Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34.37-43; Colossians 3, 1-4; John 20, 1-9.
It is an intriguing truth that the Easter narrative about Jesus of Nazareth crucified, dead, but who is living has survived for such a long time. There are aspects of Jesus’ agenda that still capture our attention and make him popular with many. He was a pluralist, he welcomed outsiders, he was for women’s emancipation, he was against organised religion.
Yet his talk about the cross and losing life to save it remain a paradox and perhaps a stumbling block for many. Like the disciples who were with him from the beginning and believed in him, we all like a shortcut to Easter Sunday without having to pass through Good Friday. But, after all, that would only be a tempting illusion, even from a simply reasonable standpoint.
Christianity from its early days had its hard times to argue its way forward and give credible and tangible witness to the truth of the resurrection. We may still understand the Resurrection of Jesus in terms of a divine guarantee of our resurrection one day. However, what needs to be highlighted even more than this is the power of Easter to transform our present life, to make us experience love in the most unlikely places, and to affect definitively the character of our being human universally.
A quick glance at the present world scenario – at the wounds of the globe where the political will to make the world a better place is concerned, and when we think of the huge displacement of peoples and all that keeps killing the hope of many – all this contradicts the transforming power of the Easter narrative. It is a huge challenge to translate our faith in Jesus Christ in credible and tangible ordinary virtues that can keep us going and that can still make us believe that love is stronger than death and evil.
There is so much that makes us falter in this firm belief. But there is a reason for our hope that we are provoked to seek and discern first and foremost in the intimacy of our hearts, on a very personal level. The entire Lenten journey we’ve been through and the liturgies of the Great Week are all meant to make us take our life seriously and question the attitudes that are really dominating in us and giving shape to our philosophy of life.
The uphill struggle of the early Christians and the fierce debates and strong catechesis of the Fathers of the Church at the time confirm that it has always been problematic to talk about the resurrection. To say that Christ rose from the dead is not something perceptible. In today’s gospel text, John the Apostle, an eyewitness of all that Jesus of Nazareth did and signified, beholding the empty tomb of Jesus, writes that “Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead”.
The information about Jesus we find in the gospels and in other contemporary literature is verifiable historically. But to believe that he rose from the dead and that he is alive, demands an act of commitment, even of obedience. Obedience enables us to forego our own omnipotence, it has spiritual dimensions that can open us up to real personal growth. In the long run this is what faith is about.
There is so much in life that we fail to understand, and which yet does not stop us from doing whatever we do daily and repeatedly with our loved ones, with the destitute, with whoever society discriminates or bullies. In today’s gospel text, sight becomes insight for both apostles John and Peter coming to the empty tomb. Whatever falls in our gaze around us can dishearten us or it can launch us to deeper insights on life itself.
Celebrating the risen Lord is not simply the retelling of ancient stories. “Do this in memory of me” has stood at the heart of Christian worship since the beginning. Memory is often seen as looking back to the past, but today, memory is seen more as identity, it is whatever nourishes and strengthens who we are. When we lose memory we become out of touch with ourselves.
The celebration of the Resurrection is always and everywhere a remembering of Christ, a putting together the broken body of Christ, symbolising the broken body of humanity itself. To be a Christian is to share in this same process, which is Christ’s dying and rising, to be in the transformative Easter miracle that changes our stereotyped patterns of life to make hope come out of abandonment.