Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34.37-43; Colossians 3, 1-4; John 20, 1-9.
Easter is about hope and liberation, and paradoxically, what gives substance to this great event we Christians celebrate today are the tribulations, addictions and deaths we carry inside us as part of our human condition. Christ participated fully in this condition and he was risen because he gave his life, he died out of love, and in him, God confirms to us that love is stronger than death.
As things are right now the world is shattered by the calamity that has struck us and the repercussions that await us all after the tempest. The proclamation of Easter, far from being mere ritual, can still impact our collective imagination, conditioned as it is now. The story of Jesus is part historical and part still unfolding in our ongoing stories.
In his discourse from Acts, St Peter says that God raised Jesus to life and allowed him to be seen, “not by the whole people but only by certain witnesses God had chosen beforehand”. We are graced if we are among those witnesses today who can see Jesus’s story crossing with ours. Faith is at the borderline between the reality of the cross, which is still experienced in all forms of suffering, and the reality of the resurrection, which is not always and in all circumstances evident.
In his book The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell writes that “ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do”. Who more than ourselves is now in a better position to confirm how viruses spread? The Scriptures show how the proclamation that Jesus was alive, against what the political and religious authorities wanted to make believe, was spreading marvellously, just like a virus, and overflowing from the hearts of those who believed Jesus was alive because they felt it in the depths of their hearts.
For early Christianity the sure witness of those who believed was “the tipping point” that made the Good News of Jesus Christ contagious. Easter overturned the story of the first Christians, anxious and fearful as they were. Does it still have the force to overturn our stories today? We all protest against suffering, injustice and violence around us as well as against other predicaments that shape our human condition.
Faith can fill the blank spaces of our doubts and provide a different, more complete version of life. This is the experience John and Peter had when, on seeing the empty tomb, everything started falling into place. Yet it is always an uphill struggle not to give in to the grim versions of reality and to wait for the opportune time of grace to provide us with a glimpse of the full picture.
Faith in the resurrection educates us to see things as God sees them and to be patient with God’s timing. Being impatient with God makes us lose courage and resilience. Anxiety, fear and despair are the emotions that easily disturb our vision of the Lord, and when they take over they empty the resurrection of its power. The truth that God raised Jesus from the dead is a miracle that God continues to repeat with us, his beloved.
As theologian Jean Danielou wrote long ago, Christianity is very much faith in a historical event – the resurrection – and historical events are not fictions. Easter is not a comforting end to a brutal story. It is the power of God in Christ risen, unleashed on us all to activate in us the seed of life He imprinted in our hearts at the moment of creation. He created us to have life in abundance, a life which, in the mystery of Christ risen, can be revealed in all its glory.