Homily: Easter Sunday – Cycle C
Halleluiah,
we made it! After forty days of prayer,
fasting and almsgiving, here we are on Easter Sunday. What a joy it is to be here with all of you:
my still new family in Christ. Like any
good engineer, however, I’m never content just to arrive at my
destination. Rather, there’s always a
little part of me that wants to look back at where I’ve been and how I arrived
here in order to see if I accomplished all that I had set out to accomplish. I think that it is a valuable thing for us to
do on Easter Sunday: kind of like looking over photos from a trip as soon as
you get home so that you don’t quickly forget the experiences you had.
To
begin, let’s go back to Ash Wednesday, all the way back on March 6th. There we heard Christ call us to repent from
our sins and to believe in the Gospel and I encouraged you to look hard at what
your Lenten fasts would be to ensure that they produced more than just forty
days of punishment, but that they would also produce in you a sense of detachment.
Then,
on the first Sunday of Lent, we recounted how Christ modeled for us what our
forty days of fasting should produce in us.
He spent forty days in the desert, fasting and praying; and the
Scriptures tell us that when he emerged from the desert, he was hungry
(Duh!). What Jesus realized during that
time of fasting and prayer was that it wasn’t food or other worldly things that
he wanted, but rather it was communion with God towards which all of his
desires were pointing. Therefore, when the
devil tempted him to change rocks into bread, to worship him so he could have
dominion over the kingdoms of the world, and to put God to the test by throwing
himself off of the parapet, Jesus could resist him. His fasting had led him to detachment from
any desire for these worldly things.
A
couple of weeks later, if you were with us for the celebration of the
scrutinies, we heard about the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the
well. Poor woman was just trying to get
to the well and get home without running into anybody, but there was Jesus
ready to flip her world upside down.
Jesus innocently asks for a cup of water, but when the woman questions
him about asking a Samaritan for something, Jesus reveals to her the real
reason why he is there: he tells her that if she knew who she was talking to
that she would be asking him for water, because the water he would give would
never leave her thirsty again. What
Jesus was revealing to her was that what she was really looking for couldn’t be
found in husbands or in a well, but that it was sitting there right in front of
her: that what she really thirsted for was to know God and that this knowledge
alone would satisfy her thirst.
While
I could go on picking out other examples from our Scripture readings from these
past seven weeks, I won’t. Hopefully,
however, for these last forty days, this has been the work that we have been
doing: removing the “old yeast” of malice and wickedness, as Saint Paul
describes it today, so that we can celebrate this feast with the “unleavened
bread” of sincerity and truth.
Hopefully, by our fasting and almsgiving we’ve been detaching ourselves
from the things of this world: things that only provide a temporary
satisfaction. And hopefully through our
prayer—which is where we meet God like that woman did at the well—Jesus has
been showing us what it is that we are truly thirsting for. And so, hopefully, you find yourself today
like Jesus did when he emerged from the desert and like the woman did when she
encountered him at the well: hungry and thirsty for what truly satisfies.
If
you’ve done your work well, then you probably feel a sense of freedom from
whatever it is that you gave up. Thus,
you won’t be easily tempted to go back to it now that Lent is finished. If, however, you haven’t done this work so
well, then you’re probably looking forward to getting out of this Mass as
quickly as you can so that you can indulge again in whatever it was that you
sacrificed for the last forty days. Either
way, I can tell you that the hunger that all of us are feeling today—the hunger
that we are left with after forty days of fasting—is not a hunger for worldly
things (although it may feel that way); rather, it is a hunger for God.
Saint
Augustine famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in
you.” I think that he could have just as
easily said the same thing if he would have said: “We are always hungry, O
Lord, until our hungers are satisfied in you.”
And so, whether you have used this time of Lent well or poorly (or not
at all), I can tell you that whatever hunger you feel inside of you today is
truly a hunger for God and only communion with him will truly satisfy it.
Now,
I’m enough of a realist to realize that some of us here see this and some of us
don’t. Those who see it are here today
rejoicing with full hearts and full voice that God has not left us alone to die
in our sin, but rather that through the resurrection of his Son he has redeemed
us so that our hungers can be satisfied.
Maybe, however, that’s only a few of us.
Perhaps, though, many of us have gotten a glimpse of this during Lent
and so come here today with great hope that something new is happening in our
lives that can move us towards finding meaning and purpose in all that we
do. Yet I am sure that there are still
some of us here who just don’t see it at all.
And you know what? That’s
ok. Because we are all here today, just
like Jesus’ disciples were all together on the first Easter. And we are all hearing the same news—the
joyful, compelling, and confounding news: He is risen!
And
so regardless of where you find yourself today, the Good News is that He is
risen and for the next fifty days we will be feasting on the joy of this day,
and everyone is welcome to join in this feast from wherever it is that you are
at. This feast is truly the foretaste of
heaven: for it is the joy that on this day nearly two-thousand years ago Jesus
the Christ of God rose from the dead and conquered sin and death forever, restoring
our communion with God and making it so that we can all truly live in harmony
and peace.
My
brothers and sisters, if you have been waiting for your invitation to join into
this feast, then here it is. Whatever it
is that compelled you to be here today, know that God wanted you to be here and
that he invites you to experience the richness of this banquet that he has
prepared for you—for all of us—from before time began. He knows that each and every one of us is
hungry and he longs to satisfy that hunger.
Therefore, lift up your hearts to experience the satisfaction that only
he can give: the union of love that he offers us here in this Eucharist.
Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN
– April 21st, 2019
Thank you, Father Dominic.
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