Easter Sunday
Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
March 31, 2024
The Fragility of Life and Longing for Immortality
In the small hours of Tuesday morning, a ship collided with the Key Bridge, bringing it down in an instant and suddenly taking the lives of six workers. All of them were fathers of families; all of them were hardworking men who came to the United States to make a better life for their loved ones. On this Easter morning, we pray for them, and not only for them, but for their grieving families and for seafarers directly impacted by this event. Yet, even as we earnestly pray, this tragedy makes clear to us all how fragile is our life on this earth and how precarious is the work of our hands.
None of us, myself included, likes to be reminded of our fragility and mortality. Something in us protests. Something in us wants does not want to die. When we fall in love, deeply and irrevocably, do we want it ever to end? When we are surrounded by family and loved ones, or engaged in work that brings us satisfaction, do we want that ever to end? And as our days grow shorter, do we not wonder how we will be remembered? So we attempt to avoid the death we fear and to attain the immortality we desire.
For example, we try to prolong our lives through diet, exercise, and medical care, and indeed life is God’s gift to us, so we should take care of ourselves . . . yet even the best of care only prolongs the inevitable…so we try other tactics. Some may try to live on in their children and grandchildren, hoping that their offspring will be like them and will say nice things about them. Others try to achieve immortality by becoming famous, even infamous, hoping that future generations will admire them . . . a path open only to a few. It turns out that self-made immortality requires that one live on in others, whether it’s one’s progeny or in the memories of family, friends, and colleagues. At best, this yields only a shadow of oneself. It fails to satisfy.
Love Stronger Than Death
Where, then, can we turn? Are we destined to be absurd and frustrated creatures, finite beings filled with infinite longings? Or is there a path forward? Could it be that vain attempts to live on in others provide a clue, a way to break out of the most insoluble of human dilemmas. That clue is love. We want to live on in those we love, whether it is a spouse, children, friends, or trusted colleagues. And that is perfectly natural and normal, something very human and beautiful. Yet, those loved ones in whom and through whom we wish to be prolonged . . . they too suffer from the same fragility and mortality that besets us. Thus, the words of Isaac Watts’ famous hymn: “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.”
So we look for a source of a love stronger than death. But where to find it? The answer to that question is not found in science or politics, or poetry. It is found in faith, faith in the One who is the Source of our being, faith in the One God in Three Persons who is, who was, and who will be, Three Persons who live eternally, one in their love for the Other. It is this infinite love upon which our lives were founded. This is the Love “in whom we live and move and have our being”.
The Father so loved the world, says John’s Gospel, that he sent his only Son. Jesus came to a world shrouded in sin to reveal the love that is the Source of our being, the very love which rescues us from sin, that is, anything that hinders us from opening our hearts to the Infinite Love by whom and for whom we were made. Thus did the Eternal Son become one of us, preach the Good News, heal the sick, raise the dead, forgive sin, and take upon himself every form of sin, human suffering, and futility. He brought those things to the Cross and on the Cross he conquered. His was not a triumph of brute force, or clever tactics, but the triumph of love. A love stronger than sin. A love more powerful than death . . . Buried in a borrowed tomb, he rose in our human body, at once the most pivotal and the most stupefying fact of human history.
Pivotal, because it seals the link between love and immortality. Pivotal, because it means that biological fragility is not the last word, for Jesus risen in his human body is more than a resuscitated corpse. Oh, he is still one of us but his risen life is different, beyond the grasp of time and space, beyond the grasp of sin and death, a humanity transformed by the glory of God . . . . This is pivotal because the risen flesh of Christ opens for us the way to eternal life. And for that same reason, Jesus’ risen life is stupefying. Stupefying, in that even the Gospels cannot describe fully the Resurrection. Stupefying, in that even the disciples who encountered the Risen Lord were by turns astonished, doubtful, fearful, and jubilant . . . When filled with the Holy Spirit, they would spend the rest of their lives bearing witness to the Risen Lord who, by his Cross and Resurrection, broke through the barrier of sin and mortality to restore our humanity.
How Shall We Believe?
To believe in this greatest of mysteries requires us to rely on witnesses – on Mary Magdelene, on Peter and John, all of whom we met in today’s Gospel, and on St. Paul who saw the Risen Lord seated at the right hand of the Father, and on the Apostles bearing witness to the Risen Lord after Pentecost. Our belief rests upon their testimony of those who staked their lives on its truth. Peter, John, and Paul would give their lives in testimony to the Risen Lord. For them, love was better than life and for only love triumphs over death. So too, a succession of martyrs, from the dawn of Christianity until now, have given their lives in testimony to the truth and reality of the Resurrection. We can do no better than to accept their testimony as true and life-giving as today we profess anew our faith in Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life.
But we can also look closer to home for witnesses to the Love we long for. In the days following the tragedy at Francis Scott Key Bridge, Father Ako, Pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Highlandtown, ministered lovingly to the grieving families . . . a pastoral love rooted in the infinite love of the God who died and rose to save us. On her 103rd birthday, my mother, God rest her, smiled and said to me, “Bill, it’s about time I start living on the other side.” She could say that with complete assurance because she shared in the Lord’s Risen life through the Eucharist and because, in her quiet way, she bore witness to Love beyond all telling. Thus, Father Ako and faithful Catholics like my mother also stand as witnesses to the Lord whom we acclaim as the Resurrection and the Life.
Pope St. John Paul II once said that, in the Eucharist “we ‘digest’ . . . the secret of the Resurrection.” The Church invites us to the Eucharist Sunday after Sunday and day by day, not to impose upon us or to take up our valuable time, but out of a burning desire inscribed into her very heart, to share with us the mystery of the Lord’s Risen life, so that you and I may find the infinite life, love, and immortality “through him, with him, and in him.” The Lord is Risen! Alleluia!