Easter Day Capitular Mass |
The Day of Resurrection. The faithful women who had followed him ever since those early days in Galilee report that the tomb is empty. Nobody ever disputed the fact of the empty tomb in ancient times but of course there were different explanations. When the women returned from the tomb and told the apostles what they had seen – “These words appeared in their sight to be idle talk and they disbelieved them”.
The fearful friends of Jesus Christ had of course been looking for a rather different climax to the movement which had started in Galilee. The cause of their depression is stated a little later on in our chapter from Luke, as two of the disciples explain to a stranger who joins them on the road that Jesus of Nazareth, “a prophet mighty in deed and word” had been condemned to death and crucified, and this was death to their hope that “it was he that should redeem Israel” – that he should be a liberator, a hero for their cause.
In a world of violence, in which hatred dressed up as devotion can set off bombs on buses, it is sometimes tempting for us to identify with the victim on the cross. But that is precisely the point of the story we have just heard. The women come looking for “Jesus who was crucified” and they get a shock – He is not here.
Seeing ourselves as the victim is a temptation which can legitimate our own contribution to the chain of violence in which martyrs are avenged by creating new martyrs. The sufferings and injustices are real but can blind us to our share in keeping the old cycles going. The hardest conflicts to resolve are those in which both sides believe themselves to be the victims. The Christian Churches have no right to feel smug about this. Catholics and Protestants have glorified their own martyrs, More and Campion, or Latimer and Ridley, depending on which side you are on and edited out the others. We shall be making some progress when we can more generously celebrate the martyrs of the other community.
The real story of the Passion of Christ is much more disturbing. Jesus on the night of the Last Supper, which we remembered on Thursday, gave himself, body and soul to his friends gathered in that Upper Room. One of them was an accomplice in his arrest and death and the others also betrayed him by running away. Jesus had opened the door to a new world and his closest friends slipped back into the old world.
One of the common themes in the resurrection appearances is that Jesus Christ surprises his followers and meets them as a stranger as he does on the road to Emmaus. It is a reversal of expectations. His former friends have difficulty recognising him until he takes the initiative and greets them.
The message is do not fear and go back to Galilee where they all came from and where they must return to understand their own stories and their own part in Jesus’s death. Peter will be asked three times “Do you love me” because he has to recognise himself as the one who denied Jesus three times and played his part in betraying him.
At Easter there is no “martyr for our cause” to be discovered and no cross that can be used to sanctify an ideology or any particular system. Jesus meets us as a stranger, teaches us to see our complicity in family feuds, in the lethal relationships in which we seem to be trapped, in political conflict, and in economic injustices like slavery which in some cases go back centuries.
One of the most unbelievable theories about the Resurrection is that it was simply a communal hallucination, wishful thinking. Instead the discovery that “he is not here” is made by women whose evidence was not at that time acceptable in court proceedings rather than by any of Jesus’s closest students who did not at first believe that there was anything in it.
The Christian community is created by Easter and the Resurrection of Christ, not the other way round. We have been shown our “old self” as St Paul says, but that is not the end of the story. Jesus calls his betrayers his brothers and invites them to go back to their own roots, Galilee, to receive a new self as forgiven people so that they “might walk in newness of life”. It is Peter the betrayer who has been forgiven who we hear in Acts communicating the Resurrection to the very people who crucified him in the very place of his death.
If we have really entered into this story, seen the betrayal, watched the crucifixion “afar off” like the women, gone to the tomb expecting to find a dead hero, and instead heard the Easter shout “He is not here”; if we have accepted his command to go back to Galilee, our own roots in the everyday, to recognise our old selves but to be freed from ourselves as forgiven people, then we shall know the newness of life, the Resurrection life, in our deepest God-created selves; and we and our community will be genuine signs of peace and hope, and agents of peace and hope in this world of warring victims.
Easter and the greeting of the Risen Christ created the Church. Jesus appears not as some ghostly apparition with instructions for his friends on how to escape this ghastly world. On the contrary all the stories stress both the initial difficulty his friends had in recognising him but also they emphasise his presence round a table, on the sea shore, in the locked room where they had gathered.
Jesus had created his new community by speech, touch and the sharing of food. After the Resurrection, the forgiven community is sustained in the same way.
By their desertion and their betrayal, the friends of Jesus had ranged themselves on the side of the lost and guilty and made themselves marginal to the new life which Jesus embodied. At Easter Christ welcomes them and us back to the meal which provides the key to understanding and opening the way to the new life.
At this service we give up our food and drink at the offertory into the hands of Jesus so that we become his guests and receive our life from him. The elements become charged with a new potential because they are no longer our possessions but gifts. In every Eucharist the meaning of the material world is changed from the kind of possession which inevitably gives rise to conflict, to a gift which creates the conditions for reconciliation between human beings. We are witnesses because we eat and drink with him after his rising from the dead.
On this Easter morning we celebrate the reversal of death and the open door into fresh hope for the world. Christ is Risen. He is Risen indeed.
