Homily for the Easter Vigil 2009
Our Easter hymnody often captures the sense
of Jesus' passion and death being a spiritual battle,
one with high stakes.
The forces of evil, of control and domination,
of malice, brutality, and coercive power
combine to bring Jesus to a shameful death.
With a nod to the poet Ann Sexton,1
we can imagine this as a high stakes poker game.
Jesus is dead, in the tomb.
The forces of the empire lay down what seems to be an unbeatable hand,
a royal flush: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten of spades.
There is a smirk of confidence --
"and now what will you do?"
God hesitates, then proceeds to lay down one card at a time,
five aces, five of them.
And then God's eyes begin to twinkle,
shoulders begin to heave,
and from deep within there is a deep, wonderful, infectious laughter.
It is a moment of absurd, incomprehensible joy.
When everything looks desperate and lost,
(the feeling of alles ist verloren)
when the worst thing in the history of the world has happened,
Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, is dead --
God plays the fifth ace.
Someone could say "unfair!"
But nothing about the cross is fair --
the only way out of this end-of-the-world situation
is to make a new world.
So God played the fifth ace -- the resurrection --
the beginning of a new creation.
Jesus Christ rose for us.
Not for humanity in general,
but for every human being, for you, for me,
from the first Adam to the last anti-Christ.
Not only for Mary his Mother, but also for Judas and Peter.
Not only for the good and the nice,
but also for the bad and nasty.
The essence of Easter lies not in the return of spring,
the new colors of plants and green grass, blessed warmth.
Easter in its essence is Jesus, the Risen Jesus,
gloriously alive, risen and alive for us.
The resurrection is God's way of making good on the promise to Mary
at the Annunciation:
"For nothing will be impossible for God."
I believe that the Easter season
is a more powerful invitation to conversion than Lent.
As you listen to the accounts of the disciples
try to come to terms with the Risen Lord in the next 50 days,
I think you will agree with this statement.
The disciples have to let of the "Jesus of Galilee."
The Risen Jesus is no longer constrained by time and space --
he is again fully in the Trinity.
The disciples have to re-interpret, re-understand
everything that happened during Jesus ministry
in light of the resurrection event.
Through our baptism we have been grafted into the Risen Christ.
How do we live out of that Easter energy?
First, in our lives, in our families and communities,
never let the sorrows of this world
submerge the joy of Christ risen.
Everything in our lives as believers
is bathed in the glow of resurrection.
Every pleasure is enriched by the awareness of resurrection.
Every tragedy is backlit by the hope of the empty tomb.
Second, in his resurrection, Jesus says "no" to all-consuming power and domination.
The resurrection calls us to use the strategies of life,
not the weapons of death and manipulation.
Easter calls for a consistent commitment to learning how to be non-violent,
how to be in complicated and difficult situations in a life-giving way.
Third, it may seem that the resurrection renders the material world meaningless.
Just the opposite is true.
The resurrection of Jesus is a bodily resurrection
not a resuscitation or merely a spiritual resurrection.
So the material life of this world matters to God.
This has direct implications for our own stewardship,
for our engagement in political and economic thought
and all that contributes to our understanding of being human on this planet.
As Saint Paul says so eloquently,
the entire creation groans in anticipation of transformation,
waiting for its sharing in the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
April 11, 2009
--
1From "The Rowing Endeth," in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982) and John Pritchard, Living Easter Through the Year (Collegeville, MN, 2005), 9-10.
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