Today’s readings: Acts 10,34.37-43; 1Corinthians 5,6-8; John 20,1-9.
During Holy Week leading to the victory of Easter, it is a disturbed and confused community that takes the centre stage. It is a community of disciples who had believed and given full credit to Jesus but who were not realistic enough to realise what the drama of living entails. Jesus had constantly warned that it was not going to be easy and that he had to undergo a cruel death before the promises come true.
This was the story of a community which in the face of unfolding and quite disturbing events limited itself to observe from a distance what Jesus was enduring. That was for them too much to bear. While Jesus was being arrested, accused, condemned, ridiculed and put to death on the cross, most probably they kept expecting a miracle. They followed him in good times. Now they failed to see through the shattering events of Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
Even in our daily lives, there is what can be called the Holy Saturday syndrome, whenever we give in to a sense of fatality and helplessness, resigning ourselves almost passively to an impasse condition. Easter is the exit from such deadlock crises. Today’s gospel depicts two contrasting figures among the first disciples who both run to the empty tomb of Jesus convinced that a breakthrough was about to happen.
It was not doubt or lack of hope that drove them to the tomb scene. They knew it was going to happen, but two days’ waiting was too much and it seemed an eternity for them. They rested on the solid foundation of things seen and experienced. But even if those foundations were shaken, they still knew that at the end of the day God is God and He will not delude.
We need to liberate ourselves of the image we have of Jesus which haunts many of us during Lent, particularly in Holy Week. We tend to stop at the imagery that dominates our pageantry and which starkly provokes our imagination. The resurrection is not that provoking. We cannot afford to reduce the resurrection simply to the fact of a dead body coming back to life in distant Jerusalem centuries back in time.
If we fail to see the connection between that miracle of the empty tomb and our human and daily anxiety, then we do well to ask ourselves what’s the sense of all that we are celebrating today. Easter changes radically the drama of our daily living. Easter stands for the way God intervenes in life, it stands for the other side of the coin to the shattering reality that humanity endures daily. The daunting task of believers in time is to proclaim that Easter is just as real as all that actually distorts and disfigures the human face of so many.
As Peter said in his first address from Acts: “Jesus went about doing good and curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil.” From a faith perspective, the power of the devil stands for all that today continues to wound humanity, to enslave many, it stands for all forms of death we experience daily, many a time senseless deaths of innocent people.
There is a culture of death inspired by egoism, self-centredness, greed, corruption, abuse and indifference to the needs of others and of the entire creation. This is the culture that creates more space for cemeteries, that continues to keep tombs sealed and makes it harder to believe that the promise of the resurrection is worth believing.
In our perception, this unfortunately tends to prevail. But Jesus’s life contrasted sharply and constantly with this power of negativity. What we are celebrating today as Christians is not simply Jesus coming back to life. The Easter message is more than that. It proclaims that life is greater than death, that love is stronger than hatred, even if at times this contrasts with what we experience or perceive.
The gospel proposes life in its original beauty, with wine at table and the possibility of relationships between us humans built on true love and dignity, rather than on self-interest and greed. This will not look idyllic, as long as we keep constant contact with the words of Jesus and as long as we remain connected to him even in our Good Fridays and in our long Holy Saturdays.