Easter Sunday 2024 (The Paschal Mystery)
God is entirely transcendent. God is so different from us that there is no way we can comprehend Him, that is, get our arms around Him. We are a combination spiritual and material beings, body and soul. God, Who is Most Real, is also Immense. We understand things on earth by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting those things. And we understand them better when we measure them. But God is not a thing at all. God is the Being Who creates all things and sustains them in existence. But God is not material, not even a Force. (Sorry, Star Wars is wrong.)
But God creates and sustains for one and only one reason. He does not need us for anything. His life as the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, is so overflowing with Goodness, Truth and Love that He pours that into creation, and especially into human beings. It is rightly said that God loves us into existence. He doesn’t make us exist so He can get something out of us, unlike the Greek and other pagan “gods.” He loves us so He can pour out gifts into our lives. And He builds into our natures a need to praise Him, not because of His need, but because that praise we give Him makes us more complete, more perfect. By praising Him, we build ourselves up as His offspring. We are at our best when we do it, as we do each week when we gather here.
Of course, we are all weak as human beings, children of our rebellious first parents, who tried to seize godlikeness when prompted to do so by the serpent–Satan. So when God invites us to love Him for our own benefit, to serve Him for our own growth, we can and do say “no.”
What we have prepared for during the past five weeks, and what we celebrate on this Pascua, this Easter Day, is that God did not give up on us when He heard our “no.” Instead, He sent His only begotten Son to live and preach and suffer and die–and rise again. He did that so that, sacramentally united with Him through baptism and our obedient faith, we could live a life of repentance, forgiveness, and union with Him. He loved us so much that He did that without ever needing to. He did that because we needed Him. As we read in John’s Gospel, we must be born from above of water and the Holy Spirit, and obtain through His grace our own eternal life, individually and as Church.
St. Paul tells the Colossians, and us, today, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” We are immediately tempted to look up to the ceiling of the Church, because we are material creatures who think spatially. For us, words like “above” and “up” and “raised” and “on earth” refer to material dimensions, just like time in seconds and mass in kilograms and volume in liters. But “raised with Christ” doesn’t mean flying off into the atmosphere. Not at all. Raised with Christ means being moved into a new level of existence, an existence that is best studied in the Book of Revelations, the Apocalypse.
St. John’s Book of Revelations, the last book in the Bible, was written to churches under persecution. It is a book of encouragement. On the simplest level, it looks beyond current perils, imprisonment, martyrdom, confiscation of property by the civil government, and says “the bad guys lose and the good guys win.” But the more profound teaching that ties into the Resurrection is “Jesus Christ is the Lord and He makes everything not just better, but totally new. Like we’ve never seen.” And, even more, He brings everything to perfection, to completion. Everything reaches the end to which God’s original creative love aims it each moment.
Let me digress a moment to some words that cause confusion in our modern, philosophically challenged world. The word “end” signifies more than what happens when the ref’s whistle blows. When we attain our end, we reach the state of completion that we were aimed at when God created our souls at conception. We were aimed at being complete, finished human beings, after the finishing school called life. We were aimed at being spitting images of Jesus Christ, poured out in love for other human beings.
When people use the word “end” they often use it in the statement “the end justifies the means.” It’s ordinarily used to justify some action that’s disobedient to the natural law God posts in our hearts, like “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not commit adultery.” Fake justification. A man seduces a woman, not because he’s evil, but because he enjoys the act. He doesn’t intend, as Paul taught, to make a life commitment to the woman with God’s blessing, and he certainly doesn’t intend a child, but maybe a child is conceived anyway. In his mind, the “end” of pleasure justifies the means, adultery.
Now he’s got a problem. He faces embarrassment, and for many what is worse, eighteen or more years of child support payments. So he encourages the woman to “take care of it and I’ll pay for it.” That’s the means he thinks will attain his end of eliminating the scandal and the financial repercussions. It’s one more act of violence against the woman and the child to compound the first one. So violation of the “thou shalt not murder,” and probably a bunch of lying and maybe stealing to facilitate the procedure.
What’s happened here is that these folks, as many do, confuse the word “end” with the words “intended result.” And you all know to where the path paved with good intentions leads. Sadness, sickness, death, and in the worst case, eternal punishment. The end does not justify the means. Your good intentions don’t lead to happiness if they involve an evil action.
So we are indeed aimed at becoming spitting images of Jesus, our Lord. And when we reach that end, after a life of repentance, petition, thanksgiving and praise, of working with other Christians to spread the Gospel and care for the poor, what will be our end, our true end? John tells us in Revelations 21: No more tears in a community of God’s people, tucked into the bosom of the Father. No more death because we live in a new, spiritual body and soul. No more pain or sobs or mourning, because the old, sin-ridden, corrupt order of things has passed away, not even a distant memory.
Let’s all dedicate our post-Easter time and energy to making that a reality, not just for ourselves, but for our city, state, nation and world.
