Easter Sunday ABC
Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Col 3:1-4; Jn 20:1-9
April 12, 2020

 

Today, with great joy, we join with Christians throughout the world to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. Happiness fills our hearts as we sing the Easter alleluia and proclaim Jesus’ victory over sin and death. At the same time, we recognize too that resurrection is part of the inner dynamic of the universe, that over and over again, new life keeps rising out of death. Jesus’ Resurrection is therefore a symbol of God’s transforming presence in the world. We expand our celebration to include, not only Jesus’ rising from the dead, but also the completion of what he came on earth to accomplish – to preach the Good News to people, and to suffer, die, and rise again. There would have been no Easter unless there had been a Good Friday. That is important to remember, because we are also marking today, not only what happened to Jesus, but also what is a model for our Christian life. When we embraced the wood of the Cross on Good Friday, followed by the silence and absence of God in the Holy Saturday experience leading up to this Easter Day, we acknowledge the pattern of the Christian life for ourselves: suffering, dying and rising. The experience of darkness that is the absence of God in suffering is also part of our journey to new life. That journey is what is ritually enacted in the Easter sacrament of Baptism – as those to be baptized die symbolically beneath the waters and rise again to new life.

Celebrating Jesus’ rising is not quite the same as celebrating an important event in the life of another person. That is because in celebrating Jesus’ resurrection, we are meant to be celebrating something important in our lives. Are suffering, dying, and rising, a faith-pattern that can be discovered in our lives? What is our attitude towards the suffering, both physical and emotional, that comes our way as we go through life? Is our suffering the occasion for anger, frustration, denial, impatience, or self-pity?

Or have we taken some small step towards integrating (incorporating, combining) our sufferings and our experiences of God’s absence with what the Church reenacts during Holy Week and Easter? What we are facing here is the challenge of either celebrating Easter as we would a friend’s birthday or of celebrating it in a much deeper way. The birthday of a friend, no matter how strongly we feel about it, is still not our own, but someone else’s birthday. Easter, however, is not just Jesus’ rising – it is the offer, and the acceptance, of a new life by all who suffer, die, and rise with him. We celebrate Easter not just for Jesus’ sake, but for sake too.

The feast of Easter, therefore, provides a fundamental key for understanding the meaning of Christian life, with its inevitable experience of suffering. Willingness to suffer does not mean looking for suffering. It means that we, with the eyes of faith, have come to recognize that there is a profound (deep) mystery in suffering. Through the darkness of physical or emotional pain, Jesus invites us to let go of our dependence on things that pass away and allow ourselves to be drawn closer to himself. He invites us to let go of our plans, of our need to control our lives, and to let him lead us. When suffering comes our way, we can respond either with blindness or recognition. Blindness means that we see suffering entirely in a negative way. It can make us angry, sad, full of self-pity, or more demanding of others. Recognition means that we realize that God is present to us in our suffering, and that he is offering us new life through that suffering. With recognition comes new life – the birth of a new closeness to the Lord.

As we celebrate this Easter day, Jesus’ invitation to each of us is not only to celebrate with him, the Risen Jesus, but to have the courage to enter into the mystery of suffering, as he did, and through that suffering, to experience a new life of grace in the Resurrection.

This Easter invitation is a long way from the world of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies. It is a call to ground our lives firmly in the Gospel, in the Resurrection, and in the mysteries of our Christian faith.

- Fr. Stephen Lattner, O.S.B.