Easter Homily
In today’s first reading from Acts 10, St. Peter says “they put him to death by hanging him on a tree” but also that God raised this man on the third day and “granted that he be visible.”
Then, in our Gospel from Luke 24, Jesus himself says that it was necessary “that the Christ should suffer these things” and then “enter his glory.”
In other words, Jesus’s death and resurrection interpret each other. What we say about Easter extends and builds upon what we said about Good Friday. Jesus’ Easter resurrection is a victory because his death on Good Friday was real. Jesus’s resurrected body still has his scars – his suffering is not erased, or whitewashed, or forgotten – but it is made into something new and radiant.
This transformation of suffering - this pivot from Good Friday to Easter - gives us, who follow Jesus, the power to live in a new way. It says in our second reading, from Colossians 3, that our life is hidden with Christ. It says that we who follow Christ also die, but if we die anchored in him, we will also appear with him in glory.
At the heart of the Christian faith is an honest acknowledgement that bad things will happen to good people. What happened to Jesus on Holy Thursday and Good Friday should make that obvious. Jesus does not magically exempt us from sin and its consequences.
But Jesus redeems his and our suffering. His deep desire is to transform our sin and suffering, so that our short lives can become spiritually significant and our souls can be radiant and beautiful. Suffering is not an obstacle to this transformation, but rather one of the essential ingredients.
If we want to become like Jesus - if we want to have a spiritual life, if we want to follow him into intimacy with God - then what happened to him will have to happen to us. When we follow him, we allow ourselves to be configured until we become like him in all things, including his passion and suffering.
On Holy Thursday, Jesus washed feet and gave us the Eucharist – with his betrayers, Peter and Judas, sitting right there. Then later that night, in the garden of Gethsemane, he prayed and asked that things would go differently, that the cup might pass from him, but, crucially, he also prayed “thy will, not mine, be done.” Next he was arrested and questioned, humiliated. The crowds preferred Barabbas to him. The Roman soldiers stripped and tortured him in a dozen different ways.
During all of that, he never fought back, he never lied, he never evaded. Instead he washed feet. Instead he gave us the Eucharist. Instead, when the cock crowed, he looked on Peter with love. In his agony, he prayed the Psalms from the cross. In his last breaths, he forgave the people who executed him.
These events are not a metaphor for what God is kind of like. These last few days are not an abstract philosophical proposition about a divine watchmaker who set the universe in motion and then steps back. Instead, these last few days are the revelation, God’s disclosure of himself, telling us what we would not otherwise know about our creator. These last few days have been an encounter with a flesh and blood person. Clarifying all arm chair speculation, and as a bulwark against fantasies and psychological projections, these last few days reveal what holiness is. These last few days define the nature of God, in whose image we are created.
The glory of Easter – the revelation of today specifically - is that God stands by his Son and redeems His suffering. God does not let the horror amount to nothing. Because of Easter, Jesus’ virtue and love during his suffering was not pointless humiliation.
On the contrary. Having endured the worst that humans can do, having gone eyeball to eyeball with the devil, Jesus blazes a trail for us all to something glorious. St. Augustine wrote, “He died, but he slew death; he put an end in himself to what we were afraid of. He embraced it, and killed it. Like the greatest of hunters, he caught hold of the lion, and killed it.”
The meaning of our life is hidden in this Jesus. If we want to know who we are, we have to look at Him, to find ways to know and open ourselves to Him.
Last night at the Easter vigil, we baptized our parish’s newest Catholic. Fr. Bob preached about how we have to surrender to God in order to let God love us into becoming who we’re supposed to become. It is possible - it is a common and universal temptation - to try and deal with sin and suffering without surrendering, to try and deal with our through our human strategies of evasion, denial, resentment, diversion, addiction, and bargaining, all the variations where we insist on our autonomy and preferences. But in the end, our pride and attempts at self-medication only perpetuate the cycle. In the end, the only way to defeat sin and suffering is to surrender to our Creator in all things, to follow Jesus through suffering with love, hope, and confidence in the Easter promise.
In a few moments, we’re going to stand together and renew our baptismal promises. We’re going to repeat the phrase “I believe” several times. What does it mean to “believe” in God? Is “belief” an intellectual assent to a proposition? Is believing in God like believing that George Washington was the first president of the US – something people tell you about, something that happened a long time ago, something that affects us abstractly and distantly? Is believing in God like believing in the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, something where the evidence is sketchy, but what the heck, let's cast our reason aside? Is believing in God something we mumble about politely, because we’re here in church all dressed up, and we don’t want to be too awkward?
No, no, no. A thousand times no. Maybe we start small like that. Maybe we venture our first steps in trust simply because other people, others whom we love and trust, because we can coast on their faith. We all start where we can.
But when we say we "believe," a Christian is ultimately expressing confidence that if we put our weight on this mystery – if we put our anchor in these High Holy days – then a whole new way of life is true and real, possible and fruitful.
Anchoring ourselves in these mysteries is a superpower, enabling a new future. We now know that, uniting our suffering to Christ, any illness, any poverty, any rejection, any lethargy, any sin we commit or might be committed against us, these things can be turned to prayer, can be occasions for forgiveness, and that this perseverance will be vindicated. Because of Good Friday and Easter, we now know that “a holy soul can be dragged trough the deepest evil and leave a trail of goodness.”
This is the superpower – the patience, the fortitude – that changes lives. Having seen that it’s possible to endure evil, and still leave a trail of goodness, having caught a glimpse of that, we might be curious to learn more about our faith and go a little deeper. We might even be curious to learn more about this odd body of people that have gathered around Jesus – the Church – and what makes it tick. We can start to understand why Catholics do hard things.
Again, we can start on this new way of life with small things. We can befriend those who are lonely or hard to deal with. We can unplug from the mobs and needing to be one of the cool kids. We can read and watch wholesome things instead of floating around online. We can support charities and ministries to help other people, even when the culture and the market says look out for #1. We support and build a culture of life, even when it’s inconvenient. We can stand for something more beautiful than our appetites and creature comforts.
You know, the devil is always trying to trick us. Remember how, on the cross, there were two thieves crucified either side of Jesus. One thief had the childlike view of religion, the small view. He mocked Jesus – if you’re really God, make this suffering go away, make me comfortable, get us out of here. But the other thief, the one who was honest about his sins, saw that Jesus was right there beside him in his suffering. That thief looked on the face of God, and united his suffering with his. That thief understood the final stakes of reality, and how Jesus changes everything. May we let our belief change everything for us too. Amen.
