, but gives them meaning. I would like to offer three ways in which we might bear our current emptiness aided by the news that Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.
Our Beliefs: when faced with a lack of answers to the fundamental questions of life, suffering and death that our current situation brings into sharp relief, the resurrection tells us that these things do not have the last word. This was the message of the Holy Father last night, when he told that us that we must place our hope not in mere optimism but in Jesus who emerged out from a place nobody ever does, the tomb. The Pope went on to say:
He, who rolled away the stone that sealed the entrance of the tomb, can also remove the stones in our hearts…. He did not abandon us; He visited us and entered into our situations of pain, anguish and death. His light dispelled the darkness of the tomb: today He wants that light to penetrate even to the darkest corners of our lives.
The risen Lord does this for us not only at the end of time, but even today.
Our Prayer: when faced with privation from our usual sources of grace, we turn again to the resurrection. Let me share a personal experience. For those following us on the live stream and don’t know me, you have probably figured out from my accent that I am not from around here. Some of you probably think I am from Mississippi. No. Actually I am from Uganda, where the average parish has about 10,000 parishioners and about 20 mission stations. And so, most Catholics don’t have Mass every Sunday, and certainly not at Easter. I was fortunate to be the pastor of a much smaller parish of only 4,000 people and 12 missions. And so, unless I could find other priests to help me, on Easter Sunday I was able to celebrate Mass in only three villages, meaning that the other 9 churches went without Mass, the very sacrament by which we proclaim the death of the Lord and celebrate his resurrection.
And yet the other three quarters of my parishioners were not left without an experience of Jesus' resurrection. They came together every Sunday and the catechist led them in a service of the Word, reflecting on the Scriptures. They prayed the rosary, meditating on the mysteries of Our Lord's life that culminate in his death and resurrection. They said devotional and personal prayers, and all the other spiritual helps the Church gives them, which as we know all draw their power from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus they found some way to draw from the fountain of the Lord's resurrection.
Our Actions: In the Holy Father's reflection last night on why Jesus asked his disciples to meet him in Galilee, a place that was remote not only literally, but also religiously, he suggested that Jesus did not want the message of hope to be confined only to the holy places. And so the Pope asked that we bring the hope of our beliefs and our prayers to everyone, even to the remote Galilees of our lives. That is what many doctors, nurses and others, what priests, religious and laity are doing when they take care of the sick and dying, even at risk of themselves getting sick. That is what families, even our own family here is doing, getting to know each other better, connecting with those who are far away. This morning the Pope went on to urge that this is not the time for indifference, not the time for self-centredness, not the time for division, not the time for forgetfulness. These empty values must be replaced by love.
Conclusion
I want end by returning to the parishioners with whom I had a date, indeed to any with whom you all here had a date, if any of them are following. Like I challenged them on Ash Wednesday, to focus, not only on the ashes which are empty without living out spiritual meaning in them, I challenge you again today, to focus not only on the external ways in which we celebrate Easter which are empty unless they also have the very meaning of Easter, which is that the Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. He is risen indeed in our beliefs; he is risen indeed in our prayer; he is risen indeed in our works.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)