Blog post Easter - April 2021
Easter will be in a few days. At time of writing we are just entering Holy Week, the days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.
Last year, 2020, Easter Sunday was April 12. We were only just into the pandemic, or at least the declarations of states of emergency. At our house, we were not out of the country when the state of emergency was declared, but we were out of town. We came rushing back home in the middle of March Break week when we heard the news. So did a lot of other people.
I re-read my Easter Blog post from April 2020. Curious as to what I was focusing on early in an intense situation whose future and duration we could not know. We were staying at home, we were being vigilant, and we were aware among other things that church services were being severely curtailed or cancelled. For the first time in my life my favourite service of the entire year - the Easter Vigil - was actually cancelled. Not only is it the number one service in the church’s calendar, I have had the privilege since 1993 of singing the Exsultet, the great Easter proclamation. Not in 2020.
But still, didn’t we all expect it to be temporary, relatively short lived?
My Blog post reflects that, I think. The theme was purification, picking up on one of the great themes of Lent, Passover, and so on. Clearly understanding this as something you go through. And you need to be attentive and intentional about what you are doing. It all has great significance in the faith life of anyone who believes in Jesus and what He is about.
Here is part of the conclusion to that post:
It all seems to come together in a most remarkable way. Wouldn't it be terrible if we went through the purification rituals of Holy Week, and then walked away from it all when it was done. And wouldn't it be terrible if we went through the purification rituals that are going on at the hands of the coronavirus, only to later walk away from the experience as if it meant nothing.
A bit unknowingly prescient, perhaps. We realize that we have much to learn from coronavirus. The monster has forced that upon us by staying in our face for so long and depriving us of contact with each other, depriving us of income, depriving us at times of even a sense of well-being, of feeling safe in the world.
But it was not going to last. And it has. And even with the vaccine, we are going to need to be vigilant for some time to come.
Great damage has been done in the meantime. We have lost relatives. We have been unable to say good-bye to loved ones who died even from other causes. We have lost jobs. We have lost businesses. And again we have lost a bit or a lot of our ability to feel safe.
Which brings me to Easter again. The Resurrection. The triumph of goodness over evil, of life over death. The words of the Exsultet that I used to sing on the eve of Easter Sunday in the dark before the lights came in on the church, are tremendously triumphant in tone. Pick any stanza. Here is one:
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
Here is another:
This is the night when Jesus Christ
broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Oh really? The pandemic did not stop last Easter. It won’t be done by this Easter. What then does all this mean?
Robert Barron has a wonderful reflection on the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen images of Jesus’ journey from his trial by Pilate, to his execution and then his burial. The third station is Jesus’ first fall under the weight of the Cross and after he had been whipped with cords that had shards on the ends. So he was bleeding a lot. It should not be too big a stretch for us to imagine carrying the weight of the pandemic. That we, like him, totally do not deserve.
In his reflection on this scene, Bishop Barron tells the story of a man who approached him after Mass one day to say that the sermon he had preached - and that Barron thought was pretty good! - on the benevolent love of God, had left the man empty. Oh? Why? The man told about his situation in which his two granddaughters, ages 5 and 7, were suffering from a terminal disease that starts with loss of their eyesight. They both will die. The disease was not understood and could not be controlled. The elder girl had already lost her eyesight and the younger sibling was crying in terror at the fate that awaited her too. The man had been to priests, ministers, rabbis and gurus, to ask the question, Why is God doing this? Barron’s sermon was for the man the most recent in a line of failures to shed any light on it all. Barron notes: “Never had the problem of evil - reconciling the goodness of God with the presence of suffering - appeared to me so concretely and in such a compelling way.”
He replied to the man that he did not have a concrete answer to the problem. But he could see the man was still searching for God, and “if you follow the question all the way, you will be led to the heart of the Christian mystery, which is that God the Father sends his Son into the very worst of our suffering, into what frightens us the most. And in that we have the answer ..... a deeply spiritual answer: that God doesn’t take away our suffering, but he enters into it with us and thereby sanctifies it.”
The triumphal language of the Exsultet is exactly that - the paradox of triumph arising from the torture, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. He was not spared, and that is where the sanctifying comes from. For believers, the resurrection does not take away pandemics, it removes their sting, their ultimate power over us. The resurrection shows us that they do not get the last word. We are invited to believe that and to trust it. And when we do, we sing the Exsultet and announce it to the world.
I have experienced family tragedies in my lifetime, challenges to faith. But by far the biggest challenge to believe this resurrection stuff came in October 2015 with my diagnosis of lymphoma. That is when Easter/ resurrection/ Exsultet became real. Really real. I trusted the message, and I felt what that triumph is about. At the Easter Vigil 2016 when I was in the middle of my treatment and too weak to walk on my own up and down the two steps of the sanctuary at St. Paul’s, I sang the Exsultet with a weak voice and a strong spirit of hope. Lymphoma did not get the last word even though I did not know what direction it was going.
This year we join the old man with his granddaughters and weep for them and for him. We join everyone affected by the pandemic and feel our hearts break a little. And then we let Christ enter. And we sing.
