Christ is risen! The Lord has brought us once again to the blessed celebration of his resounding and definitive victory over the powers of darkness and death. For the True Light has come into the world and has laid down his life for us and taken it up again gloriously. With Him we have ritually broken down the gates of hell and have emerged triumphant into the celebration of the new life—grace upon grace, as the Gospel says—that the Lord Jesus has granted us in his great mercy and love for mankind.
In a world where sadness and suffering reign, we receive today the proclamation of joy, the joy which the Lord said cannot be taken away from us. And indeed it cannot, as long as we hold firm our faith in the Resurrection of Christ, whose own irrepressible life and joy are communicated to us by his divine grace. If we so wish we can come daily to a renewed communion with the Risen Lord through the Holy Eucharist, and we can thus be refreshed and strengthened by Him who makes all things new.
Easter is all about new life, new beginnings. It may not be the beginning of a new liturgical year, but it is much more. As we sing in the Office of Matins, it is “the beginning of a new and everlasting life.” It seems to me that perhaps we should have begun reckoning each year as anno domini beginning with the Resurrection of the Lord instead of his birth. Even though the Incarnation of the Son of God was a radically new and eternally significant event, the world still remained under the shadow of death until the Lord rose from the tomb and plotted a new course, as it were, for all creation.
For Paradise was still closed when the Lord was born, but it held a huge Grand Opening celebration when the Lord descended to the realm of death to rescue his people and then brought them back with Him in his risen glory to the throne of the Father, where He reported with delight that his mission had been accomplished. The Father was well-pleased in his beloved Son, and He proceeded to welcome myriads of souls into their everlasting and joyful home, the place where there is no pain or sorrow or mourning, where God wipes every tear from their eyes and will always be with them, illuminating the Heavenly Jerusalem with the light of his glory and his love.
So we celebrate not only the new life of the Risen Lord, but the new life of those newly received into Paradise as well, and the new life of those newly received into the Church, and also our own renewal of spiritual life in the grace of the Risen Christ. Why is it, then, that the readings we just heard (Acts 1:1-9; Jn. 1:1-17) are prescribed for this feast? After all, there is only a brief mention of the Resurrection in Acts and no mention of it at all in St. John’s Prologue. On a very practical and liturgical level, it is simply because, in the spirit of this feast, we are doing something new, having a new beginning. We are simply beginning today the continuous reading of the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles which we will hear throughout the entire paschal season. So we should count ourselves lucky that there’s at least one mention of the Resurrection in there! We’ll not be so lucky on Bright Monday when the continuous reading brings us to a meeting with St. John the Baptizer and the priests and levites. Yet the Baptizer does mention baptism, which is, as I said yesterday, an important link with the mystery of resurrection.
And so this brings us again to something new, that newness of life which St Paul says is the fruit of baptism, because it is the fruit of the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have to try to celebrate this feast not merely as a great milestone on the liturgical calendar, still less as merely the termination of the rigors of Lent, but really as the beginning of something new in our lives. It has to be a spiritual wake-up call. In his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul exhorts his drowsy charges with a couple lines from an ancient hymn: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light” (5:14).
That is one of the things this feast is about. Christ shall give us light. In the terminology of the early Church, to be baptized was to be illumined by divine grace. A remnant of this is to be found in the Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Gifts, which we celebrate during Lent, where we pray for the catechumens, referring to them as “those who are preparing for illumination.”
Perhaps, then, in the Gospel proclaimed on this feast we can find a link with the Resurrection in the terminology of light and also of divine adoption, which is accomplished through baptism into the All-holy Trinity. Sleepers can awaken and rise from the dead because Christ the Light who enlightens all men has come into the world. The Lord’s own life, which is what is communicated to us through the sacraments—especially the sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Chrismation, and Holy Eucharist—is called “light” in the Gospel. “In him,” writes the evangelist (that is, in the Word who is God), “was life, and the life was the light of men.” So when we enter into communion with the Lord through the sacraments, we are illumined, because his life is communicated to us.
St. John goes on to say that to all who believe in Christ, it is granted that they can become children of God. This is what happens through Baptism and Chrismation. Through this union with the Son of God, we become adopted by the Father as his sons and daughters. And through Chrismation, in the words of St. Paul, God sends the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” Thus the Holy Spirit testifies that we are in truth children of God.
This is our share in the new life that Christ has bestowed upon the world through his rising from the dead and the Gift of his Holy Spirit. It is not enough merely to hear about the Resurrection and decide to believe in it. Those two steps are necessary but not sufficient. For the power of Christ’s Resurrection really to take hold of us and change us from within, we have to be in communion with Him in the mystery of his Resurrection, and this is precisely what happens when we receive the sacraments in faith and in love. We begin our new life with the sacraments of initiation, but we preserve and nourish it though sacramental absolution and Holy Communion. Without the sacraments, Easter is only a recalling in faith of something that happened 2000 years ago. There still is blessing in this, but it is not the fullness of what the Lord wants to give us. With the sacraments, it is the experience of the grace of that event here and now, for the very life of the Risen One is given to us, flows into us like Living Water. And the very sacrifice He offered is shared with us as food and drink, vital to the life of our souls. So we spiritual sleepers can wake up and rise from the dead, for Christ has given us light!
There’s also another reason why this feast marks something new, a new beginning. This beginning of the period of the 40 days of Pascha opens up a special time in which the Risen Lord is spiritually among us in a way not quite the same as in other times. This is a time in which we are called to listen closely to the voice of the Lord. For as it says in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, during the 40 days after his resurrection, Jesus appeared often to his disciples, “speaking of the Kingdom of God.” This is another fruit of our sacramental illumination and of our celebration of the Resurrection. We are enabled—if we give the time and properly dispose ourselves—to hear Christ speaking to us of the Kingdom of God. We need to learn more about his Kingdom so as to increase our desire for it and to be able to detach ourselves from the passing things of this world.
St Teresa of Avila, after having been granted visions of the Kingdom of Heaven, saw earthly life in a whole new light and was appalled that those who are attached to earthly things are “so basely occupied,” putting great value on worthless things while ignoring that which is beautiful and desirable and glorious beyond all comparison. After showing her the indescribable wonders of Heaven—and they truly were such, for the saint unfortunately refused to attempt a description, having no words for it—the Lord said to her: “See, daughter, what those who are against Me lose; don’t neglect to tell them.” That should put into our hearts both fear of offending God and also great desire to be found worthy of all that the Lord has prepared for those who love Him. So even though I have not received such visions, I’m hereby not neglecting to tell you to give your life and your love to the Lord, who offers you joys and blessings far beyond anything this world can offer. St. Paul said he would gladly give up everything for the sake of Christ and to share in the mystery of his death and resurrection.
Beginning, then, on this first of the 40 days before the Ascension of the Lord, let us open our hearts to the word of God, the living Word, who was with the Father from the beginning, through whom grace and truth have come to us, who is willing to give us his own life and his everlasting love. He wants to be with us as He was with the Apostles, speaking to us of the Kingdom of God, preparing us to receive his Spirit, leading us out of this land of exile into our heavenly homeland. For by the grace of baptism we are children of God and citizens of Heaven. We have only to wake from the sleep of our self-absorption and to offer our lives, in all their details, joyfully and gratefully to our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, who died to take away our sins and rose to give us everlasting life. Christ is risen!
