Easter Sunday - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2022

How to talk about life, or love, or newness, or relationship [or in an imperfect world, also about forgiveness]? They are too elusive, too rich, too full of mystery, to define. We need to move into poetry, or story, or symbol or something similar. That is what the Gospel writers do, each in their own way, when they start trying to share their experiences of, and insights into, the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection.

In today’s Gospel passage, Luke summoned “two men in brilliant clothes” to explain things for him. And their message was a wonderful one: “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? He is not here; he has risen.” The original Greek is more succinct, Why look for “the living one” among the dead? “The living one, the alive one.”

I sometimes wonder if “looking among the dead” is what we do all too often. We don’t look for the living one at all. It is basically what all good Jews were doing at Jesus’ time. They looked to their Law; they examined their behaviour — and some of them were excellent at both. But, by and large, they did not look beyond that. They did not look for life, or love, or newness, or relationship, or forgiveness — other than perhaps from a distant and demanding God.

It can be very easy for us Catholics to be satisfied with orthodoxy, or conscientious behaviour. They are good, except that we cannot ever quite make the grade personally; and in general feel that we are constantly under threat and so spend most of our energy vigorously defending them. Our focus inevitably becomes the institutional Church.

For Jesus’ contemporaries, Moses had been a great man, but he certainly was not alive in their midst as he had been for the first generation of Hebrew slaves.

The Christian faith is not meant to be simply an improved version of Judaism. Our faith is person-centred. It is essentially experience, the experience of life and love and newness — through relationship with the living Jesus, not the Jesus who was, but the Jesus who is, the Jesus already abroad in our world now. Let us listen again to the message from Luke’s “two men in brilliant clothes”: “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? He is not here! He has risen!”

Today the risen Christ, the alive one, will be found wherever we see signs of genuine life. And if we want to be signs of life ourselves, if we want to be, as one of our songs puts it, “alive, not just living”, we need to do our best to enter into lively, personal relationship with him. It might be good to be conscientious, but it is not enough. It is helpful to be orthodox, but it is not enough. We need to get to know Jesus, to get close to him — like the women disciples whom Luke listed, who couldn’t get to the tomb quickly enough, and had to be satisfied to wait impatiently until “the first sign of dawn”.

It is possible to get close to Jesus, but it takes time on our part. However, it makes all the difference. Pope Francis consistently speaks of the “evangelising Church”, the Church that sees as its priority the desire to spread, and to embody, the “good news” of life being lived ...

Christ has risen! Alleluia, alleluia! Happy Easter!