Easter Sunday Sermon 2012

Easter Sunday 
  (Acts 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9)

           

God raised (Jesus) on the third day, and granted that He be visible to us.

Those words of St. Peter are the culmination of an age-long awareness and expectation in Israel, where the third day was of special significance for Jewish piety.  In the book of Genesis we are told that Abraham, in obedience to the voice of God, was taking his only son Isaac to offer him in sacrifice to the Lord on a mount the Lord would make known to them.  Sorrowing father and innocent, unknowing son, were journeying on along with some servants, when (Gen 22:4-5):

On the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you."         

On that third day Abraham had seen Mount Moriah where he believed his son had to be sacrificed to the Lord; in the event, however, it turned out to be the mount where the son was not only restored unharmed to his father, but restored as the sign of God’s enduring promise of blessing for Abraham and God’s chosen people:

Because you have not withheld your only son – blessing I will bless you and multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. (Gen. 22:16-17)

Again, in the prophecy of Hosea (6:1-3) there is a message of consolation for sinful, suffering, Israel:

Come, and let us return to the LORD; for He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up.   After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight.   Let us know, let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD.  His going forth is established as the morning; He will come to us like the rain, like the latter and former rain to the earth.

You can understand what comfort and joy the disciples experienced on recalling such texts after having found the empty tomb and seen the Risen Lord:  Jesus -- the ultimate bearer of God’s promise -- whom they had Personally known and loved, had risen from the dead on the third day, had been restored to life in God’s presence; death had been unable to hold Him!  That is why Peter (Acts 10:39-42) could so confidently proclaim to Cornelius and his family whom, under the command of the Holy Spirit, he was about to baptise:

We are witnesses of all things which He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem, whom they killed by hanging on a tree.  Him God raised up on the third day, and showed Him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead.  And He commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that it is He who was ordained by God to be Judge of the living and the dead. 

Let us now address today’s reading from St. Paul and allow him to guide our thoughts:

If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.  

For Paul extends this wondrous event of Jesus’ rising from the dead to include us:

For you have died (with Christ), and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 

How can he say that we died with Christ if not because Christ died as Lord and Saviour for all mankind, and as Head of the Church which is His Body?  Though sinless, He died a sinner’s death on our behalf; and when He died on Good Friday all our hopes seemed to have died with Him, leaving us -- on Holy Saturday -- to experience only the emptiness, the helplessness, and indeed the hopelessness of our native, sinful, condition. But now, Peter and Paul, together with all the apostles, bear witness that God has raised Jesus from the dead; and, since He is risen, Paul says: you -- you who believe in Him and in the God Who raised Him -- you too are risen with Him, sharing in His new, Risen Life.  Because of your faith in Him, the Risen Lord, you are no longer subject to the frustrations and ultimate horror of earthly death, no longer bound by sin in your native pride and self-solicitude (1 Corinthians 15:55-58):

“O Death, where is your sting?  O Hades, where is your victory?"  The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God, Who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.          

Indeed, Paul says that we too are seated with Christ at the right hand of God!  We do, indeed, firmly believe that Jesus -- the Holy One of God -- is seated at the right hand of the Father, and we also believe that He continually intercedes for us; but how are we seated with Him at the right hand of the Father?

The answer is that we are not, of course, physically seated with Him now in heaven; nevertheless, that is where the vital powers of our spiritual life originate and whither they are leading us.  Jesus, in His glorious humanity, is at the right  hand of the Father in heaven; but He is also, in a sacramental manner, physically with us in the Eucharist, whereby He draws us up, into, Himself through the Spirit.  Our heavenly food -- the driving force of supernatural life within us -- is the living Body of the One seated at the right hand of the Father in glory; and the more we live by that food, the more we live by His Spirit, the more He draws us closer and binds us more intimately to Himself.  For the sake of all mankind He has taken our humanity into glory and none are barred from sharing His glory because of their humanity.

But we have much surer basis for hope than the mere fact that our human nature is no longer barred from heaven: for each of us has been called -- the Father Himself has called us -- personally and individually, as Jesus said:

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.  (John 6:44)

And so, being called by the Father to Jesus, we believe, and having been baptised into Jesus we are justified, by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul tells us:

Moreover, whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.  What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?  (Rom 8:30-31)

Today Jesus is risen and we are glorified in Him: for we who receive the Body and Blood of the Risen Lord in true faith are now assured that we are under the guiding tutelage of the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God, Who is leading us  towards heaven, both our present destiny and our future home; because our food of life -- the Eucharist -- is, sacramentally, the very same Body which is Jesus’ in heaven; and His Spirit, bestowed on us through the Eucharist, is at work forming us in Jesus’ likeness so that we might be able to share -- as living members -- in the eternal glory of His heavenly Body before the Father: 

For your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.

The Father has received back His Beloved Son; Who, living now before the Father as Son of Man also, is the custodian of an eternal promise, that where He is, we -- who through faith and baptism are members of His mystical Body -- shall be:

Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:24)

Such is, indeed, the Lord Jesus’ prayer today in our regard: what hope of glory and promise of fulfilment it holds out for us in the future!  Indeed, what joy and peace it can bring us now, if, praying in union with Jesus, we live in a way that witnesses to the sincerity of our prayer!

Consequently, we who entertain such hopes cannot, surely, allow ourselves to live a life of obsessive worldliness -- constantly searching for our needs and striving after our wishes -- whilst largely forgetting our heavenly calling and its future fulfilment.  Even Jesus’ prayer that we “may be with Him where He is” can only bear effect in the lives of those who are open to and in tune with such a prayer; that is, in the lives of those who seek communication and communion with Him more seriously and more lovingly than they search for earthly possessions and social acceptability.  We must never forget St. Paul’s admonition in today’s readings:

If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.

However, let us appreciate and follow such advice in the spirit of today’s wonderful celebration, taking very much to heart the words of the prophet Nehemiah (8:10):

Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our LORD. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.  

Easter Vigil Mass (Year B)

 

EASTER VIGIL MASS (B)

(Romans 6:3-11; Mark 16:1-7)

Mark tells us that three women followers of Jesus came to anoint His body in the tomb, and, to their great surprise and joy, found that the exceptionally large stone used to block the entrance to the tomb had been rolled aside; so:

            Entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing      a white robe; and they were amazed.

We too have reason to be surprised, if not amazed, at the fact that this young man sitting at the right and wearing a white robe is not named.  He was obviously an angel, and that is the surprising thing, because Pope St. Gregory writing about the Angels and Archangels tells us that:

“Angels are only sent when something is announced through them.  Those who make minor announcements are called angels, those who make important ones are called archangels.  Hence it is that not just any angel was sent to the Virgin Mary (at the Annunciation) but that Gabriel the archangel was sent: it was right that the proper one for this role should be of the highest rank of angels since he was to announce the greatest news of all … When angels come to minister to us, even the names by which we know them are taken from their ministry -- Michael means ‘Who is like God’, Gabriel ‘Strength of God’, Raphael ‘Healing of God’.”

Isn’t it strange then that we are told nothing about this ‘young man in white sitting at the right’ in the tomb; one who was there, had been sent, to announce the very greatest news of all -- pace St. Gregory -- which is the news of the Lord’s Resurrection?  There he is, in the tomb, not a glorious, named, archangel, but simply, a young man dressed in white!!

In that way all our attention is directed to the message he has been sent to deliver; and yet, all that he says about the Resurrection is:

            He has risen; He is not here.

The women could see that the Lord was not there, so really all the young man says about Our Lord’s Resurrection is, “He has risen.”   What, indeed, was the young man there for?  You might say, “perhaps he was there to roll away the stone.”  Very well, but, having done that job, why did he remain?  Just to say: “He is risen”?  Yes; that was, indeed, the main reason for his coming and remaining, because those three words both state a supremely important fact and contain a most important teaching.

First of all, the simple fact is so very important for the disciples because otherwise they might well have thought, as did Mary Magdalen, that the body of Jesus had been taken away by some unknown persons: after all, there were many important people who wanted His name to be totally forgotten.  Had the young man not been there to declare Him risen, the disciples would, it is true, most probably have eventually recalled that Jesus had spoken of rising of the third day, but, due to our human weakness, they could not have had any certainty about whether or not that had actually taken place without their seeing and touching Him.  And this is why the teaching is revealed dear People of God: Jesus did not want to see his disciples hesitant and unsure, fearful and doubtful, for He hates the anxious worrying and the corrosive hesitancy that easily prevents men and women from embracing hope and committing themselves in trust.  Such worry and hesitancy is the tap root, so to speak, of humankind’s sinful self-love; it is, spiritually, a mortal threat for a disciple of Jesus, for a child of God.  That is why the young man in white straightway states the fact simply, clearly, and surely: “He is risen”.

Moreover, the young man’s words, reported back to the disciples, would give them a necessary jump-start, so to speak, moving them to hope again; it would encourage them to look forward to seeing their Risen Lord.  He therefore went on to speak more expansively about that future meeting with the Risen Lord:

            Go, tell His disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee;            there you will see Him, just as He told you.'

How remarkable!  There is no mention of the Crucifixion of only two days ago; the Resurrection itself has been allotted but a very few words, and the angel goes on to speak mainly about the future meeting saying: “the arrangement He made with Peter and the disciples still stands; nothing has happened to change that planned meeting.  He is already going ahead to Galilee.”

And that was what Jesus wanted: His disciples had to begin living again, depression and worry had to be replaced by hope; and all uncertainty and anxiety had to be totally dispelled even before that promised meeting restored and renewed their commitment to Him.  See how self-effacing is Jesus’ love, you might say how careless He is in respect to His own glory!!  The angel’s message was phrased first and foremost for the well-being of His disciples, only secondly for Jesus’ glory.

And so, on this vigil, nothing is said of how things happened or where Jesus had gone.  How did He look: glorious, heavenly, majestic, awesome?  Wouldn’t we love to take away with us tonight a picture, some understanding, of that glorious, never before heard of, event that would give us a spiritual infusion of heavenly zeal and joy?  But nothing of the sort!

Now we know, God is wiser than we are: He is infinitely good, and knows all our real needs; so let us look again, yet more closely, at what is being offered us this holy night.  In our relationship with God, we have, first of all, to appreciate Who we are dealing with, what sort of Person, so to speak, He is.  The angel’s message, as I said, ignored the Crucifixion, skipped over the Resurrection, and concentrated on a future meeting of the Lord and His disciple.  It would seem as if that meeting was of such importance, that nothing, not even a horror such as the Crucifixion, could possibly, in any way, have prevented it taking place; and that nothing so gloriously transcendent as even the Resurrection can be allowed to push it aside into forgetfulness or oblivion!  The angel’s message is, therefore, about God’s Providence and Power: surely you did not think that the Crucifixion could prevent the meeting:  God’s Providence and Power is total and unassailable; it is also about the Lord’s Love and Faithfulness: never fear that the Lord in His Risen Glory could ever forget you and His meeting with you.  His Love and Faithfulness are constant and unfailing!  Surely you can’t fear He might have more important things than you on His mind?’  People of God, these are fundamental truths about Jesus, about the God we worship and serve: first of all, He is the omnipotent Lord of both heaven and earth, Satan can do nothing that will prevent the coming of God’s Kingdom; and secondly, His Personal love and faithfulness is more tender and tenacious than the human mind can imagine, nothing can separate us from His watchful care.

We are next privileged to catch a further glimpse of the Risen Lord’s love in the angel’s last words to the three women:

Go tell His disciples and Peter!

The disciples, as you will remember, had fled and left the Lord; that was bad enough; but Peter had three times publicly denied His Lord.  Since then he would have been breaking his heart with grief and his soul with regret at the recollection of what he had done.  These few words of the angel show the tender, personal, love of the glorious Risen Lord; they assure us that the Risen Jesus has indeed a gloriously human sensitivity in our regard.  He was well aware of the turmoil in the mind and heart of Peter, and He wanted Peter to be assured that he was in no way to be excluded or cut off.  Therefore the angel had to refer to him by the very name Jesus Himself had first given him (‘Go to the disciples and Peter’), insisting that he be present at the meeting in Galilee as planned.  People of God, note well: our God and Saviour is Almighty and -- in the same Breath of the Spirit so to speak -- most lovingly Personal.

Finally, however, for an authentic relationship with God, we must know not only Who we are relating to, but we must also be aware of how we are to relate to Him: for in our life with God we must have total trust and confidence in God and in the Faith we have been given, the Faith that enables us to appreciate and contact Him.  God’s power and the Lord Jesus’ love will never fail us no matter what the appearances may be!  Therefore, we have to develop within ourselves -- for that is where the weakness lies -- our confidence, above all, in God Himself, but also in the blessing of the Catholic Faith which has been bestowed upon us and handed down to us:

The young man said to them, ‘Do not be amazed; Go, tell His disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you.'"

Very often, People of God, men and women want to wonder at some apparently marvellous happening -- whether or not it is so marvellous does not really matter -- because they have no sure rock on which to rest within themselves.  They glory in the wonder and for a time they feel confident, think they have faith; but then, as the human chemistry within them, or as the outside circumstances around them, gradually change, they are not quite so sure, and they begin to feel the need of another wonder to give them another boost.  Now we must not treat the Lord’s Resurrection in such a way.

To that end, the anonymous young man who this evening said hardly anything about the Resurrection itself, as we have noted, actually said almost everything about the Faith God wants us to have:

            Do not be amazed.  He is going ahead of you.  You will see Him just as          He told you.

This Easter morning we should leave here with renewed trust and confidence in, and an overwhelming sense of gratitude to, God the Father, Who has invited us this day to a deeper appreciation of the mystery of His Son, our Risen Lord, ever abiding with us, and by His Spirit in us, in Mother Church.    Moreover, we should seek to make this blessing of deeper love for, and appreciation of, Jesus, this blessing of renewed confidence in our Catholic Faith handed down to us over twenty centuries by Mother Church, a permanent feature of our Catholic character. And towards that end, we should constantly seek to strengthen it within us by making acts and aspirations of confidence and trust, in the same way as we make the more customary acts and aspirations of love:  Just as ‘My God, Lord Jesus, I love You’ should always be at home on our lips if we want to grow in such love, so also exclamations of trust, prayers for hope, outbursts of gratitude such as, ‘My God I trust you, I hope in You’, or ‘Thank you Father, Lord, for the gift of the Faith and for Mother Church’ should always be hovering around in our mind and heart.  That is the sort of fruit the Father wants from our Easter celebration.  Therefore, as we leave here wishing each other a Happy Easter, let us all resolve to give Easter joy to the Father Himself by striving to bring forth the fruit that He expects from those who wish to become true disciples of His beloved Son.  A Happy and a Holy Easter to all here present.

Palm/Passion Sunday

Palm Sunday,  (B)

(The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to Mark)

In the responsorial psalm today you repeated words that were horrendous, coming, as they did, from the mouth of Jesus:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Such a cry can only have been forced out of Jesus by unimaginably intense suffering, for He was, on earth, the very Son of God made flesh: as a Child He had been loved and taught by Mary, most reverently supported and protected by her husband Joseph; He had grown up in constant favour with God and man, and it had been His ever-deepening delight to learn – through his habit of prayer and with help from the Scriptures both at home and in the synagogue -- to recognize and respond to His heavenly Father ever more and more in all the details of His daily life and experience among men.  Having come to know Himself as sent by the Father, Personally commissioned and endowed to save Israel and -- ultimately, through His Church -- the whole of mankind, in all that He did He sought exclusively and whole-heartedly to please and give glory to His Father in Heaven by leading Israel, through repentance, to peace with her God and fulfilment in her calling.  How unimaginably intense, therefore, must those sufferings have been which led Jesus to cry out:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Listen again to a little more of the psalm:

All who see me mock at me; they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads: “He relied on the Lord; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, if he loves him.”   (Ps 22:7-8)

It is hard to suffer unjust, ignorant, derision; derision from those whose life and actions could not endure any investigation at all; from those ever ready to bend and blend with every prevailing wind because they have no principles, and have courage only to run with the hounds or share in the jeers of the crowd or the violence of the mob.

But even those who find themselves suffering such derision -- when, finally brought low, and their suffering and agony made manifest to all -- will sometimes hear individual voices being raised on their behalf, find some compassion and sympathy from one or two onlookers more humane and tender-hearted than the others.  And there were, indeed, some such who witnessed Jesus’ agony; but they had no appreciation of His Person and character, no understanding of His aims and purpose: they lamented His wounds, but as spectators otherwise uninvolved, with the result that His persecutors were able to laugh at His helplessness, and deride His abandonment.  Even worse, they abused the very thread of life sustaining Him by saying:

            He relied on the Lord, let Him rescue Him, if He loves Him!

Yes, Jesus had trusted in the Lord, His Father!  Throughout His life He had trusted Him totally because He alone knew that His Father was totally trustworthy.  Now, however, it seemed that, as His life was draining away, He found Himself in a situation unimaginably alien to the ideal for which He had lived and now found Himself dying: He had wanted to lead His fellow Jews and Chosen People to recognise the Father He proclaimed as the one true God Who had originally chosen, liberated, and wondrously blessed their fathers before bestowing upon them the land on which their own feet now most gratefully stood, even though their worship of Him was now lacking love’s true obedience.  And here were those to whom He had been sent, and for whom He had laboured long and was suffering much, mocking His Father and their God with that jibe: “let Him save this fellow if this fellow is His friend”.

Compared to this Personal agony the physical torment was as nothing; nevertheless, physical torment it was: He could count every one of His bones, and was wracked by agonizing cramps as He hung there; He experienced a horrible difficulty in breathing, continually having to struggle to raise His rib-cage to find relief from the dreadful and continuous threat of being smothered; and then, from those gaping holes in His hands and His feet, His life-blood was pouring out and leaving Him with a such a terrible thirst!

We know that the psalm which Jesus was reciting went on:

But you, O Lord, be not far from me; O my help, hasten to aid me.

It witnesses to the fact that He trusted His Father to the end; indeed, the psalm closes with words of triumph:

I will proclaim Your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will praise You.  You who fear the LORD, praise Him!  All you descendants of Jacob, give glory to Him, revere Him, all you descendants of Israel!

However, granting such a final outcome, the question becomes all the more pressing: why did Jesus have to suffer so dreadfully in order to carry out the work God -- His most loving Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- had decided He should accomplish for our salvation?  What, precisely, was that work He had set Himself to do in fulfilment of His mission?

It was a work of sublime love, divine love indeed: not simply to save us from the result of our sins, but to give eternal glory and praise to the Father, and to turn us back again to the recognition and love of Him from Whose face and presence we had originally and most wrongfully turned at the instigation of the serpent, the father of lies.

And so, Jesus did not suffer horribly because such much suffering was needed to free us from the weight of our sins; no, He suffered so much to give supreme glory and honour to the goodness of His Father, and to show us, His own brethren, just how far and to what extent He Himself as Perfect Man would, and how we -- though sinners yet disciples – can and should, in and with Him, trust the Father.  To that end He willingly allowed Himself to be emptied entirely of physical and emotional strength, of all awareness of any remnant or residue of former sources of comfort and relief, of any hope of possible escape or deliverance other than His Father’s love and faithfulness which, however, He could no longer feel, recall, or imagine.   He suffered thus because He wanted to proclaim to suffering humankind that no matter what their situation – for no human suffering could possibly measure up to this – the Father was the One to trust.  He might have said this again in words, but words could in no way have the weight of conviction carried by the living example of this Man who, so totally forgetful of Himself, relinquishes all that He has and is and commits Himself into His Father’s loving arms from the Cross, in order to make manifest to sinful men just how good the Father is, how totally and absolutely trustworthy.

Only thus, by enduring and triumphing over the worst the devil might inflict, would Jesus be able free us from fear of the devil by giving us an unquenchable hope in the Father’s goodness, and thereby empower us to follow wherever His Spirit might lead us; only thus, could we be raised in and with Him to the dignity of children of heaven, able and called to collaborate with Him in the continuance and fulfilment of His work for the salvation of mankind; only thus, could we be taught and brought to give fitting glory to the God, the Creator and Father of us all.  

Hear now the words of St. Peter giving encouragement to a tiny flock of bewildered and persecuted Christians in Asia Minor, and recognize how your faith today is indeed being offered the same nourishment as that which enabled those Christians of old to triumph over their sufferings and transform their world:

You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.   He, indeed, was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you who through Him believe in God, Who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. (1 Pet 1:18-21)

Glory and praise to you Lord Jesus Christ!  You are the Saviour of the world!