Easter Homily 2020
On the evening of the Easter Vigil, the greatest moment in our Christian year, we light the Easter Candle and proclaim the Risen Christ. Its soft glow celebrates the victory of Christ’s life over death, the conquest of love over fear. This year we do so in a climate of national and international anxiety. It is a time of shadows – the shadow of irrational panic-buying, hoarding and public brawls; the shadow of unemployment and financial insecurity; the shadow of profiteering; the shadow of disconnection from our community of faith and its sacramental life; the shadow of concern about our health and the health of our families. We have come to live in a land of shadows.
Yet in the fog of the shadows, in this climate of uncertainty, we light the great Candle of Easter and proclaim Christ lives! We are not proclaiming a resuscitated Jesus. We proclaim a risen Christ. As Pope Benedict once wrote, “If in Jesus’ Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse it would ultimately be of no concern to us. For it would be no more important that the resuscitation of a clinically dead person through the art of doctors. For the world as such and for our human existence, nothing would have changed.”[1]
No, the mystery of Resurrection that we proclaim this night is not about mere resuscitation. As Pope Benedict went on to teach us, “Jesus’ Resurrection was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lives beyond it ‑ a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence.”[2]
To proclaim Christ is Risen, therefore, means that we see him standing in the midst of our shadows and calling forth light. He is standing before the deathly places and is calling forth life. Where does the light of the Resurrection dawn in the midst of the experience of our shadows? Above all the Risen Christ stands in the shadows of our isolation and calls us for into a new experience of community.
Konrad Marshall writing today in The Sydney Morning Herald accounts for many examples of precisely this. As he says, beneath the shadows “look a little deeper, and a far more potent story is unfolding: one of kindness, connection and trust.”[3] Amongst many examples, he discovers:
- Josephine Vains, a chamber musician with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, playing her cello in her street to give beauty to her neighbours in their isolation. She has played at sunset every few days since the last week of March;
- Catherine Barrett who sat down at her desk and created a Facebook page called the Kindness Pandemic – an online repository for all things joyous. Within a week she had 250,000 followers and now a million;
- Nigel Beck, aka DJ Nige, driving around his country town in his 1970 Volkswagen Kombi, playing What the World Needs Now Is Love and other tunes. “I see such a beautiful reaction,” he says, “kids busting a few moves, a few people crying;”
- The sharing of goods in situations of scarcity, people giving away something they don’t need to another in a more desperate situation. As one small business owner, Adam Lust wrote to his own clients, “If anyone you know, particularly the elderly or unwell, needs anything picked up or delivered from a chemist or a supermarket or post office or anywhere else, we are happy to volunteer our help in any way we can.” How many times this initiative has been echoed in our own parish community with the many offers provided our parish office to assist others.
Konrad Marshall wonders if with all these “inventive acts of human connection we’re witnessing something fresh.” Something ‘fresh’ is something ‘alive.’ It speaks to us of something living as distinct from something inert, passive, asleep, paralyzed. And because of this it is, at base, an indicator of the life of the Risen Lord, whether the instances are acknowledged as such or not. But as those who proclaim the Risen Lord it is our responsibility to look for these moments, to stay present to them, to foster them further, to celebrate them. We need to do this more than ever in this year when the shadows are dark and lingering.
When we see a light that overpowers the darkness, when we perceive such light and can utter deep in our hearts, “Christ is Risen!” then we draw confidence that such occurrences are not merely incidental or transitory. They are markers of the possibility of transformation, of a possibility unfurling within our midst, the seeds of a new sense of community, and of a new future.
When, through the light of the Risen Jesus, we can honour, and be full of gratitude, for the ways in which God’s light shines even now, the darkness that threatens us gives over to a radiant light, full of beauty, full of promise – the possibility of something new.
Marshall suggests that “the pandemic becomes a moment to reset, and a chance to ask the question: was this really how I wanted my life to be?” Is not the outcome of such reflection a new future? And, is not this the greatest power in the life of Resurrection – the promise of the future? A future being woven now through the midst of the shadows by the multitude acts of kindness and connection that speak to us of community even in the face of our isolation. Life in the face of death.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week- From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 243.
[2] Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 244.
[3] Konrad Marshall, “A force for good: how the coronavirus crisis is sweetening our collective tune.” The Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, (11 April 2020),
