Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008
Reflections on Acts 10:34-37
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20: 1-9
by Patricia Crowley, OSB.
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I. Introduction
What do we celebrate on this feast of Easter????
On Easter Sunday, 1955, a man died and was buried quietly in an unimpressive gravesite. That man, a Jesuit, a paleontologist, a biologist, a philosopher, a mystic, a prophet, a priest, a member of the esteemed L’Academie Francaise, a prolific writer, died at six o’clock in the evening in New York City. His funeral from St. Ignatius Church in Manhattan and his burial about sixty miles upstate at the then, Jesuit novitiate both took place on the very next day, Easter Monday, with a few friends in attendance.
That man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, glimpsed and wrote about one answer to the question – What do we celebrate here today.
He taught us to savor the risen life as he described Christ as the Omega Point in creation and in so doing held that the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ might be viewed not merely as historical events, affecting Christ only, but rather, as cosmic events, affecting the whole cosmos, the entire universe, the many universes, all of created reality……(based on an excerpt from A Passionate Champion of Christ by J Felix Raj, SJ)
Today’s gospel presents another answer. Each of us undoubtedly has an answer to that question.
II. Today’s gospel story presents the “empty tomb” as an answer to the question of what we celebrate today:
a. Mary (or in Luke’s version, the women together) came in the darkness of the very early morning. She came searching; she saw the empty tomb; she wondered where “they had taken the body.” She was puzzled; she sought out her companions.
b. They came – Peter, more slowly; the other (most probably John) more quickly. They went into the tomb; they saw the cloth that had been over his head. “…until then, they failed to understand.”
c. Something happened as they encountered the empty tomb and the cloth they knew had covered him…..d. The impact of this understanding ripples through the friends and followers of Jesus and we will hear those stories in the weeks to come.
III. So, what are some other answers to the question: What does Easter celebrate?
i. The empty tomb is certainly one answer.
ii. The utter transformation of Jesus the Christ in a resurrected body is another. We will hear many stories in the days and weeks ahead of some experiences of Jesus’ new way of being with his friends…..
iii. Another answer to what we celebrate is undoubtedly that we have a definite hope that we ourselves will experience resurrection after death. That is certainly another answer to the question.
iv. The life and work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is still another.v. You may, indeed, have some of your own answer to that question – What does Easter celebrate?
IV. The “empty tomb” is a starting point. So, we might ask ourselves with whom we identify in that gospel story……
e. With Mary – who comes because she feels the suffering , the death, the loss of Jesus and then, is utterly dumbfounded by the unexpected reality that the tomb is empty. She goes to fetch her companions.
f. With Peter – who comes to see but comes slowly. Some commentators propose that he was somewhat burdened with his own guilt and the memory of his denial. We each carry our own “baggage” as Peter did. For some of us it is the memory of times of failure or of weakness; for others it might be the baggage of grudges to which we cling; for other, it might be memories that haunt us. But, when he does come, he grasps what the scriptures meant that “he must rise from the dead”.
g. With the other one, the one “whom Jesus loved” – he ran quickly. When he got there, he bent down and saw and then, waited to enter with Peter. Perhaps we, too, wait for others and them we move….even though as in the gospel case, we grasp the meaning ahead of the other.
h. With Mary after the men had left – she lingered weeping, feeling deeply the pain and the loss.
i. Perhaps you identify with one…or perhaps each of them represents a part of ourselves as we ponder this mystery of the resurrection.V. It is Mary who in the very next passage actually encounters the risen Jesus as she wept.
I would suggest that as Mary, people in our world who know suffering and allow themselves to remember and feel the suffering of others and of our world. They are the ones who will also know resurrection.
That is the mystery of the Cross in relation to the mystery of the Resurrection. Through the deepest parts of the passion, Jesus’ relation with God is maintained even in what might appear to be a time of despair.
Don Senior, C.P. the president of CTU, gave a splendid talk on the Resurrection at Loyola earlier this year. He captures this thought in saying: “Scripture affirms that Jesus’ trust in God, a trust under assault, but never destroyed, becomes the slender thread that carries through in Jesus’ journey from death to life.”
That “slender thread” of trust in God is poignantly expressed by the Nobel prize-winning poetry of Julia Esquivel:
“It isn’t the noise in the streets that keeps us from resting, my friend…./ there is something here within us / which doesn’t let us sleep, / which doesn’t let us rest, / which doesn’t stop pounding inside, / it is the silent, warm weeping of Indian women without their husbands, / it is the sad gaze of the children fixed there beyond memory, in the very pupil of our eyes / which during sleep though closed, keep watch / with each contraction of the heart,/ in every awakening./ What keeps us from sleeping is that they have threatened us with resurrection! (Taken from Threatened with Resurrection, 1982, The Brethren Press, Elgin, Illinois 60120)
We, in today’s world, can also hang on to that slender thread of trust in God, that memory of the suffering of the cross and of others in our world. We can be, as Mary, weeping at the tomb, remembering and somewhat bewildered. We, too, can be “threatened with resurrection”.
In the spirit of that poem, of Mary in the garden, and of the magnificent insights of Teilhard de Chardin, we pray:
1 That this Easter morning, we, too, might be “threatened with resurrection,”
2 That we, too, might be willing to allow ourselves to feel the sufferings of our world and our own lives,
3 That we might, in that powerful image of the cosmic Christ, glimpse this event as impacting the total created reality of the entire cosmos.The challenge of the Easter Season is to allow ourselves to be threatened with the power of the cosmic scope of the Teihardian sense of resurrection.
That we may know how marvelous it is to be threatened with resurrection, to dream awake, to keep watch asleep, to live while dying, and to already know oneself as resurrected.” (Taken from Threatened with Resurrection, 1982, The Brethren Press, Elgin, Illinois 60120)