Easter Sunday
I said here last night during the Easter Vigil that the real miracle of Easter is the manner in which the lives of the apostles had been transformed. They had been the fulfilment of his own biblical prophesy: "Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered." They had fallen asleep as he prayed alone in Gethsemane. The man he had chosen as leader denied any knowledge of him. At the end, they ran scared from Calvary and cowered behind locked doors in Jerusalem. Then suddenly, in an instant, they are transformed. They are out on the streets preaching. Fear has banished. They are convinced he is alive. This conviction sent them out into the streets transformed, rejuvenated, intent on sharing this good news that Jesus their hero was still alive. This experience the early Christians called 'the resurrection'.
We can say very little about the nature of their experience, but it has the power to transform lives. The eyes of faith will see the resurrection of the Lord at work. To this the apostles were witnesses, as Peter tells the house of Cornelius in our first reading today. One minute they are downcast and burdened with despair; the next minute they are confidently proclaiming the resurrection to all who are willing to listen to them. They are literally new men and women.
All the gospel writers struggle to convey this mysterious reality: what happened to transform the lives of the followers of Jesus? Today we had read John's version, written perhaps 60 years after the event itself. This is a very subtle piece of writing by John. By the time John is writing this, the first generation of those who had known Christ in the flesh had died. The appearances have now dried up. There are three characters in this story: Mary of Magdala, Simon Peter, and an anonymous figure called 'the other disciple'. Mary finds the tomb empty and it does nothing for her faith: 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him' she complains. If we read the text closely, the 'empty tomb' does nothing for Peter either. The anonymous 'other disciple' then went into the tomb. John tells us cryptically: 'He saw and he believed.'
Whereas the faith of the first generation of believers was ignited by post-resurrection appearances, the present and future generation of Christians will be dependant upon the empty tomb. They must now walk on their own as it were. Mature faith must trust in the word of Jesus and not lean for support on the miraculous.
However, we do little justice to the Easter message by dismissing death as simply irrelevant because of the Easter event. Perhaps the vast majority of grieving people experience their suffering as meaningless waste. And of course much of it was. But this is not the sum total of our experience. We also know that selfless love has suffering as a frequent companion. This seems to be a law of life as we experience it. The more intensely we love, the more intense will be the sorrow on parting. It seems to be the price demanded by our scheme of things. And this seems to be supremely so in the case of Jesus. His entire life, based utterly on selfless love, offers us a glimpse of the New Creation. It was inevitable that a life lived in such an intensely loving manner should have ended in such intense pain. Not even death could deter him from following the father's plan.
The Father's response to this obedient self-giving was to restore him to us as Lord and Saviour. The fact of death remains. The significance of the fact has been transformed, - because Christ has absorbed suffering and death into himself. Because of Jesus our suffering and death has acquired a divine dimension. Because of his death, they will acquire a divine conclusion. The problem has not been solved. But the mystery has been deepened and enriched. This is the reality we try to absorb during this Easter day and indeed throughout the Great Fifty days of Easter.