Easter Sunday The Resurrection of the Lord
Today's Mass Readings
What is the last thing that a priest wants on Holy Saturday? How about a Funeral service! When I first got news about the funeral, I felt overwhelmed. The last thing I wanted in the midst of all the Holy Week schedule and practices was a funeral. I agreed to do the funeral simply because that is what my duties call for. But when I entered the funeral home and saw the family of the deceased gathered in love around the body, I realized that this funeral was the best thing I could accommodate on Holy Saturday. It gave me a sense of what the family of Jesus must have felt on that first Holy Saturday. Like them, here was a family waiting with the body in a casket, waiting for the stone to be rolled away. It was a most beautiful experience for me to see this person buried with Jesus, and like Jesus, waiting for the resurrection. For the family too, to know that they could entrust their loved one into the hands of the same Father into whose hands Jesus entrusted his life was the most consoling thing. They left in peace. I would like to reflect on the significance of Easter on various levels. Let me do so from three levels: eternity, divinity, and humanity.
Eternity – Our Father has the last Word
Easter tells us that concerning human destiny the Father has the last word. When human beings through their irreversible choice brought suffering and death upon themselves, God refused to let suffering and death be the last word. The only way to conquer suffering and death was to take away its eternity. But no mortal being could rob death of its eternity. Only an eternal being could do that. Jesus came and by his death as the ‘Eternal One’ brought about the death of death. The last word concerning human destiny is but hope and life.
Divinity – At Easter we become One of God’s
Easter completes the incarnation story=
At Christmas, God became one of us. At Easter we become one of God’s. The events that lead up to Easter are events that intimately connect God to humanity and humanity to divinity. On Holy Thursday, at the Last Supper Jesus gave his body and blood. Any one who eats his body and drinks his blood now has “Eternity” within them. In this way, not only does God become ours but also we become God’s. On Good Friday, Jesus took upon himself our suffering, sin and death. In this way, he made part of his innocence and life. Any one who calls upon his name now is intimately bound up with his divine redemption. On Holy Saturday, Jesus is buried in the tomb. Through his burial Jesus enters the final point of human existence. Anyone who dies in Christ is now met by Christ precisely at the last point of human existence. Here, Christ absorbs us into the eternal life of God. That is our Easter. Thanks to that first Easter, every Christian death is another Easter.
Humanity – Life is a paradox
What does Easter do for my humanity? What does Easter do for my day-to-day living? Easter provides every human person a reason, a vision, a hope, and a reason to live and die. Easter tells me that no human person must ever succumb to despair. Easter tells me that no human life is without meaning. Easter tells me that even when I am in the dumps, in the depths of sin, God never gives up on me. Easter tells me that God does not abandon me in my suffering, but rather, that suffering with me, God prepares for me an eternity without suffering. Easter tells me that life is a paradox: that it is in my humanity that I can discover my divinity, that it is in giving that we receive, that it is in suffering that one can find strength, that it is in losing oneself that one finds our self, that it is in death that there is life.
As Catholics we believe that the entire Christian story is actualised and reactualized on this altar. Suffering, death, and new life are all divinised and offered to us in this simple bread and wine. The paradox of Christ’s life is re-enacted here right before our eyes. There were very few on that first Easter day that recognized it. But we who have touched him, and feel him, and receive him, know that Jesus is alive. He is now in our midst. He is God – Alleluia.
- Fr. Satish Joseph