April 14, 2001 (Holy Saturday)
The Resurrection of our
Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ from the dead on the morning
of Easter Sunday is the central tenet of our Catholic Faith. Saint
Paul wrote: “Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again
from the dead, how do some among you say, that there is no
resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the
dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen
again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea,
and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given
testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath
not raised up, if the dead rise not again. For if the dead rise not
again, neither is Christ risen again. And if Christ be not risen
again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins. Then they also
that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life only we
have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” (1
Cor. 15:12-19)
Our Lord manifested His Easter
victory over sin and death, effected by His own death on the wood
of the Holy Cross on Good Friday, and that is the source of our hope
beyond this vale of tears in which we live. The Cross reminds us
that we must bear our share of the hardship that the Gospel
entails, believing with all of our hearts and minds that there is
nothing we can endure in this life that is the equal of what just
one of our venial sins did to our Lord in His Sacred Humanity during
His Passion and Death. As essential as the Cross is in our daily
lives, however, it is the means by which each of us may walk out of
our own grave on the Last Day and have our glorified body reunited
with our soul for all eternity in Heaven. Our Lord’s Cross
was His passageway to give us eternal life — and give it to
the full. Thus, the eyes of our soul must be fixed at all times not
only on the Cross but also on the fact that the Cross leads to
eternal life, that death is not the end, only the beginning of the
fullness of eternal life (the enjoyment of which may be delayed if
a soul has died in a state of grace but has not satisfied the debt it
owes because of its forgiven mortal sins and its general
attachment to venial sin).
The fact of our Lord’s
Resurrection from the dead is meant to influence every aspect of
our lives without exception. This secular world in which we find
ourselves tends to frequently drag down even the believing, praying
Catholic to the depths of despair. People find themselves thinking
and acting in purely earthbound terms, going about life as though
nothing makes sense, as though nothing they do really matters.
Even the events of the Easter Triduum can become secondary to the
perceived anxieties about daily living. There are many devout
Catholics who have to “find time” to get to the Mass
of the Lord’s Supper or to the Liturgy of the Passion or to
the Easter Vigil Mass. The world in which we live has quite a pull
on us — and most of it is meant to draw our attention away
from the hope that lies beyond death, the hope that lies beyond this
passing life and the grave.
On the contrary, the
Resurrection shows us that everything matters. Each of us
matters in the eyes of the Blessed Trinity. Each one of our actions
matters. Each thought we have matters. Every moment of our lives
has a transcendent significance. God means to use every moment of
our lives to help us know Him more fully, love Him more
completely, and serve Him more generously through His true
Church. He wants us to realize that we are creatures whose
redemption has been wrought by the terrible price of the shedding
of every single drop of His own Most Precious Blood. He wants,
therefore, to keep our hands on our plow as we traverse the field of
life, always keeping the eyes of our soul focused on the fact that
what we do in this life will determine where we spend the next.
Vivified by the descent of the
Holy Spirit upon them on Pentecost Sunday, the Apostles preached
the facts about the Crucified and Resurrected Savior, Jesus of
Nazareth. Indeed, the Resurrection was the central theme of their
preaching, precisely to teach men that this mortal life —
wherein we encounter pain and suffering and difficulty —
does make sense. We are not to view our lives in earthbound
terms. Our Lord has risen from death. He has conquered the power
of sin and death for all eternity. It is up to each one of us to
interiorize the transcendent significance of the Resurrection for
us so that we can exude authentic Christian joy (as opposed to
maudlin giddiness) in the midst of the world in which we live. We
are meant to live in glory forever. That is our destiny. Imagine
what our own lives would look like if we really kept our attention
focused on the fact that the travails of this passing world are
merely steppingstones to a glory that “eye has not seen and
ear has not heard.”
While we are creatures who
have the possibility of sharing in the glory of an unending Easter
Sunday in Heaven, the path to Paradise is fraught with potholes.
That is what the Church’s liturgy directs our attention to
during the time after the commemoration of our Lord’s
Passion on Good Friday, when we meditate on the forty hours
between our Lord’s death on the Cross and His Resurrection
from the dead on Easter Sunday. Those forty hours — a time
during which our Blessed Mother waited patiently and the Apostles
hid in fright — are yet another simile for life itself. For is it
not the case that it is when we are waiting for some anticipated
event that the passing hours can seem endless, can seem almost
like an eternity to us?
Much happened during those
forty hours between the time our Lord breathed His last on the
Cross and the time He rose from the dead in glory. Our Lord
Himself, as the Creed teaches us, went to the precincts of the dead
to lead out from there all of the souls of the just who had waited
for the Redemption from the beginning of time. The Gates of
Heaven, tied shut and closed by the Fall from Grace in the Garden of
Eden, were reopened. Indeed, at the very moment that Blood and
water (the sacramental elements of the Church) poured forth from
our Lord’s wounded side, countless souls of the just were
flooding into Heaven, led by their Victor and King. There was
rejoicing by the angels in Heaven as the zenith of God’s
creative work — human beings — were finally brought to
gaze upon the glory of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit for all eternity.
Much was happening also here
on Earth. Our Lady prayed as she waited. The Apostles themselves,
not really knowing what to expect, also waited, although in fright.
Would they be arrested and crucified themselves? Where were they
going to live? What were they going to do? What did the Master
mean when He said that He would rise from the dead?
Isn’t it that way with
us sometimes? Those of us who profess belief in our Lord’s
Easter victory over sin and death frequently act as though we do
not believe in the Resurrection. We complain about our crosses, not
seeing in them the means to our own empty tombs. We wonder why
bad things happen to ourselves and our family members and friends,
forgetting the horror that our own sins imposed upon the Second
Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man. We think that our Lord has
abandoned us in our moments of need, failing to realize that He is
with us all times, that He beckons us to adore Him in His Real
Presence so that we can gain the strength and the courage we need
to live as true believers in His Resurrection. Our waiting seems
like an eternity.
When we think about it,
though, life is relatively short. Even a person who lives a hundred
years has lived only a small fraction of the history of the Church,
approximately 5 percent. We must always be aware of the fact that
the same Blessed Mother who prayed while she waited for her Son
to visit her on the first Easter Sunday morning prays for us and
with us as we wait to be sharers in the glory of her Son’s
Resurrection.
In 1995, in his homily at a
Mass in Oriole Park, Baltimore, Pope John Paul II said:
Our waiting for God is
never in vain. Every moment is our opportunity to model ourselves
on Jesus Christ — to allow the power of the Gospel to
transform our personal lives and our service to others, according
to the spirit of the Beatitudes. “Bear your share of the
hardship which the gospel entails,” writes Saint Paul to
Saint Timothy in today’s second reading. This is no idle
exhortation to endurance. No, it is an invitation to enter more
deeply into the Christian vocation which belongs to us all by
Baptism. There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with
us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There
is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us and
does not now bear with us. And on the far side of every cross we
find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will
reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is
our witness before the world.
No, our waiting for God is
never in vain. Our waiting out the pains and anxieties of this
passing world is meant to teach us that our “forty
hours” (or forty days or forty years) is a relatively short
period of time. We must therefore meditate on the fact that, just
as we go to sleep each night and enter a world of dreams, the day
will come soon enough when we sleep the sleep of bodily death and
awaken to the reality of the world that will never end. We will
see ourselves as we truly are in the sight of the Blessed Trinity
— and those who have remained faithful to the point of their
dying breath will have a loving Mother of Mercy pleading for them
with her divine Son. We must be ever conscious of what is real and
is what is not, what lasts and what does not.
At the end of every long night
of waiting there is the break of the first light. The Easter Vigil
Mass, which begins with the Service of the Light and the Readings
before Midnight in the Traditional Latin Mass — the Mass
itself starts at just about Midnight — is the break of the
first light in the life of the Church during the Easter Triduum. The
Light of the World has burst forth from the darkness of death. He
wants us, whose Godparents received a lit candle at our baptism to
signify the Light of Christ burning in our souls for the first time,
to light up the world with the flame of His bright, burning love. He
wants His light to dispel our attachment to sin and to the
pleasures of this passing world. He wants His light to shine forth
in every aspect of our lives, both individually and socially. Just as
the Sun shines forth light into the world every daybreak, so is it
the case that the Son desires us to shine forth His light wherever
we go, helping to start those yet in darkness on the path that will
lead them from the point of despair and misery to a loving embrace
of the Cross and to their own empty tomb.
As dawn is eclipsed by the
brightness of the full strength of the Sun during the daylight hours
on Easter Sunday morning, we are reminded that the full strength
of the Son shines forth at every hour through Holy Mother Church. A
red vigil lamp signifies His Real Presence in a tabernacle. Votive
candles signify our remembrance of the intention of another, living
or deceased, whose light we keep alive in our heart and in our soul.
The tall Easter Candle burns in full force, reminding us by its
melted wax that the One Whose light is thus symbolized wants to
burn away all residue of sin and selfishness and self-absorption
from every aspect of our lives.
The Apostles were slow to
believe that the Son had risen on Easter Sunday. Our Lord had to
personally instruct two men on the road to Emmaus about the
meaning of the events of His Passion and Death, which they were
trying to explain to Him, Whom they presumed to be some passerby
unfamiliar with all that had happened. “O foolish, and slow
of heart to believe in all things which the prophets have spoken.
Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into
his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26) Saint Thomas did not believe the
stories of our Lord’s Resurrection until he had put his
fingers in the nail prints on our Lord’s hands and placed his
hand in our Lord’s wounded side. “Jesus saith to him:
Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are
they that have not seen, and have believed.” (John 20:29)
We are those who are blessed
because we have not seen and have believed. We believe in the
Resurrection on the authority of the Church founded by our Lord
upon the Apostles, who were the actual eyewitnesses to His rising
bodily from the dead. We know that, with respect to the received
teaching of Christ, Holy Mother Church is guided infallibly by the
Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit. God, who can
neither deceive nor be deceived, has so willed it that those of us
who are nearly two millennia distant from the events of
Passiontide and the first Easter Sunday will believe with the
fervor and the joy possessed by the Eleven in the aftermath of the
Resurrection. And we thus have the same obligation they did to
proclaim the Good News to everyone we know, never shirking from
the responsibility of inviting people into the true Church so they
can be fed by the Eucharist, know the sacramental forgiveness of
their sins, and thus be ready to meet God in the face at any moment
He chooses to end their waiting for life everlasting.
The Easter season lasts fifty
days, beginning on Easter Sunday and ending seven weeks later on
Pentecost Sunday. The Easter season is ten days longer than Lent.
Eternity is longer than the life we spend in our mortal body in this
passing world. The legitimate joy we experience in thanking our
Lord for bearing His Cross and conquering the power of sin and
death over us is meant to be expressed in a special way during the
fifty days of Easter. And that joy is meant to be conveyed to a
world that is seeking joy so desperately in all of the wrong places.
Asking our Lady, to whom our
Lord first appeared on Easter Sunday, to pray for us, may we use
the Easter season to radiate the Light of Christ, shouting out to the
world that each of us is meant to rise from our own tomb on the
Last Day and know nothing but eternal bliss.
Saint Paul wrote:
“Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall all indeed rise again:
but we shall not all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead
shall rise again incorruptible: and we shall be changed. For this
corruptible must put on incorruption; and this mortal must put on
immortality. And when this mortal hath put on immortality, then
shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is
swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death,
where is thy sting? Now the sting of death is sin: and the
power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who hath given us the
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be ye steadfast and unmoveable; always abounding in the
work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the
Lord.” (1 Cor. 15:51-58)
May we be always engaged in
the work of the Lord, proclaiming to one and all the good news:
Alleluia!
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