This and That:
What’s all this fuss about Resurrection!
Resurrection
What is resurrection – not as some distant belief, but as a here-and-now experience for us? Because we fail to experience it, it tends to remain to some degree beyond our understanding. It is for this reason the Church helps us shed a little light on it by expressing this very mysterious event in the language of symbols. And just as a poem, painting, or piece of music helps us know experientially the author’s suffering, pain, or ecstasy, so also three symbols of Easter can speak to our hearts and touch our souls in a very personal way.
The Symbol of Light
Take the powerful symbol of light from which life seems to spring. Through light chaos can be transformed into ordered calm. Think of Jesus’ Resurrection as an eruption of light. With the Resurrection, the Lord’s Day enters the nights of our human history. This light alone, the Light of Christ, is the true light. He is pure light, God himself who causes a new creation to be born in the midst of the old, thus transforming chaos into creation in the one who believes. Is that not the calm our faith can bring us?
On this glorious feast of light, we pray to the Lord that the fragile flame of the candle he has lit within us, the delicate light of his word and his love, amidst the confusions of these times, will not be extinguished in us, but will become ever stronger and brighter, so we might be, with him, people of the day, bright pinpoints of light for others.
The Symbol of Water
On this feast of the renewal of Baptismal Promises we are all sprinkled with Baptismal water. True, Christ descended into the Sea, into the waters of death. True that Israel did also into the water of the Red Sea. And both Christ and Israel came out of the waters of death to new life. Thus having risen from death himself, Christ now gives us that same possibility of rising to new life. What this means is that Baptism is not just a washing or cleansing, but a new birth out of real death. With Christ we can symbolically descend into the sea of our own daily deaths and rise again as new creation. The symbol of water is life giving in still another way. We encounter and experience water in the form of the fresh spring that gives life or the great river from which life comes forth. Thus in Baptism, the Lord makes us not only persons of light to others, but also sources from which living water gushes forth. Just think of your relationship to your children, grandchildren, friends and neighbors. We all know people who leave us somehow refreshed and renewed; people who are like a fountain of fresh spring water on a hot summer’s day.
Let us pray that the Lord, who has given us the grace of Baptism, give us the gift of being sources of pure, fresh water, bubbling up from the fountain of his truth and his love within us.
The Symbol of the Alleluia
A third great symbol of Easter is the singing of the new song “Alleluia”! What happens when a person is touched by the light of the Resurrection and thus comes into contact with Life itself? What happens when one rises out of a watery death to a new lease on life? He or she cannot merely speak about it. Mere speech is no longer adequate to express the reality. No, they and we have to sing and shout and let it all out! And so we as the Church sing the song of thanksgiving of the Saved. And while all around us may be sinking – just read the headlines – we are rising in that same water. While all around us may see dark and dread, we are following the Light, Jesus himself.
Let us pray that our song of hope and celebration – our personal and communal Alleluia – continue to reecho into the future at each Sunday Eucharist where we come to sing of the light and water that is the cause of our joy.
So what’s all the fuss about resurrection? It’s the “fuss” of knowing what it means to know the Lord Jesus and to experience his victory in the present. Now that’s something to sing about! Happy Easter!
Fondly,
Father Nicholas
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