AS St Paul warns us in 1 Cor 15:17, the resurrection of Christ is critical for our Catholic faith.
Nevertheless, Christ’s resurrection celebrated at Easter means much more than his victory over physical death.
His resurrection is God’s affirmation of everything Christ was, said, and did.
It is an affirmation of the presence of the Kingdom that Christ proclaimed, of the importance and dignity of all people without exception, of the necessity to live our lives with love, forgiveness, and compassion, of the goodness of all creation, of the meaning of existence, and of the rightness of our vision for a better future.
As a result Easter fills us with the hope that because of Christ we too will one day conquer physical death, but much more as well.
It also promises that here and now we can experience to a lesser degree the Communion with God and all the saints to which we are ultimately called.
Often now I long for a moment, even if only an hour, when I might see my mother and father again, as well as my grandparents and extended family, to ask those questions that had not arisen when they were alive.
Easter each year is a ringing declaration that I will see all these people again in the company of God and the saints.
Perhaps the questions I wish to ask will no longer be relevant, but that does not matter. What does matter is that I am certain I will see them again and that I will rejoice in their company with a closeness that I never imagined possible.
Such a benefit from Easter is only one of the smaller satisfactions that it provides. The fact that I will meet God face to face is our greatest reason for rejoicing at Easter. After that everything else is a bonus.
For all of us at Easter the hope of one day meeting God face to face should be more than enough.
May this season of Easter 2005 fill us all with the fullness of hope won for us by Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection.
Holy Saturday – the longest day
FR ANTHONY KELLY CSsR reflects on what happened on Holy Saturday, the longest day in the Easter story
HOMILIES do not often refer to Holy Saturday. Pastors and parishes are understandably getting ready for the Easter Vigil.
Besides, Christ’s ‘descent into hell’ is the most puzzling article of the Apostles’ Creed.
But hope needs to take its time. It must make time to dwell on this longest day when Jesus is truly dead among the dead.
On this middle day, he is indeed dead and buried. He is cut off from the land of the living and, it would seem, left undefended even by God.
Jesus of Nazareth is just one more executed criminal, gone from this world in failure and shame.
Without pausing here, hope can veer in the direction of mere optimism. It begins to repress both the horror of the real death of Jesus and the dreadful extent of human tragedy.
Hurrying past this Saturday to the triumph of the Sunday suggests that his death simply means resurrection. But that is to deny both the deadliness of his death – and our own.
It is better, then, to let our Alleluias be silent, our altars lay stripped and the tabernacle stand empty than to settle for a hope that acknowledges no grief. For without the ability to grieve, we can have no capacity for real joy.
On this day, Jesus, and ourselves with him, are stripped of everything save what God can be and what God can do in God’s good time.
There is a truth hidden in the silence and grief of this middle day. Jesus is one with us, not only on the surface of life, and not only in the experience of life’s mortal agonies. He has also gone down into the underworld of the dead.
With the burial of that tortured body, all the deepest Godward aspects of our lives seem to be simply swallowed up and come to nothing.
Before we Christians dare call this day ‘Holy Saturday’, we must feel something of the unholiness of what has happened.
The Alleluia of Easter rings true only if we have groaned under the weight of failure, guilt, and desolation at the absence of God.
In other words, we must remember that it was first of all an ‘unholy Saturday’, a day when nothing is happening. It was all over; nothing had changed.
God was apparently powerless to save even his Innocent One. All we can do is grieve and wait, to wonder if God can still act; and if so, when and how?
Very simply, we are being provoked into the contemplation of the brutalised corpse of Jesus; and, with that, to recall the dreadful finality of the deaths of all those we have loved and cared for.
For this middle day was originally experienced as not being the middle of anything. It was the day of God’s obvious defeat and banishment from the world we know, and reduced to silence.
Though Jesus had offered an amazing hope, now the hearts of his disciples were benumbed in a universe turned suddenly grotesque.
The Apostles’ Creed speaks of his ‘descent into hell’. The Latin word used was ‘inferna’ or ‘inferos’.
It seems to mean simply the lowest places that human imagination can depict. It evokes that limit of God-forsakenness where hope is most tempted to despair.
Jesus has gone down into these regions of ultimate dread, the point most distant from God. There, darkness reigns, words run out, and death is at its deadliest.
The Word has indeed become flesh, not only on the surface of life, but right down to its most dreaded depths. The last great cry of Jesus from the cross contains all the inexpressible dread of our humanity in the face of impenetrable mystery. It echoes in all the deaths of those who trusted in an apparently powerless God.
Yet, in his descent into hell, Jesus embodies the outreach of God, embracing the dead, the hopeless, the irretrievably lost. The Father has given what is most intimate to himself, the beloved Son, into the point furthermost from him. Love has gone to the end.
The communion of love between Father and the Son has been stretched to this extreme point. Only then can it express a compassion limitless enough to contain every dimension of our human existence.
On Holy Saturday, hope finds its proper depth.
Philosophers and theologians may speculate on how God acts in our human freedom. But in Jesus’ burial among the dead, hope is given an image through which to sense inexpressible dimensions of God’s mercy.
Human beings can pervert their God-given freedom – as when they crucified Christ himself. But even if they die cursing God as their great rival, the story does not end there.
God’s love is not changed into vengeance, nor is the Father’s mercy diminished.
Because the gifts of God are never withdrawn, Christ is there, awaiting all, no matter what their chosen hell.
In the words of St Gregory the Great, he is ‘inferno profundior’ , ‘deeper than the lowest place’.
The silence of Holy Saturday echoes with the words of hope. The realm of death is not annihilation or ultimate isolation. Jesus is there.
The region most distant from life and furthest from God is not beyond the reach of the Father’s love.
Moreover, the realm of ultimate damnation – what we usually mean by ‘hell’ – comes into existence as ‘the second death’ (Rev 20:14) only if these dead refuse the salvation that is offered them.
The God they rejected in the times of their proud self-sufficiency now comes to them in the depths of their weakness and need. They are offered a way out their loveless self-enclosure through the love that has found its way in. And so, the healing of purgatory can begin.
This is merely a way of saying what St Paul has already said. There is ‘nothing in all creation, nothing in life or death …, nor things present, nor things to come …, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom 8:38).
On Holy Saturday, we meditate on the love that has led Jesus to be dead with the dead. In owning its grief, in facing its dread, hope is most alive.
Fr Anthony Kelly is a Redemptorist priest, who is Professor of Theology in the Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane and Australia’s representative on the International Theological Commission in Rome.
