Easter Sunday 2021
(Acts 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On this Easter morning we are gathered to rejoice in the Lord for the
glory and beauty of His Personal triumph over sin and death and for the
wondrous salvation He has thereby won for us.
If we look back to our human origins, we can learn there something of
the true significance of what, at first glance, would appear to have been the
utter degradation and revolting ugliness of Our Lord’s sufferings and death on
Calvary.
God had been wonderfully generous to us at our creation: making,
forming, us in His own image and likeness to rule over all that He had made in
a way that would give glory to His most holy Name and provide for all our
needs. There was, therefore, a close, ‘instinctive’ bond of
friendship between God and our forebears, and indeed, God even used to walk in
the garden of Eden conversing with them:
The Lord
God (was) walking in the garden in the cool of the day (and) called out to the
man … (cnf.
Genesis 3: 8-9)
There had been only one restriction to Adam’s total freedom in the
garden, and that had been established when God, from the very beginning, had
told him:
You are free to eat from any of the trees of the
garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; for in the
day that you eat of it, you will surely die. (Genesis 2:15)
Notice first of all, People of God, that ‘knowledge of’ means real,
‘physical and full knowledge of’, not merely ‘theoretical awareness,
philosophical knowledge of’. Therefore, the prohibition was made by
God because such fruit would prove most seriously harmful to Adam, ‘eat of it
and you shall surely die’: one who deliberately turns away from God, by
that very fact, cannot share immortality, which is essentially
divine, with God.
Adam’s appreciation of God’s goodness was in no way diminished by the warning he had been given, since there was nothing in the Garden which called for Adam to have such knowledge of evil nor was there any good being withheld from him by God, Who urged Adam was to cultivate and care for the garden in every respect. Indeed, we learn next how harmonious and lovingly considerate was God’s relationship with Adam, for God, having taken careful note of Adam’s situation, decided (cf. Genesis 2:18-23):
It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make
a helper suited to him. So, the Lord God
caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, then He took one of his ribs and closed
up the flesh at that place. The Lord God
fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her
to the man. The man said, “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of
my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman’ for out of man this one has been
taken.”
Thus, from the sympathetic closeness of the bond between Adam and God, Eve herself was formed.
However, the serpent managed to poison Eve’s mind by insinuating that God’s command forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had been made out of oppressive authoritarianism, and thus the nature of the bond between God and the couple He had created became strained before being ultimately determined by the issue of obedience: for Adam, weakly opting to go along with Eve in disobedience to God’s warning/command, thereby inevitably lost his participation in God’s immortality and became subject to death and suffering for mankind as a whole.
That, dear People of God, is why Jesus declared so very frequently that He had come among men not to do His own will but the will of Him Who had sent Him:
Jesus made many more such assertions so that we might most surely recognize the root of our human sinfulness and suffering.
Thus, there are two most important points for all disciples of Jesus to appreciate from the very beginning: first of all, there can be no true love for God in one given to disobedience, for disobedience is the root of all our evils and the cause of our alienation from God: we cannot ‘pick and choose’ between disobedience now and obedience later, in our relationship with God. Secondly, the obedience we owe to God can never truly be cold or automatic, for that is a disfiguration of its original and most authentic nature … for obedience is essentially the truest expression of human, child-like, love for and total confidence in, God our Father.
Now, bearing in mind what we have learnt about our origins, let us look for the glory and the beauty of Our Lord’s obedient Passion, Death, and Resurrection brought about on Jerusalem’s mount of ignominy, Calvary.
We were told in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles that:
They put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree.
How wonderfully beautiful!! The beautiful fruit of God’s good tree in Eden – which, following the Serpent’s deception of sensuous Eve and his exploitation of Adam’s indecisiveness -- had become a stone of stumbling, is now most wonderfully transformed by Jesus’ obedient self-sacrifice into the life-enhancing, life-enriching, life-fulfilling, fruit of divine bounty now offered to us in the Eucharist!! Supremely desirable indeed for the gaining of wisdom: not merely cold knowledge of good and evil, but wisdom sublime and divine; a saving transformation symbolized, most beautifully for us disciples of Jesus, no longer by a snake pierced through and lifted up high on a pole as under Moses, but by God’s most beautiful fruit hanging on a tree of loving choice.
What delight in His Father, what love for us, enabled Jesus to hold His head high throughout those atrocious torments on the Cross? Of that we are told in the Psalter:
Blessed is
the man (whose) delight is in the law (the command) of the Lord … He is like a
tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its
season and its leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:2-3)
where, of God’s infallible prescience and love, He was destined to become the fruit of salvation, the fruit of Calvary, not, as at the serpent’s, suggestion to be sneakily grasped, but lovingly intended by the Father Himself, to be taken and received with faith and humble Eucharistic gratitude:
Take this,
all of you, and eat it, this is My (Son’s) Body which will be given up for you.
When the serpent deceived Eve he had promised her that:
When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and
you will be like gods, who know both good and evil.
Our blessed Lord and Saviour, on the other hand, opens our eyes to the full truth of our situation when He offers us the strength of His grace together with a call to repent, warning us that only those who humbly believe in Him and in His Father’s merciful goodness will be able to receive with profit the full fruit of His sacrifice and the wisdom of His Most Holy Spirit.
People of God, today we should, as Catholics and Christians, wholeheartedly rejoice! Rejoice in God’s infinitely beautiful wisdom that extends throughout all His creation and all ages shaping all our human destinies; rejoice in His omnipotent and universal might, that manifests itself in a Son willing to suffer the loss of all in order to conquer sin and to save His Father’s chosen ones; rejoice in the goodness of Him Who knows no evil and suffers no evil, and Who -- in His only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ and by His Most Holy Spirit -- is become our Light and Life, our Joy and Peace, uniquely able to transform all evils to His greater glory and our eternal salvation.
Rejoice, rejoice, indeed, but also pray today, our world is so dramatically turning away from God to the worship of human wilfulness: ‘might is right’ still holds sway, but today, ‘might’ yet more imperiously lays claim not to direct physical power to enforce, so much as to sheer stiff-necked wilfulness to guarantee what is wanted wherever ‘persuasion’ is impossible: for might today lies in numbers: for our modern democracy is always and only most fully content, satisfied, and acceptably-satiated with ‘popularity’, sustained by as many as possible voters however young, regardless of integrity, truth, beauty and authentic fulfilment.
Yet again, let our rejoicing be truly Catholic and Christian, for human wilfulness, though perduring to self-destruction can never thwart the ultimate will of God’s goodness to us triumphant in Jesus, radiant in ‘shareable-glory’ for all who turn to Him with loving obedience and total and humble confidence.
