Sermons: Easter I

Easter I (First Sunday after Easter)
March 30, 2008

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life;
And this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life.
He that hath not the Son of God hath not life. -- I John V

In the season of Easter you and I are called to reflect upon the true nature of life. What is life? Where does it come from? What sustains or preserves it? What makes it good, noble, beautiful or meaningful? Can we find meaning on our own, or do we look outside of ourselves in order to find its truest expression?

In the season of Easter we read about the Apostles confusion, bewilderment and uncertainty as they were confronted by the Risen Jesus Christ. And they were experiencing these mental and emotional states because as yet they had not been enlightened. As yet the Holy Spirit had not come upon them to open their eyes that they might learn about the nature of true life and its definition.

To be sure the faithful followers of Christ, his Mother and family, his Apostles and disciples did have the first keys to finding the true nature of human life. Afterall they did believe that life comes from God. The Blessed Virgin knew and trusted that God would bring to pass a conception in her womb that could not otherwise have occurred by natural means. So the very beginnings of life, the conception both of Jesus Christ and of all human beings, though technically different, find their origin or source in the power and desire of God. And with the Blessed Virgin Jesus’ family and friends would have known that God alone preserves life, keeps us alive so to speak, through that invisible presence of his power. We do not keep ourselves going, God does, and this would have been accepted as the truth of natural man’s preservation. And to some extent they all would have agreed that only God is good, and so it is He alone that can make human beings beautiful, noble, good and true. Without His presence to generate these virtues, they cannot truly be obtained and experienced.

But the real message about life that comes to us through the drama of Holy Week and the conclusions of Easter Sunday is that life is about much more than creation, preservation and the benefits of this life. The unfolding love which has come to us in the agony, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveals to us that true life must be much more than the preservation of a good moral existence. True life is not about ethical or moral uprightness. True life is about death and resurrection. True life is about oneness and unity with God the Father. And oneness and unity with God the Father mean that human life always was intended to be about participation in the life of God. True life then is all about living with God, in God, for God and by God. True life is about the loss of the self and the gaining of God’s wisdom, his love and his power.

Now this may seem very strange. But the fact of the matter is that what we have come to know in the unfolding revelation of love in the life of Jesus is that none of us can live well without God. None of us can be beautiful without God. None of us can be noble without God. None of us can be true without God. As proof of it we have the witness even of the faithful friends of Jesus who at the point of God’s demands flee for fear of their own lives, deny Christ for fear of their own lives, betray him for fear of their own lives. What they do, and what we do, is to act as if my life, your life, is something whose good and interest can be separated from God. And this we know as sin. Sin is the acting out of a lie, which falsely believes that life can be anything without God’s power to conserve and to make better. We cannot live and we cannot be made better unless we die, with Christ, and rise with Christ. In other words, we cannot live truly unless we decrease and deny ourselves that He may increase and make us new.

To have life is to have the Son of God. To have life is first then to forgive all men. To have life is to know that as we have betrayed the Son of God and the Son of man, we need forgiveness. To accept this forgiveness is to be moved and defined by God’s infinite mercy. So to have life we admit that we are sinners who have acted out without the knowledge of God’s nearness, without the conviction of his ever-presence at our sides whensoever we make any choice in life. To have life then is to see that we have chosen death, which is nothing other than not practicing the presence of God. Once we have admitted that we have done this, then we must die. When we die, and only then, can we be made alive and rise up out of ourselves to embrace the approaching power of God’s mercy and his love, his wisdom and his power. So forgiveness is the first key to having life. We embrace it. But then we must pass it on. We pass it on by forgiving those who hate us, mock us, deride us, despitefully use us. We pass it on by asking those whom we have hated, mocked, derided and despitefully used to forgive us. We engage, in other words, in the wonderful exchange of life’s new possibilities given to us by God and then shared with others as what is given and what is received. This is true life. This is the only form of life. If we fail in this then we have not the Son of God and so have not life.

Jesus is not dead in the tomb. Jesus lives, and because he lives so can we. He is not one who was seeking his own good, his own desires and loves, his own advancement and promotion. As the blessed Benedict says, “The crucial point is that this man Jesus was not alone, he was not an “I” closed in upon itself. He was one single reality with the living God, so closely united with him as to form one person with him.” Jesus was not alone. He is one with God. The man Jesus, then new Adam, is one with his Father always. He receives what his Father gives. He passes it on and out of himself. “Peace be unto you,” he proclaims to his family and friends. “Peace be unto you,” he exclaims to us today in this space. “As my Father has sent me, even so I send you.” We are recipients of true life. Christ forgives us. He promises us peace. He breathes his forgiveness into our souls. His forgiveness and peace overcome all of our fears. He offers us true life, which is nothing other than unity with the life which is God’s.

Benedict continues, “Jesus found himself, so to speak, in an embrace with Him who is life itself, an embrace not just on an emotional level, but one which included and permeated his being. His own life was not just his own, it was an existential communion with God, a “being taken up” into God, and hence it could not in reality be taken from him.” Jesus was and is at one with God’s love. That love conquers death. That love is forgiveness that destroys man’s war on God, his division from him, his deluded attempt to have a life that can be outside of God’s existence. Jesus is one with the love of God and so he conquers our sin, which is death. His love enables us to say, “It is not I that live, but Christ who lives within me.” (Galatians 2:20) My “I” is no longer. For the old man, the old “I” has been denied. The new “I” has come alive because Christ lives to give himself for me, to enter into me in order to bind me to our Father in Heaven. The old self has been emptied of its selfishness, its vanity and its false pretence to power. The old self is now the new self which is incorporated into oneness with God our Father.

In the Holy Sacrament Christ comes to us in order to fill us with his forgiveness and his peace. He comes to us in order to be so at one with us that he “dwells in us, and we in Him.” Let us end with the words of Dr. Farrer.

THE death and resurrection of Christ draw near to us in this sacrament. The bread is broken--there Christ dies; we receive it as Christ alive--there is his resurrection. It is the typical expression of divine power to make something from nothing. God has made the world where no world was, and God makes life out of death. Such is the God with whom we have to do. We do not come to God for a little help, a little support to our own good intentions. We come to him for resurrection. God will not be asked for a little, he will be asked for all. We reckon ourselves dead, says St. Paul, that we may ask God for a resurrection, not of ourselves, but of Christ in us.