Dear friends, without a doubt, this is the strangest Easter Vigil I’ve ever experienced. Nonetheless, despite the worldwide pandemic, Christ is risen. Alleluia.
To our Elect, Rachael, Amber, Stephanie, and Sawyer, I want to send you greetings and express our closeness to you during this Vigil. The Vigil at which you were to be baptized, confirmed, and receive your first Holy Communion. Our message to you is, stay close to Christ. Let him draw you nearer to himself during these trying times. My prayer for you is that you will emerge from these days of isolation and distancing more convinced than ever to clothe yourselves with Christ.
I am struck this evening by the words spoken by the angel to the two women and spoken again by the risen Christ to the same women: “Do not be afraid!”1 Like the two Marys, who made their way to Jesus’s tomb early in the morning, we, too, “are seeking Jesus the crucified.”2 Like them, you, too, might be struck by the seeming absence of the one who was crucified and died.
The absence we experience is not the absence of the empty tomb but that of an event that is 40 days down the road: Christ’s Ascension. Ten days after that we observe Pentecost when we celebrate Jesus’s sending the Holy Spirit upon his followers, something he promised to do. Who is the Holy Spirit if not the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence among us, in us, and through us? In other words, the Holy Spirit is the way Christ is present until he returns.
During the Last Supper, according to Saint John’s account, Jesus says this about the Holy Spirit to his disciples: “But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.”3 The masterworks of the Holy Spirit, of course, are the sacraments. The sacramental center is the Eucharist. Like the one to whom he bears constant witness, the Holy Spirit most often works in overlooked ways.
And so, we are not alone. God has not abandoned us in our hour of need. Instead, he chooses to enter into our suffering and to suffer alongside us. This is exactly what Jesus’s Incarnation is all about. Saint Melito of Sardis noted this in an ancient Easter homily:
For the sake of suffering humanity [Jesus] came down from heaven to earth, clothed himself in that humanity in the Virgin’s womb… Having then a body capable of suffering, he took the pain of fallen [humanity] upon himself; he triumphed over the diseases of soul and body that were its cause, and by his Spirit, which was incapable of dying, he dealt [humanity’s] destroyer, death, a fatal blow4Despite being an important way any sanctification we might realize happens, suffering remains a great mystery. One cannot really listen to hear our first reading from Genesis about Abraham’s willingness to accede to God’s command to sacrifice his only son without being made uncomfortable. Our uneasiness should not be glossed over lightly. Rather, we should let ourselves be shocked and disturbed by it. Like all evil, however, the only way we can make any sense of this episode is by seeing it through the lens of Christ's cross: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…”5
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Hendrick de Clerck, ca. 1575-1600
Nonetheless, suffering remains a great mystery. We need to grasp that God does not cause suffering to realize his purposes. Why should God, who is all good, violate the principle that one may not do evil so that good may come of it?
While Melito's encouraging words may seem like wishful thinking, our Christian hope bids us believe. It bears noting, yet again, that hope lies beyond optimism. Hope is that inexhaustible refusal that arises from the deepest well of our humanity that tells not only that this, too, shall pass but reassures, in the words of Julian of Norwich: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”6 Julian went on to note that “These words were said most tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any who shall be saved.”7
Who shall be saved? While it is utterly impossible to give a comprehensive answer to that question, we can be confident in these words of Saint Paul’s, taken from our epistle reading:
For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection. We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin8If nothing else, this trying season should help us put away pious sentimentalism, which is a cheap substitute for faith, leading as it does to optimism while unable to produce genuine hope, which is the flower of faith that blossoms into the fruit of charity. Let us, too, surrender our moralism, which holds that God’s lovingkindness is facile and hinges on our relative goodness or badness. This is the kind of thinking that inclines a person so inclined to see in catastrophic events, like this pandemic, God’s punishment for evil. One who does this does not believe in the God of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Christ bore our infirmities, physical and spiritual, as he hung on the cross. This is the Good News that frees us. This freedom, of necessity, is realized through the vicissitudes of existence. Life, after all, does have meaning!
In a few minutes, we will reach the moment for which all of this tremendously difficult Lent has been a preparation: the renewal of our baptismal promises. Once again, we will reject sin so as live in the freedom God has given us in and through Christ. We will also profess our faith in Christ Jesus, “who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered death and was buried, rose again from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
My sisters and brothers, as we enter into the Octave of Easter, relying on Divine Mercy, let us once again, during our present difficulties, together proclaim, using the words revealed to the Apostle of Divine Mercy, Saint Faustina: “Jesus, I trust in You.”
1 Matthew 28"5; Matthew 28:10.↩
2 Matthew 28:5.↩
3 John 16:13.↩
4 ICEL, The Liturgy of the Hours: Lenten Season/Easter Triduum/Easter Season, Vol. III, Office of Readings, Holy Thursday, 405.↩
5 John 3:16.↩
6 Julian of Norwich, Showings, XXVII.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Romans 6:5-6.↩
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