Easter Vigil Homily 2009

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Jesus Christ is not raised. Your faith is in vain! Depending on where you stand in the cathedral basilica in St. Louis, MO this is perhaps what you might see. The simple two-letter word 'if' is easily obscured if you are standing in a part of the cathedral that does not have an unobstructed view of the transept within which the famous quote of St. Paul is stenciled, "if Jesus Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain.' (1 Cor 15:17). I have to admit that my favorite thing to do in the St. Louis Cathedral, besides, of course, celebrating Mass or visiting the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, is to walk around the cathedral and to look at that stenciling. The beauty of the stenciling focuses me on the precious gift of faith in the Resurrection of Jesus, but the unique positioning of the stenciling also helps me to see how precarious is this same faith.

Faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the true historical bodily resurrection of Jesus, is a precarious faith indeed. Not that it is going anywhere anytime soon. The symbols and prayer of tonight's liturgy proclaim forcefully that darkness has been overcome by light, that death has been vanquished. Faith in the Resurrection is not going anywhere anytime soon, as deeply as it is founded upon the rock of St. Peter's confession, and passed down through the witness of the saints and martyrs whose intercession we invoke before our profession of that same faith tonight. Our faith in the Resurrection is not a completely new faith, but instead is a gift handed down with great care by the Church, and more personally, by family and friends whom we know and trust, so that most of us make the risk of faith not alone, but within the strength of a community. We enjoy the security of believing in a Resurrection that has rung true within the hearts of billions, on every continent, who have seen in the paschal mystery of Jesus the story that explains how things really are. We have received faith as a gift, and have been incorporated into the Rock of faith that is the body of Christ. Faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is something we are here to celebrate tonight, and it is not something that is going anywhere anytime soon.

Yet we are acutely aware of how precarious this faith in the Resurrection of Jesus really is. We have lived in an age of skepticism for decades, but in the last decade in particular, it is more likely for a person to lose religion instead of finding it. Even as the Church welcomes with great joy her new catechumens tonight, 155,000 strong in the United States alone, the fastest growing segment within the sociology of religion is the segment of people who do not claim any religious affiliation at all. The non-religious have grown from 8 to 15% of the United States population in just 10 years, and they are now the second largest denomination. If we haven't experienced this already in the culture surrounding us, this trend should show us how precious is the gift of new catechumens for the Church, how tremendous the obstacles that stood in the way of their conversion, and how precarious our own faith is in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

To join the Church today, or to renew our baptismal promises, is actually to go against the tide. There is no doubt about that. Even as Christians are still the majority, and some 2/3 of Americans will attend a Church service today to celebrate the Resurrection, professing faith in the Resurrection of Jesus is not the latest craze like Hannah Montana. It is not like becoming a fan of chocolate chip cookies on facebook, which I did last week. No, it is more fashionable today to lose religion, not to find it. Professing faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, whether we are doing it for the first time or for the 90th time, is less and less a going with the flow. It is increasingly a decision that has more dramatic consequences. It is a decision that is getting increasingly harder to make. Professing faith has consequences for what we know to be true and real and good and necessary. Just as importantly today, professing faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is to stand in opposition to a trend within society to increasingly see religion as detached from reality and as ultimately harmful both to the human person and to the world.

Standing in especially strong opposition to this trend was the preacher of the papal household, Fr. Raneiro Cantalamessa, who preached the Good Friday service at St. Peter's. Referring to a clever campaign underway in London which aims to paint the city with billboards that say, 'There is probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life,' Fr. Cantalamessa, while seeing the billboards as a great opportunity for us to correct misperceptions about religion, nonetheless laments the insensitivity of the billboards by saying this:

Atheism is a luxury that only those with privileged lives can afford; those
who have had everything, . . . . That slogan on the bus in London and in other
cities is also read by parents who have sick children, by lonely people, the
unemployed, refugees from war zones, people who have suffered grave injustices
in life. I try to imagine their reaction to reading the words: "There's probably
no God. Now enjoy your life!" How? Suffering is certainly a mystery for
everyone, especially the suffering of innocent people, but without faith in God
it becomes immensely more absurd. Even the last hope of rescue is taken away.

In the light of real human suffering, stop worrying and enjoy your life is an absurd answer, certainly more absurd than the answer that God, while not taking away suffering, has redeemed it through the death and resurrection of His Son. What does it mean to say to someone who is in the throes of death, to stop worrying and enjoy your life? It seems that such an answer in insensitive at best, and of course only useful if a person has a lot more life to live. Yet in trying to persuade us to do this and not that, the billboard point toward the possibility of faith, and toward its reasonability. The billboards appeal to human freedom, the spiritual dimension of the human person that goes beyond the scientific and deterministic viewpoint the billboard represents. It is this same human freedom to which the billboard appeals that can be drawn not toward the simplistic pleasures that fade over time, but toward faith in a life that never ends, a life made possible through the Resurrection of Jesus. Because of the paschal mystery we have celebrated during this Sacred Triduum, there is the possibility, for those who can see with eyes of faith, that suffering and death do not have the final say. For people of faith, suffering and death can be embraced. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus, a faith carefully handed down to us, suffering and death become not our arguments for disbelieving in God and living only for ourselves. Quite the opposite, suffering and death are the pathway, chosen for us by Christ, who first loved us and gave His life on the cross in expiation for our sins, toward eternal life. Because of the Resurrection, we are all moving not toward sin and death, holding on for dear life, trying to squeeze every ounce out of a life that is quickly fading. No, because Christ is truly risen from the dead, just as He said, we know our life to be getting bigger, our love deeper, and we know we are moving toward a joy that this world can never take away! +m