Evergreen forest

Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34.37-43; 1 Corinthians 5, 6-8; John 20, 1-9.

There is always the possibility and the danger of perpetuating the celebrations of the Great Week as mere rituals which are in no way different from pagan rituals that have always formed part of the most primitive religiosity.

The permanent significance of the resurrection of Jesus can only be seen and grasped in what later witnesses, including ourselves today, make of it.

In his gospel, John is giving account of the sequence of things as they happened early on that first day. Peter was still bewildered by the crude facts and failed to understand what it all meant and to connect what he was experiencing with what Jesus stood for in his days.

But then in the first reading from Acts he is boldly addressing the crowds. He needed to go through a process of unlearning to assimilate what he was experiencing and let it sink down to take over in his struggles of mind and heart.

Like Peter, we are at a point in time when we badly need to liberate once more the image of Jesus of Nazareth from the way we’ve mummified it in our religious frames of mind. We also need to let go of the Jesus we’ve imagined in order to be in a position to meet the Risen Lord.

The way people are leaving the churches and institutional religion today is a statement we need to hear and grasp. The Jesus we perpetuate and transmit is not always the Jesus who saves.

What is it that we are in search of in life? And how can our desires and needs cross with that Jesus who is himself coming our way to meet with us precisely where we stand? We need to give Jesus back to the human dimension where he belongs. As Peter says in his address, he “went about doing good and curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil”. That is the human dimension of Jesus and of his mystery.

On this Easter Sunday, resurrection should still mean the curing from the power of the devil, whatever that may mean to our culture. How can we translate that in a language that is comprehensible to a culture that has become demythologised to the extent that it refuses to speak of the devil or of powers by which it is conditioned.

The power of the devil in Scripture is also something to be cured of, a malaise, something that kills. It is a culture that obfuscates consciences, that emancipates reason to the detriment of faith, that kills God without giving true life to people. It is a culture which in the wake of the Modern Age claimed to give back freedom and dignity to the individual but which still fails to put man’s dignity first.

Jesus puts himself first and foremost in contradiction with this power that suffocates rather than gives life. Easter is about a spirituality of hope. It should give us a theological glimpse, opening for us a window through which we can experience a moment of creativity, of reconciliation and healing.

As Daniel J. O’Leary says in his book Passion for the Possible, “the exploration of the mystery of the resurrection goes on forever. It is the evergreen forest of our often faltering hope, the ever fresh spring of our often doubting belief.” Even if we acknowledge that our nature is flawed and that there is so much ambiguity in our living and dying, the Easter hope is not in place just in spite of, but because of our sinfulness.

The resurrection of Jesus is an assurance that evil and suffering do not have the last word, that death is not the end. It is capable of reversing our points of no return in politics, in religion, in issues of poverty, injustice, and dehumanisation.

The resurrection of Jesus is a statement that is much deeper than the statements of facts we read about daily in our headlines.