Second Sunday of Easter Homily 2020
The late English writer Daniel O’Leary related a striking moment of epiphany narrated by the Irish mystic John Moriarty. Moriarty was walking through muddy patches in the meadow near his Kerry home, wondering how those ‘hints of heaven’ could emerge from such a drab place. “How could something so yellow as a buttercup come up out of soggy brown earth?” he asked. “How could something so purple as an orchid and so perfect as a cowslip come out of it? Where does the colour and perfection come from?”[1]
As were the first disciples, we are surprised by the power of life when it appears, and often in the most unlikely of places and experiences. As O’Leary himself observed,
“The spirit of Easter is utterly free, utterly beyond our control. It is the deepest meaning of all our experiences, of everything that exists. It is in the harshness of war, in the tenderness of touch. It lives in the darkness of despair, in the glimmer of hope. It parts the veil, it rolls away the stone, it changes the focus; it transforms our way of understanding ourselves and our world. It points away from the perfection of angels to the damaged beauty of the human miracle.”[2]
It is to this damaged beauty of the human miracle that today’s gospel takes us. This story is of an encounter with the Risen Christ. It is extraordinary for a number of aspects. The disciples are locked away in fear. They are entombed within their own insecurities, their own anxiety, their own sense of hopelessness. They are at a dead end. The future presents without promise. All they have is the darkness of their situation. Yet, the life of the Risen Christ comes to them, there, in that very room. They do not leave that space in which they are enclosed to find him. No, he finds them, there, in their fears, their insecurities, their questions.
So, it is for us now. The Risen Christ is not apart from those questions the pandemic brings us. Like those first disciples, we too, in a certain sense, are locked away from one another, wrapped in a certain fear. Yet, the physical separation into which we have withdrawn is not a barrier to the power of Resurrection. The Risen Christ comes into our own relative solitude and speaks to us of possibility and invitation, the call to see our lives in a new and different way, planting the seeds of fresh vision and new practice. As O’Leary said earlier, he “parts the veil, [he] rolls away the stone, [he] changes the focus; [he] transforms our way of understanding ourselves and our world. [He] points away from the perfection of angels to the damaged beauty of the human miracle.”
Yes, in that room the disciples are not met by a Christ resplendent in glory. Rather, they are met by the Risen One who remains the Crucified One. The Gospel of John makes the wounded character of the Risen Christ graphically clear. This is altogether wondrous: the Resurrection had not removed the wounds of the Crucifixion. The woundedness of Jesus has not been eradicated. Rather, it has been transformed. The Resurrection has enabled the Christ to bear his woundedness in such a way that those wounds now become a place of life and possibility.
In this lies the great Easter mystery for each of us. Living in the light of the Resurrection of Jesus, living the life of the Resurrection, does not take away our own vulnerability, our own fragility, our own deep seated woundedness. Curiously, as this Resurrection account invites us to consider, Resurrected Life helps us enter and bear our vulnerability, our fragility, in a new kind of way. As O’Leary observed,
“Resurrection does not sweep us away to a painless place but reveals the redemption in our suffering now. The lost paradise is regained in the soil of our fields and in the seasons of our souls. There is no sin, loss, betrayal, shame or despair that is final. Somehow or other, in the end, all is harvest . . . Resurrection is what we were created for. But we perennially celebrate it and perennially forget all about it. We remain blind to its wonder, deaf to its transforming harmonies.”
I have always found it fascinating that we use a candle to make the declaration of Christ Risen, as we did last weekend. Yes, at some point in our ceremony we turn on the bright lights of the church. Yet, the most important symbol for us in proclaiming the Resurrection is the light of a candle, a light which never loses its fragility. It is a light full of invitation, and without threat. It is a light in which our shadows are not eradicated but held and accepted. The light of a candle shines in the darkness. It does not take away the darkness, but its light is of such unmistakable quality that it pushes back the covers of darkness and offers us the space of hope in the midst of the shadows around us.
We are angry, and our anger turns to a new openness. We are embittered, and our resentment turns to a new receptivity. We are closed off, and we experience a new sense of companionship. And how do we know that this Easter transformation is indeed truly stirring within us. As the gospel today indicates, there is only one way of knowing: the experience of peace. Whenever a gospel story repeats something three times there is no mistaking. Three times Jesus says, “Peace be with you.” When we enter our own wounds, and discover there the unexpected mystery of peace born from stillness, then the miracle of the Resurrection has begun to stir within us. This is the nature of Easter hope, resurrection hope; it is the hope that infiltrates the tomb of our experiences. It is the light that shows us the stepping stones before us and along which we might be led out of the darkness into the daylight once again.
Resurrection. This is what we celebrate. As O’Leary concluded, “The landscape does not change but our eyes do. We watch for the small hourly miracles deepened against eternal meaning. Easter perennially emphasises the utter earthiness of divinity, and the divinity of each daily act.”[3]
O Leary gave his final word to the poet Pauline Mattarasso, and may it be ours too:
“Reaching her arms so high/she thrust them through/to peg love’s laundry in the sky./And white against the blue/her banners flew.”
[1] Daniel O’Leary, “Song of the Earth,” The Tablet (26 April 2014), 6.
[2] O’Leary, “Song of the Earth,” 6.
[3] O’Leary, “Song of the Earth,” 7.
