Easter Homily

Easter, the great exodus, passage, and entry of Jesus
started on Good Friday.
With the dark tunnel of death that Jesus had to enter,
Godforsakenness.
‘My God my God why have you forsaken me’ .
The great silence.
‘It is finished’.

Death, inevitable.
Our world. This is our human condition.
In the wake of that observation, awareness also arises:
Our human world, the world as we humans have arranged it
there is a lot wrong with it.
War, violence, exclusion, you name it.
The question is often asked:
“Why does God allow this?”. Wrong question.
God never allows suffering!
He himself suffers. He dies from it.
Jesus on the cross is, as it were
the only portrait we have of God.
An image of endless self-effacing love.
Unadulterated love,
love that takes nothing back,
love that is pure gift.

That love was nailed to the cross.
The world as we have arranged it
cannot hack it, finds it unbearable .
It ‘s too much .
We collectively say: Crucify him.

Yet that love is the eternal bed of our lives.
What lights up in the resurrection is
that love is stronger than death.
Strong as death is love . Ca 8:6

It is like a seed present in each of us.
The power of love is
a power of emptiness and liberation.
He who loves does not look at himself,
He/she puts himself aside,
and becomes a space to welcome the other (Maurice Zundel ).

You can see that very clearly with Francis of Assisi.
Only when he was ailing and near death did he see it.
Then he could sing the Canticle of the Sun.
Song of Presence.
He could even welcome death
for he knew he was going to meet that Love
which inhabited him
which lay hidden within him
deep , like a mystery,
a priceless secret deep in his heart.

And we also carry that secret within us, each of us.
A place beyond the conscious and unconscious,
where God waits for us, that aforeplace ,
the life of the Spirit in each of us.

Therefore resurrection is not an individual event of Jesus alone.
The Eastern Orthodox Church has understood this better.
Just look at the icons of the resurrection.

Then you see how Jesus takes Adam and Eve by the hand.
They are marked by life.
Gray, wrinkled.
This is how they are taken. Image of humanity.

Resurrection.
In fact, that is already happening.
With every beat of our heart.
When it is given to us to transcend ourselves.
Some forms of knowledge
are beyond the reach of our mind.
They are the domain of love.

He goes before us to Galilee, the Galilee of the Gentiles,
this is what is impressed on the women.
Gentiles. That sounds a bit unfriendly.
Maybe we should just say
the secularized world in which we live.
That’s where he’s going before us.
There we can meet the Risen One .

What does that mean?
Every day you try to live like Jesus lived,
by dying to yourself,
to what is not of God in you,
your little ego.
And to entrust yourself, to surrender,
to God who is life and love.
By having an eye for the small, for the small.

I once heard that very touchingly remarked
when seeing a person with dementia.
Someone observed:
Look, Christ walks there !

Resurrection.
It means believing that it is possible,
despite all the misery we see around us,
to keep believing
that God’s indestructible love has the last word,
and so already to enter a new human world
if that is the first word – indestructible love –
with which that world begins in each of us.

I say very consciously: begins.
Because we humans live from beginning to beginning to beginning.

Gregory of Nyssa :

“He who climbs never ceases to go from beginning to beginning, through beginning without end. He never stops yearning for what he already knows.”

Resurrection – it is given to us
on the other side of an infinite desire.

God all in all.

(Fons Eppink MHM)