Easter Day 2009
Another Easter has come. There have been a few half-hearted attempts to commercialize this day, but for the most part, the attention of the nation has been focused on opening day for the new baseball season. To be honest, I’m rather happy about that. They already stole Christmas and I am not willing to give them Easter. But think of all the things Easter can buy: new clothes, new hats, and more candy than any one person should consume. But somehow, it just never caught on. I also think there is a deeper reason. If you take all the symbols of Easter – even the ones that can be made into chocolate and sold – they speak of new life. Well, if you’re going to speak of new life that implies that the old life is over. And if the old life is over, then it must be because something was wrong with it.
This unspoken confession wrapped in the symbolism of the secular and even pagan appreciation of springtime is given voice in the “Alleluias’ we sing today. We have spent 40 days of Lent bravely admitting that things in fact are not right. We have asked for mercy because we need it. We looked within and found fault as easily as we looked around and saw disaster. And because we have, we come with faith to sing of Christ’s redemption. It is His victory over the old life which gives us the privilege -- and even the obligation – to sing of a new life. Yes, we are still the same people with the same faults (or at least the same tendencies to have the same faults). Even with these, we sing the Resurrection song. We are sinners speaking of sanctity.
Does it seem like a contradiction? Perhaps but only if we do not take this feast for what it is. If Jesus Christ did not physically rise from the dead you have wasted a perfectly good morning that could have been spent better in bed. If they found the bones of Jesus, I doubt there is a sin I wouldn’t commit. I said this a few years ago during an Easter homily and a once-a-year-parishioner told me how offended he was that I said something like this. I asked him why he was offended and he responded that, “Father, what would God think of your behavior?” I told him that, “if Jesus Christ is not physically raised from the dead, the God I worship is a lie.” If Jesus Christ did not burst the gates of hell on Easter morning, then hell is the best any of us can hope for.
But because our faith proclaims – as do we – that Jesus in fact is risen, what we hope for is more than the best we can conceive. Hope is the right of those who have faith. It is not soft and fluffy like a marshmallow peep or comfortable pillow. Hope is an act of violence. It destroys what opposes it and defends itself from the onslaught of despair. Hope is not surprised by Good Friday. And people who know the promise of the resurrected Savior also know a sacred intolerance to the supremacy of the ordinary. Regardless of reasons, popularity, and even personal experience, we still hope.
Yesterday, I went to St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers for the solemn celebration of morning prayer on Holy Saturday known as “Tenebrae.” At a certain point, one of the cantors sings a selection from the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. He used an ancient tone tracing its origins to the Middle-East and the culture Jesus Himself would have known. He was singing mournfully of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile. At a certain point, he sang of the innocent victims of this tragedy and the children left behind. Right next to me was a couple I know with their five-month-old son. With perfect timing, little David started laughing very loudly. There were smiles all over the back third of the chapel. And if you are smiling when you hear that, I believe that you have more than a sense of humor. I believe that you have the hope of Easter.
Oh, and I have it on good authority, that God was smiling as well.
Happy Easter.