3/31/02
Easter: the Feast of Faith
The two great feasts that anchor the Church’s liturgical celebration of the mystery of Jesus Christ are Christmas and Easter. Of the two, Christmas is the more psychologically available feast, because everyone has seen and touched a newborn baby; since apostolic times, however, no one has seen and touched a risen body. It takes faith, of course, to recognize the eternal Son of God in a small baby; but it takes perhaps greater faith to believe the witnesses from 2,000 years ago whose proclamation that Jesus is risen gave birth to the Church. To be a member of the Church one must be baptized and profess the apostolic faith. The core of that faith, given to us as pure gift, is belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the tomb.
The liturgical celebrations of Holy Week bring us, body and soul, into contact with the risen Christ and confirm our faith. There is in Moscow a 60-year-old woman named Tatiana Goritcheva. She was brought up as a committed Marxist, convinced that all religious stories are mere fables. When she graduated from university, however, she fell in with a group of intellectuals who had become disillusioned with Marxism and had begun to take part in the liturgical life of the Russian Orthodox Church. One Easter, she wrote 20 years ago in a book about her spiritual journey, her friends brought her with them to the Easter Vigil service. Tatiana wrote that she was deeply moved by the liturgy, with its presentation of Jesus rising from the dead, with the experience of light overcoming darkness and the crowded church ringing with Alleluias.
The climax of the first Easter Vigil she attended was the priest’s chanted exclamation: “Christ is risen!” and the people’s response: “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” “In that moment,” wrote Tatiana, “I knew: God lives.” That is the faith of Easter, the Church’s faith. The God who is Lord of the universe, the personal God who created and sustains our world so that it does not fall back into nothingness, the God who saves us through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, seeks to be the center of each and every human life.
In the resurrection of Jesus there is a unique divine intervention in the history of the world, at a specific time and place. Without faith, such a divine intervention makes no sense. Frequently enough, news reports of Christian believers’ celebrating Easter are accompanied by a critique by someone who has taken Tatiana Goritcheva’s journey in reverse. A thoroughly secular mind is affronted by the very idea that God, if He exists, would make such an intervention in the history of the world. Rather than try to understand it as best anyone can, many will explain it away.
The resurrection of Jesus is like a startling light. When a very bright light shines in our face, we blink. We close our eyes. The light is still there, but our eyes reject it because it is too much for them. On the first Easter day, even the apostles and Jesus’ close friends blinked. It took a while to recognize him and to realize what had happened. It was too much to believe until the Lord pressed them with the evidence. Once convinced, they testified to Jesus’ resurrection even at the cost of their lives. What did they proclaim and teach? What the Church proclaims and teaches today.
The tomb was empty. Jesus appeared to his followers, instructed them and commissioned the apostles to witness to what God had done in human history, even if history as such cannot recount, comprehend or explain all of the dimensions of the resurrection. It was a bodily resurrection. Jesus did not come back from the grave as a ghost. Nor was it a simple resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus reversed death. He rose again in the body that was his, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that has all his particular qualities, his way of walking, speaking, standing. But though it is the same body, it is transformed. Christ’s risen body is mysterious: changed in quality, perfected, glorified.
Jesus rose bodily from the dead. His whole person is with God, but he is still in contact with the world, with each of us. Jesus is with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but he is constantly acting on us in the world. Free of all the bonds of space and time, the risen Jesus can be wherever he wants to be; and he wants to be with us. Preeminently, substantially, as Tatiana Goritcheva came to discover, he is with us in the Eucharist. It is always amazing to me how anyone who holds the faith can ask what we “get out” of the Mass. What we “get out” is the risen Christ. What he does is explode our tiny ways and small minds to bring them into a dimension of existence that is sometimes resisted because it can be terrifying. The risen Christ is not a “nice man”; he is certainly not the sentimentalized Jesus who never makes demands that bring us beyond our very selves and turn the world inside out.
For 2,000 years, the Church has testified to the personal presence of Jesus with his people. We need the assurance of this presence in a particular way this Easter because of the scandal of sexual misconduct by some priests and the failure of authorities in the Church to protect children adequately. These terrible sins, like any sin, can be forgiven by the Lord; but the consequences of sin, like the consequences of virtue, affect every member of Christ’s body, the Church. We need the assurance of this presence because it seems these sins and scandals are being used by some in a deliberate and orchestrated way to discredit the Church herself and the apostolic faith that brings her into being. Every sin of any priest can now be reason to justify dissatisfaction and complaints about the Church from any quarter. This is not a new experience for the Church, although the extent of the manipulation of popular opinion in this country hasn’t been seen since the rise of the Know-Nothing party in the middle of the 19th century. But the risen Lord is with his Church. “We are afflicted in every way possible, but we are not crushed; full of doubts, but we never despair. We are persecuted but never abandoned; we are struck down but never destroyed. Continually we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed.” (II Cor. 4: 8-10). St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians takes on new poignancy this Easter and speaks to us in a more urgent way. And perhaps that is the special grace of this Easter. When our faith is tried, even by shepherds and fishermen, what we proclaim about the resurrection is either more clearly focused or it dissolves.
What we proclaim in faith is captured in a few words in a scene from the Gospel according to St. John (Jn 21: 1-7). It was in Galilee. The apostles were fishing, and Jesus appeared on the shore of the lake. They did not recognize him immediately from their boat a hundred yards or so out from the shore. Only when they had followed his instructions and were bringing in more fish than their nets could safely hold did the beloved disciple turn and say to Peter: “It is the Lord!” So do we say to one another this Easter with the disciples of all ages: “It is the Lord. He is risen, Alleluia.” May each of you have a blessed Easter.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
