Easter Sunday. Today’s readings: Acts 10,34a.37-43; Colossians 3,1-4; John 20,1-9
Stand in front of Jesus’s empty tomb with Peter and John. Now take a northwesterly direction, fast forward a few decades, and you will find yourself at the Areopagus in Athens, a centre of debate next to the Athenian Acropolis which was home to Greek thinkers and philosophers as it was the Upper Council where judges sat. In their midst, a man named Paul, who was trained in rhetoric and argumentation, boldly faced his interlocutors and dared to speak of someone whom God had raised from the dead. And that is when, as though a thunderbolt had struck, the jolted audience became divided such that some sneered at Paul, others said they would hear him speak some other day, and others still believed his message.
Today’s celebration – the resurrection of Jesus from the dead – is liturgically comparable to our arrival at the peak of Mount Everest. One cannot possibly get higher than this. The resurrection of Jesus is the watershed of humanity. It changes everything for us. Even seeing a flower in the desert causes you to see the desert in a wholly different light.
To give two weak comparisons, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and the first successful heart transplant brought humanity to a new level. In like manner, from the resurrection on, we cannot view our life in the same way as we did before this event happened.
From the resurrection on, we cannot view our life in the same way as we did before this event happened
Recently, an environmental campaign to save life on Earth was doing the rounds. It noted that, once upon a time, life almost ended on Earth. The ‘Great Dying’, as it is colloquially known, was the largest mass-extinction in history, caused by a rise in carbon dioxide and in global temperatures. A huge percentage of life was snuffed out.
Today, we are celebrating the ‘Great Rising’, that moment in time when Christ’s resurrection scattered the toxins of sin, darkness and death, bringing a promise of a new life on Earth and beyond it. For this reason, the Gospel accounts of today and the coming days are bursting at the seams with excitement and emotion.
This was not just a clinically coordinated event whereby a man somehow managed to overcome humanity’s biggest hurdle, namely death. Rather, this was about a faithful friend, a beloved son, a compassionate healer, the very son of God who had given everything up for our sake and who received his just reward, a reward he would share with any of us.
Recently, someone told me that he is not sure about God’s existence and about the afterlife, so he considers himself an agnostic because “one needs more faith to deny God’s existence than to believe in it”. In other words, you need to make a greater effort and to be more determined in your decision to refuse to embrace God than to accept him.
His statement took me by surprise as, to my mind, what he said truly makes sense. It made me realise how much easier it is to believe what the early Christians, who had met the Risen Christ, have been saying from day one, than to doubt their message. Indeed, the Church has never since changed its version of events.
Anthony de Mello SJ’s book AwarenessIn his Awareness, Anthony de Mello writes on sleepwalking: “… you’ll never understand a word of what the scriptures are saying until you wake up… You’ve got to wake up to make sense out of the scriptures. When you do wake up, they make sense.”
The day Roman guards put a seal on Jesus’s tomb, little did they know that the heavenly Father put an eviction notice on that same tomb: “There’s no way you’re gonna stay in here!” Jesus was lovingly evicted by the Father, and if you trust and believe in Jesus, that eviction notice will be placed on your grave too.