Easter Gives Us Hope For Recovering From Life’s Bad Experiences

Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp

Luke 24: 1 -12

With tonight’s Easter vigil we have come to the third and final part of a three-day celebration of Easter called the SACRED TRIDUUM. As I reminded you yesterday, the word ‘TRIDUUM’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘three days.’ It is a celebration, over three days of the central mystery of our faith, the PASCHAL MYSTERY, which is shorthand reference for the suffering, death and resurrection into glory of Jesus of Nazareth. Very early in Christian history, our ancestors in the faith began to interpret Jesus’ death at the hands of the Romans and at the instigation of Jewish leaders as a kind of ‘sacrifice.’ Where did all this come from? A good part of the answer is that the interpretation of his death was provided by Jesus during his life-time in the course of his preaching. It was because of this interpretation that they began to call Jesus, very quickly, the ‘lamb of God’ likening him to the Passover lamb whose blood spared the houses of the Israelites in Egypt. In a very similar manner, the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on account of the enmity and sinfulness of men saved humanity from everlasting death.

Each night of this three-day ceremony therefore, attempts in its own way to explain the meaning of the Paschal Mystery. Every ceremony of the Triduum is meant to explain to us the road to the Father’s house. Tonight we see starkly described for us the mystery of the resurrection. To begin with the word ‘resurrection’ means literally a bringing back from death. In the very earliest layers of the New Testament, the bringing of Jesus Christ from the dead is an act of God’s power. As St Paul says in 1 Cor 15: 3-4 which is the earliest New Testament statement of Christian belief in the resurrection: “I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures;”The resurrection is something that God does for Jesus. The resurrection is also something that God does for us. The road to the Father’s house is something willed and empowered by the Father Himself.

The Gospel reading tonight carries a very beautiful phrase. It says “…the women went to the tomb with the spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away…” All of us have had this experience of being through something traumatic, something from which it was extremely difficult to recover. We would have spent a long time mourning over our fate, and licking our wounds. We rehearse, over and over what has been done to us, the hurt that has befallen us. This experience which traps us is like a ‘tomb’ which seals us in, refusing to release us from its grip. What is your tomb? What has been your ‘tomb’ over this last year? Then, something shifts, we notice a difference. We are not mourning as in the past, almost in spite of ourselves, the wound in our spirit begins to heal over. Or, to use the language of the passage, we find that the “stone had been rolled away from the tomb.” I once had a friend who for 16 years, went to San Fernando from her home in Arouca on the anniversary of her mother’s death, and for 16 years, she cried. She told me, ‘it was nothing special. I just said to myself, ‘Girl, its time to stop crying.’ I myself had been through a pretty humiliating experience while I lived in Canada, and for a long time after I returned to my native country, the memory of what had happened haunted me. Then the words of scripture from Ecclesiastes 3: 1 and following:

There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven:

A time for giving birth, a time for dying

A time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted,

A time for killing a time for healing…

A time for tears, a time for laughter…

It was at that point that I came to the realization that I had to ‘give myself permission’ to move on. I had arrived at another time in my life. What about you? Are you still determined to draw solace and comfort visiting the various tombs in your lives? The resentments and hurts of the past? Or, are you going to give yourselves permission to move on and proclaim that ‘the stone has indeed been rolled away…?’