Easter Sunday
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
12 Apr 2009
The resurrection is the high point of Holy Week..
Indeed the resurrection is the highpoint of all religious history which will only be equalled when Christ returns in glory at the end of time. The totality of human beings, including the saints, had done nothing to deserve this. It was the unmerited divine response to all the crimes and sins of history, past, present and to come. There was no precedent for Christ's resurrection and no subsequent repeat performance.
Christ, the crucified son of Mary, demonstrated through his resurrection that he was truly the only Son of God; a spectacular recapitulation of the claims that underlay the succession of miracles he performed during his life-time. He was inaugurating a new period in salvation history, when his work would be carried forward principally by his Church community; what St. Paul describes as the Body of Christ, the people of God.
We should be quite clear that the early Christians believed that the Kingdom of God had come among them in a new and decisive way and that early Christianity was a resurrection movement. They did not believe that Jesus had died and gone to heaven. They did not believe that somehow he had survived all those terrible sufferings and was still limping along despite his wounds. Neither was he seen as another spirit or angel, or someone in an intermediate state of awaiting the resurrection of the dead. They saw Christ as already risen, a human being exalted into the presence of God, because he was God's only Son, already ruling the world and cosmos.
We are now approaching the end of the year of St. Paul and it was Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees and a trained theologian, who explained Jesus' achievements in the categories of traditional Jewish theology. Because his writings constitute an essential part of the New Testament, his patterns of thought are now ours, an important basis for all our theologizing.
In every Easter Sunday Mass we find a reading from St. Paul and his explanation of the resurrection can be summarised into five points.
- At the resurrection God the Creator fulfilled his ancient promises to Israel and saved them from their sins. Paul explained to his Roman congregation that at baptism we are freed from the slavery of sin; we should be finished with sin. Despite the fact that politically Israel was not liberated, that the Temple was not rebuilt, and that evil, injustice, pain and death continued on their relentless way, the early Christians saw the coming of the Kingdom as a two stage event with Jesus’ resurrection the first stage. The Kingdom has begun but the work was not complete.
- As already mentioned, like the other early Christians, Paul did not see the resurrection as the resurrection of Jesus' body back to its former self and he did not believe that Jesus' body continued to lie in the tomb decomposing. The early Christians believed the tomb was empty.
- For a limited period in the early Church Jesus was seen alive in a number of apparitions or appearances, but after that he could only be known in a different way. Paul was constituted an apostle through one of those early appearances.
- Jesus' resurrection was the prototype for the resurrection of all God's people at the end of time, the second and final stage of the coming of the Kingdom. It is at this stage that the promises to Israel are to be fulfilled in a way they did not anticipate and then all suffering and evil will be eliminated.
- The resurrection is the ground therefore for all the future hope of Christians and the foundation too for our present work. All that is good in our efforts, in all human effort, will be subsumed in some mysterious way into the new heaven and the new earth.
These are mighty claims and help explain why Christmas is probably a more popular feast in Australia than either Good Friday or Easter Sunday. As I have mentioned before it is easier and requires less faith to celebrate the birth of a child and even sympathize with the early death of a good man than to celebrate the ultimate victory of goodness, against the evidence of evil and suffering around us; a victory achieved only through suffering and death.
Let me conclude with a few words about the moral demands which are placed on Christians, on us as Easter people, who aspire to having our names written in the Book of Life, those who will be saved. I also congratulate all those who were received into the Catholic Church at the Vigil last night.
The pagan gods of ancient Greece and Rome were interesting characters, unpredictable and even capricious, who made no moral demands on their followers. This is quite different from the requirements of the one true God on both the ancient Jewish and the new Christian dispensation.
In the reading from the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel which can be used at the Easter Vigil, Ezekiel has God castigating Israel, discharging his fury at their crimes of violence and the worship of false gods, but also promising to give them a new heart and a new spirit by pouring clean water over them. They will truly be God's people. So it should be with us.
On Good Friday I explained that the forgiveness of sins was now possible for the repentant because of Christs' redemptive death.
Now at the feast of the resurrection we should also remember our call to holiness, the necessity to order our lives according to God's commandments. As an Easter people we should not be hiding from God, nor running away from him. We should submit to and obey God our Father's moral commands.
The scriptures even tell us that we work out our salvation in fear and trembling, because there is no inevitability about salvation for everyone. God is all merciful but we each have to choose to be with Him.
May we all walk worthy of the promises that we have received and may the peace of the risen Christ be in your hearts this Easter, and in the hearts of your family and friends.
Easter peace to everyone.
