EVERLASTING LIFE
Easter Sunday
Saint Cecilia Catholic Community
Rev. David Justin Lynch
April 21, 2019 10:30 AM
Acts 10:34A;37-42 | Psalm 118:1-2;16-17;22-23
Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9
+ In the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
When I was a kid, Easter was an
important holiday for me. It always comes in the spring, sometimes early,
sometimes late, (this year, it’s almost as late as it can be), and spring, of
course, means warmer weather is on the way. Anyone who knows me knows that I
really prefer hot weather to cold weather, which is one of the reasons I live
here in Palm Springs. The warm weather brings new life. Flowers bloom, baby
animals are born, and in much of the country, barren trees sprout green leaves.
In the tradition of the church, Easter is traditionally a time to celebrate
baptism, when we die to sin and arise to new life in Christ Jesus.
Here at Saint Cecilia’s, we have
an icon showing Mary Magdalene holding an egg. We associate eggs with the
origin of life. Today’s Gospel has Mary encountering the risen Lord and telling
the other disciples that his is risen. The message of that icon is that Easter
celebrates life itself. Now you know why we have Easter eggs. Don’t forget that
Mary Magdalene was the Apostle the Apostles, the first person to announce the
Risen Lord.
People ask me all the time
whether or not I believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus, in other words,
do I think Jesus actually got up and walked out of his tomb? The answer is I am
not sure. I was not there. Certainly, I am not aware of anyone who has either
claimed to have seen Jesus arise from death, or claimed to have found the
earthly body of Jesus. The empty tomb makes at least possible that Jesus rose
from the dead and ascended into heaven, just as we sing in the Creeds. But an
actual, physical resurrection is not essential to the utility of the concept of
Resurrection.
Like many other things in
scripture, Easter is not just an event, but a symbol, something that points to
something else. The Resurrection points us to everlasting life. That’s the core
message of Easter, everlasting life. In his Resurrection, Jesus demonstrated
what everlasting life looked like. Jesus showed us that we exchange the limited
existence of our earthly bodies for everlasting spiritual bodies.
Easter was the most important
event in the life of Jesus. Easter is
the total glorification of Jesus, touching upon the scope and the nature of his
Mission. In John’s Gospel, Jesus presented himself, as "the resurrection
and the life." Without the Resurrection, the preaching and the faith of
the Church is irrelevant. So here at
Saint Cecilia’s, our Easter celebration is the "Feast of Feasts."
In the Judeo-Christian tradition,
debate about whether or not people are ever resurrected after death goes back
thousands of years into Old Testament times. The Torah, or the first five books
of the Bible, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, are
foundational documents for both Christians and Jews, but those books are
somewhat ambiguous about life after physical death.
At first glance, the Torah
appears to emphasize immediate, concrete, physical rewards and punishments
rather than abstract future ones. However, there is clear evidence in the Torah
of the existence of life after death. The Torah tells us that the righteous
will be reunited with their loved ones after death, speaking of several
noteworthy individuals being "gathered to their people," for example: Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and
Moses. This so-called “gathering” is described as a separate event from the
physical death of the body or the burial.
As we heard at Easter Vigil last
night, the Jewish prophet Ezekiel talked about God breathing life into dry
bones. Ezekiel prophesied an earthquake, in which the bones came together, and
then flesh and skin came on them. Ezekiel proclaimed, “There was no breath” in
the bones, so God made those dead bones rise to life by giving the bones God’s
life-giving breath. In the Second Book of Maccabees, which is a story of
the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple after it was profaned during the
intertestamental period, one of seven brothers put to death for refusing to
disobey Jewish dietary laws told his torturers that God will raise him from the
dead. So the notion of resurrection finds at least some support in the Jewish
tradition before the time of Jesus.
Now, fast-forward to Jesus. Contemporaneous
with Jesus, a group of Jewish scholars known as the Pharisees came up with the
idea that the Torah does in fact support the notion of eternal life. You’ve all
heard of the Pharisees. Many preachers talk about them in a negative way. But who
exactly are they, and is that negative picture deserved? I don’t think so. At
the time of Jesus, there were four main groups of Jews: the Sadducees, who were
the temple priests, the guys who wanted Pontius Pilate to put Jesus to death;
the Essenes, who were mystics; the Zealots, who wanted to lead a revolutionary
war against the Roman Empire, and, last, but not least, the Pharisees. Now
despite the negative image the Pharisees have with many Christians, they are
not terrible people. Some scholars think Jesus himself was a Pharisee, and we
know from his epistles that Saint Paul was a Pharisee.
The Pharisees were the forerunner
of today’s rabbis. They were the group who kept Judaism alive after the Roman
Empire ransacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in seventy A-D. What
distinguished the Pharisees from the Sadducees were two things: the Pharisees
were forever discussing the intent of the law and how to apply it in a humane
way, in contrast to the Sadducees, the law-and-order people who “went by the
book,” and the Pharisees, who believed in an afterlife, whereas the Sadducees did
not.
So it’s entirely predictable that
Saint Paul, who was an admitted Pharisee, wrote extensively about the spiritual
meaning of the Resurrection in letters to the Corinthians, Romans, and
elsewhere. Thus, thoughts about an afterlife that began in the Jewish tradition
found their way into Christianity and came into full flower with the
Resurrection of Jesus and our celebration of Easter.
In the early days of
Christianity, there was a debate about whether Jesus was divine or human, or
both divine and human. Ultimately, the Church settled on what’s called the
Chalcedonian Definition, which is that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.
Yet, the Church still has an ongoing debate as to whether to emphasize, in its
worship and theology, the divinity or humanity of Jesus, often known as the controversy
over high and low Christology, a fancy word for studying who Jesus really is.
There’s evidence throughout the New Testament for both views. On a practical
level for the Church, the question is should we emphasize Easter or Christmas
in our worship and theology?
For me, the answer is that they
are equally important. You do not get to Easter without Christmas, yet without
Easter, Jesus is just another person, nothing really special. While other
religions contain mythic stories of virgin births and gods becoming human, the
Resurrection of Jesus is what makes Christianity truly unique. Some pagan
religions do, in fact, have a resurrection story similar to that of Jesus, but
those stories did not appear until centuries after Jesus lived.
With contemporary science theoretically
able to concoct a virgin birth by cloning a human embryo which could be
implanted for gestation in a virgin woman, that is, one who has not yet engaged
in sex, no one has yet figured out how to revive a body which has been dead for
three days. Resurrection, therefore, remains something only God could bring
about. Therefore, in the Resurrection, Jesus unequivocally demonstrates his
divine nature, and from that divine nature, Jesus offers us eternal life. The
Resurrection demonstrated eternal life by Jesus conquering the single
characteristic that distinguishes humanity from divinity: the certainty of life
eternal replaces the certainty of human mortality. Life eternal enables us to
achieve life with God.
What is eternal life? It is not
being alive forever as a human person in the flesh. Rather, it is everlasting
life. It is not something that happens in the future. It is here and now, but
continues forever. Just as Jesus had an
earthly body that was here for a time, and a spiritual body that lives forever,
we too have a physical body, but also a soul that lives forever. For
Christians, the ultimate destination of our soul is with God. We meet God
through Jesus in our lives by developing our relationship with Jesus, a
relationship that lasts into eternity.
And what must we do to earn
eternal life? The answer is you cannot earn it or demand it. You can
only receive it. You will recall from the Gospels the dialogues wherein the Pharisees
asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied that
salvation was not just about living a good life, but blind faith, blind trust
in God. Saint Paul expanded on this notion, by taking the question of law a
step beyond that of the Pharisees. Saint Paul tells us, over and over again in
his letters to the Romans and Galatians, that arguments about legal issues were
pointless. What matters is God’s unconditional love for us. From God’s
unconditional love, God offers us eternal life.
Eternal life is not conditioned
on who we are or how we behave. It is not dependent on obeying a whole cadre of
laws. It is freely offered. All we have
to do, and all we can do, is accept it.
We demonstrate our acceptance of eternal life through faith. What is faith? It
is not assent to an idea. Rather, it is loyalty. To believe in someone is to be
loyal to that person. That’s what Jesus asks of us to have everlasting life by inviting
us to what I call, “knowing loyalty. “
Jesus invites us to get to know
Him in our experience of Him in several ways.
First, we experience Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament of the Altar as we receive Holy Communion.
Second, we experience Jesus in
other people with whom we live in community.
Third, we experience Jesus in the
scriptures.
Fourth, and most important, we
experience Jesus through prayer. Jesus is described in the tradition of the
Church as our mediator and advocate, is our gateway to God in prayer. You’ve probably heard Jesus described as,
“our great high priest.” What do priests do? Yes, they offer sacrifices, but that’s not
all. A priest is a gateway to God. To quote theologian William Countryman,
priests “live on the border of the holy,” mediating between God and humanity.
That’s what Jesus does for us, and that’s what Jesus calls us to do for each
other in His capacity as our Great High Priest. All of us, not just ordained
clergy, are called to be gateways to God for others we encounter. We do that
here at Saint Cecilia’s every time we welcome a stranger, every time we support
each other through the tribulations of life, and every time we speak up about
injustice in the world around us.
The Resurrection demonstrates the
pattern of our future, when humanity will participate in the divinity of God, not
actually becoming God, but in a sense, become like God. God, unlike humanity,
always was, and always will be. God, before all else, is eternal life. God pre-existed us without beginning and will
exist without end. While Christ has destroyed the powers of sin, death, and
evil once and for all, this victory must be appropriated by each person in
cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Each person is called to join with the life-giving
and liberating Spirit in realizing the fullness of human life in communion with
God, not only in worship, but in our homes, workplaces and elsewhere as well.
Humanity’s quest for everlasting
life began long ago, before Jesus was born as a human person. Easter is linked
to the Jewish Passover by much of its symbolism, as well as by its
position in the calendar. In most European languages, the feast called Easter
in English is similar to the word for Passover in those languages. In Spanish,
the word for Easter is Pascua. In Greek and Latin, it is Pascha, with similar
spellings in other Latin-root languages.
The precursor to everlasting life
is found in the feast of Passover commemorating freedom from slavery, when
Moses led the Jewish people through the parted Red Sea from slavery in Eqypt. The Jewish people were treated in truly
inhuman ways as they labored in Egypt. They suffered hard lives to make the
lives of the Egyptians easy. But the Egyptians didn’t even give the basic nourishment,
let alone a day’s pay. God, acting through Moses, freed them. If you were at
Easter Vigil last night, you would have heard. the story of how the Red Sea waves
were held back so that Israelites could escape the pursuing Egyptian army which
was then drowned once the Israelites had safely passed. I like that story
because it’s a positive manifestation of God’s power.
In His Resurrection, Jesus
continued the work of Moses, the work of authoring freedom. Jesus frees us to
attain everlasting life, just like Moses freed the Israelites from the Egyptians.
The Resurrection frees us from the bondage of sin and death. Sin and death hold
us back from life with God. The freedom to which Jesus calls us is freedom from
gloom and darkness, freedom from the gloom of sin. Faith in the Resurrection of
Jesus means we are no longer enslaved to sin.
In the Resurrection, we are dead
to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. On Easter Day, we celebrate the defeat
of death, as neither death itself nor the power of the grave could hold our
Savior captive. The glorious and resplendent light emanating from the empty
Tomb will dispel the darkness. Christ, risen from the dead, cracks the fortress
of death, and takes captivity captive.
The Resurrection of Jesus
constitutes the most radical and decisive deliverance of humankind. Death
is swallowed up in victory and life is liberated. Easter is the dawn of the new
and unending day. In the Resurrection, we received eternal life. Today all
creation is glad and rejoices, for Christ has risen!
I shall close with a quotation
from the Pascha Sermon of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople in
the Fourth Century. Our Eastern Orthodox
sisters and brothers read it in its entirety at their Divine Liturgy at Easter.
“O Death, where is your sting? O
Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is
risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice.
Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in
the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of
those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages.” AMEN.
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