HAPPY
EASTER!
Happy Easter! What is the content of this greeting? Christ
has risen! We do not have to understand exactly what that means but it
helps if we do! We go further. Jesus has shown us that death has no ‘sting’ (1
Cor 15:55). We do not have to fear it. It is tamed. It is almost a friend. And
what is more: its source, sin, has no more power to enslave. We can be free.
So, let the Halleluia chorus ring out!
But how did Jesus do it? How is death tamed? How did he free
us from sin? He walked our roads and invited us to follow him. He raised us
from our ‘daze’ (Mk 10:32), lifting us to believe that if we choose him he will
show us the way.
He was determined, setting his face like ‘flint’ (Is 50:7),
facing whatever evil could throw at him and never giving in. Evil crushed him,
but only physically. It tormented him and killed him, but it could do no more.
He showed that, although we are ‘body’, we are more than body. We are spirit.
Nothing on this earth can crush spirit.
The spirit of a person, of a society and of the world grows
and grows - like a mustard seed. This is beautifully shown in the most recent
Council, the meeting of two and a half thousand bishops at the Vatican in the
1960s. The Council placed the Church at the heart of humanity and, perhaps for
the first time, claimed that the secular is the proper realm of God’s dynamic
and saving love. The Church manifests Christ as the soul of humanity, the
life-giving leaven of creation.
And, also for the first time, the Council welcomed the
achievements of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, which broke upon the
Church in the seventeenth century and seemed such a threat then. As the
centuries passed, the Church acknowledged the fruits of that age in, for
example, the emphasis on human freedom which the prophets of reason proclaimed,
And, as James Hanvey strikingly wrote, ‘the Council out-thinks the secular
atheistic view and asserts that secularism is an integral part of the
incarnation’. Freedom is not claiming our absolute autonomy but recognises that
we are called to go beyond ourselves. This is not a limitation but a
fulfilment.
All this is contained in the Easter message but now there is
something more. The Church must listen and learn from secular research. It was
not priests and bishops who laid bear our sins in the abuse scandals but the
journalists. It is they who fearlessly battered us, like the widow with the
unjust judge in the gospel. Finally we paid attention. It has been painful but
now we – insofar as we have listened - , and those we abused, are free. We are
humbled and purified like brash Peter when Jesus ‘looked at him… and he went
out and wept’ (Lk 22:61).
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