Homily
Easter Sunday
4 April 2010
St.Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

Today, it is easy to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it should be! What a beautiful day we gather to celebrate! Christ is truly risen from the dead, just as He said! Alleluia! Alleluia! Our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus is supported by the change from winter to spring, by the new growth of flowers and trees and grass that seemed to be dead, but are now alive. But as we know, we are here to celebrate something much, much more than the circle of life found in nature. We are here to celebrate an altogether different kind of life, a life made possible because Jesus won the definitive victory over sin and death, a life that is in every way eternal, a life that sin and death cannot touch. This faith in the historical and real Resurrection of Jesus has been passed down to us by a great cloud of witnesses, beginning with Mary Magdalene and passing with great care and with tremendous sacrifice by the apostles and saints to our ancestors, all the way to our grandparents and to our godparents, who professed this faith with us or for us on the day of our baptism, when we first received this gift of eternal life. It is easy to believe in the Resurrection today, joined as we are by 150,000 new members of our Church in the United States alone, supported by the beautiful liturgy of the Church, with its sights and sounds and prayers that renew the heart and mind, and gathered with family and friends with whom we pray about what is most important, that life and love are stronger than sin and death! Christ is truly risen from the dead, just as He said! Alleluia! Alleluia! Happy Easter to all!

Today it is easy to believe in the Resurrection. Tomorrow it will be harder. We all know this. For everything we experience today that strengthens our faith in the Resurrection we know there are countless experiences elsewhere that threaten that same faith. We belong to a Church of undeniably inspiring saints, who make faith in the Resurrection so much more real to us. The Church is holy, and She will always be so! That same Church is also home to scoundrels. Sometimes even Her leaders, those trusted most to be examples of God and stewards of His love and salvation, instead have abused the innocent. The need of our Church for purification, and to be called to justice and to make amends, is far from over. With the great progress we have made, with our Church currently being the safest place for children, and with reports of new abuse being virtually non-existent, there is still more to do. Any scandal in our Church makes our proclamation of the Resurrection limp. It is shameful and makes it difficult to share outside of Church the eternal life that we know to be true on Easter Sunday. As a result, our tradition seems easier to ignore, and although our Church continues to grow because of the great spirit of evangelization that is Her mission and life, adding 150,000 new members last night alone throughout the United States, we can note that the fasting growing segment, percentage wise, of the US population are those who claim no religious affiliation at all. What is more, we do not have to go far to hear the arguments of those who have passed from atheism to anti-theism, and who would rather see the Church eradicated than purified, and who mock our beautiful faith in the Resurrection, seeing it as a naive response to fear of death, and ulimately our story as a myth that keeps us fearing a God that does not exist, and is ultimately harmful to human progress. Today it is easy to believe in the Resurrection. Tomorrow it will be harder.

Which makes it all the more important for us today, on Easter Sunday, to know what this eternal life is that we gather to celebrate, as precisely as we can, so that we can truly live it and share it. Against those critics who would see us as immaturely clinging to myths, and fearing Hell, in the hopes that we can get a ticket to a magic life somewhere, somehow, we must profess our faith in an eternal life that we already know and possess and live and share, the life opened for us by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It is a life that is not magical, nor is it a life that can be measured by human reason or science. St. John says that this is eternal life, to know the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. You see, eternal life is something really different. It is not time, it is relationship. Eternal life for us is not an unlimited number of days and hours and minutes that somehow add up to eternity. When you add more days and hours, you never get to eternity, you just get more days and hours. Life that is measured is life that ends in death. Eternal life is something different. It is life without measure. Jesus says that whoever seeks to save his life, will lose it, but whoever loses his life, will save it. Which is another way of saying that whoever is measuring His life is already dead. Whoever is measuring days and hours knows nothing of eternal life. Anyone who follows Jesus Christ in the vain hope of getting more days and hours is a most pitiable person indeed, and we are rightfully mocked if in a continuation of this world only, we have placed our hope.

To lay claim to the eternal life that we celebrate on Easter Sunday, the axiom that you do not really start living until you find something worth dying for comes into play. Yet Easter Sunday is more than a spiritual truth that can be found in other religions or philosophies as well. Easter Sunday is the culmination of a real historical story when God entered human history through the incarnation, so that we would no longer be confused about who God is. God did not create us in order to serve Him, He created us out of love, and the cross of Jesus Christ shows something remarkable, that it is not our ultimate duty to please God, but God has made it His ultimate duty to serve us. On the cross, we see the beginning of eternal life, in Christ who out of love had quit measuring His life. On the cross, we begin to see eternal life for what it really is - it is relationship. Because of the cross, eternal life is not something that we are on a quest to earn from God, it is a relationship that begins not with our finding something worth dying for, but in accepting that God took up our human nature and died out of love for us. For the Christian, then, the quest for eternal life is not a contest to see who can live the longest, nor is it a magic trick to fly away and become a spirit or angel. No, the empty tomb is a confirmation that eternal life is a life that while, being fully human, is no longer capable of being measured by time and space. Eternal life is relationship with Jesus Christ, who once was dead, but dies no more, who is the way, the truth and the life.

This eternal life is something we reclaim today once again as we make our baptismal promises. The gift of eternal life is something we received at our baptism. In renouncing sin and choosing to be in relationship with God, we are saying that death is ultimately necessary not because God made it so, or science demands it, but that we who do not always love cannot and should not always live. Rather than stoically resigning ourselves to death today, we choose to die young, knowing that he who chooses to die young heroically lives much longer than one who chooses to grow old selfishly! Whenever we reject sin, we choose to grow younger, and to lay hold of eternal life, for sin is nothing more than a decision to measure life, and to calculate whether or not to return the love we have received from Christ Jesus. In renewing our baptismal promises, we lay hold of a life that can no longer be measured by science or philosophy, as great and as helpful as these are in helping us understand how to be human. But in renewing our promises, we say with faith and great conviction, that man is no longer the measure of love, but because eternal love has truly become man, love is the measure of man. Jesus Christ is the measure of whether we are truly alive! Today we recommit ourselves to our baptism into the death of Christ, and dying to sin with Him, we open ourselves to the reality of a life that is born of relationship with Him, who never sinned. We open ourselves once again to the gift of eternal life, a gift we received yesterday, a gift we receive today, and a gift we receive tomorrow, in a future in which God has promised to re-create the world through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Jesus Christ is risen, just as He said! Alleluia! Alleluia!